More on Ella

This seems to be "Ella week," as is only appropriate.

On her birthday, I took her to Sweet and Sassy, a salon for girls in nearby Pittsford. I reviewed the experience (with photos) here.

Ella is in a big transitional period, I think. She's still overall as happy as a cute little clam, and still ever so snuggly, but new things are churning around beneath the surface. I don't remember Madison being that way as she turned 7, she was in a nice smoothing-out period.

Several months ago, Ella's bad experience in the Pittsford Ballet had turned her overnight, it seemed, from being someone who was happy to be left at various classes into someone who was too anxious to let mom out of her sight. In March, I started her at a new dance school with a darling of a Grandma-like teacher, Elizabeth Clark, and it seemed to work wonders. Now, though, Ella is back in a period of semi-anxiety. She doesn't want me to leave her at any class by herself, and she's still uneasy about being left even if the class she's in is with Madison or is something she's been doing for years, like karate. It's weird.

She doesn't want to go into rooms alone. She keeps telling us she's scared. She's having a hard time sleeping in her own bed, she doesn't want to be in her room alone while going to sleep; although she does do it, we have to leave the light on and let her read herself to sleep. And then she never makes it through the night; sometime in the wee hours she always comes in and snuggles with me.

She's also a bit hair-trigger cranky. She's much quicker to take offense and act outraged when things don't go her way. She's always been one to "try it on" just for fun, to see if mock-outrage is amusing or effective, but lately, it seems, that the trying-it-on blends really quickly into something almost genuine, or perhaps just something that is less in her control.

And then, there's the lying. Well, twice. But Madison assures us that Ella has been in the habit of bending the truth here and there for a month or two.

Now, to her credit, she's a terrible liar, hasn't tried to stick with a story once we questioned it skeptically...so it's not as though she's trying hard to be deceptive. And the lying has been about things that don't really matter. And, once found out, she's totally mortified, so upset at the idea of having lied (and I think that's genuine...she actually doesn't want to be someone who has lied, as opposed to someone who has been discovered to have lied) that it takes her a good deal of sobbing to get a grip and admit it out loud and say she's sorry. We haven't even needed to come down on her hard or anything, or even engage in long, boring lectures about why we don't lie. We've just had to be firmly a bit appalled, and her own psyche takes care of the rest.

I think she'll grow out of this really quickly. But it does mean that we'll be more skeptical of her assertions for a little while.

One thing I know about Madison: She just doesn't lie, period. And the fact that Ella has only done it a little bit, recently, and we've been able to find out and ferret out the truth, means that I'm really pretty lucky, here. And, my kids are in such a position that they don't feel the need to lie about things, which makes me feel good, too.