Ella crying

Ella is in a crying phase lately. I can't quite figure it out. I'm wondering if maybe it's this in-between-ness that is 6 1/2.

She loves listening to the Nancy Drew books on CD, follows their logic perfectly, remembers details...but she says they've been making her nervous to go upstairs by herself, or go to sleep in her own room, and indeed she bursts into tears sometimes when she's asked to do this. So we're not having any more Nancys for a while.

My cheerful little I'll-try-anything-academic girl has been crying instead of settling down to do her math -- it's multiplication tables, nowadays, using the Math-U-See blocks to do the problem, and then putting little note cards (old business cards of mine written on the back) next to them, and saying the skip counts.

If there is something new for school, instead of figuring it out for herself or even trying to, she cries.

And, most dramatic, the other week when she started a new ballet class, she burst into tears 2/3 of the way in and couldn't go on. I had thought that was done, that she wouldn't go back, but the following week (last Friday) she decided to try again. And, apparently, she started crying right away in class, but told the teacher she just wanted to dance anyway, that she couldn't help it but she was fine. So strange.

She can basically read, now, but I got a sense of just how much she must have skipped in that Fairy book the other day because yesterday when she was reading the book Just Like a Baby that we love, she really struggled and it upset her.

She's still mostly cheerful, though. So I don't know.