Elisabeth's Writings

Lately, Elisabeth has been doing a lot of writing. She likes to sound words out and write them. A few weeks ago, we closed on our refinance and we had the notary come to our house. Elisabeth was watching Word Girl on tv while we signed a bunch of documents. After Word Girl was over, Elisabeth marched in and showed the woman her craft cabinet. Then she told the notary that she was going to "write down the story she just saw." She got out a piece of paper and a pencil and walked over to the table. The notary said "Oh, that's so sweet, are you going to draw pretty pictures?" Elisabeth looked at the woman, with a kind of curious expression like perhaps the woman was hard of hearing or just plain dumb, and said - slowly - "no.... I'm going to write the story." And she said "The butcher had a free barbeque. Th th th t h." Then she wrote the word "the." The woman said "She's actually writing it!!!"

The entire rest of the time we signed papers, Elisabeth wrote out the story of that Word Girl episode. Some of the words are misspelled ("btchr" for butcher as an example), but by and large it is a very impressive piece of work - and the notary was extremely impressed.

The thing about Elisabeth is that when an adult is around, she is incapable of doing anything on her own - she asks questions like "is this right? How do I spell this." And then says, "no I caaaaaan't do it by myself," when you tell her to figure it out herself. But - left to her own devices - she can do pretty much anything she sets her mind to. Case in point, the other day (on her actual birthday), Doug came downstairs to find her in the family room sounding words out. He listened for awhile and then asked what she was doing. "Writing in my journal, Daddy" He asked what she had written and she said "Today we met mommy." Well, actually, she wrote "toodai we met mommy." And, they had met me - we met at McDonalds for lunch. She sees Doug write in his journal (this is my version of a journal), and she had gotten a nice pretty notebook for her birthday complete with fancy pen - so she decided to start keeping her own journal.

Here is a picture of her Feb. 11 entry from her journal. Doug circled the words, since Elisabeth interspersed a few extra words that she won't discuss with us. Doug helped her with the date, after the fact.

And then, she had to write thank you notes for the vast array of presents she got for her birthday. I had come up with the absolutely brilliant idea of buying her letter stamps and letting her stamp out "Thank you [insert name here]" on each card. We got through two cards before Doug and I realized that this absolutely brilliant idea was amongst the absolute worst ideas ever. Each card took 15 minutes just to stamp out and then another 5-10 for Elisabeth to write her note (after each letter we had to hear a complaint about how she was so tiiiiiiiiiiiired and couldn't write any more letters - only to watch her run and run and run when we set her free). Doug and I then stamped the rest of the cards and she wrote the note on the inside. It took us almost 2 weeks of pretty diligent work, but I can say that as of today they are all written (this is almost completely thanks to Doug's persistence).

I learned that it is important to do quality control on child-written thank you notes. One read, or was supposed to read, "Thank you for the birthday set." But the final "t" in "set" was tipped backwards at a 45 degree angle and let's just say the lines were of equal length making it look a lot more like an "x" than a "t." Needless to say, I had to correct that one lest the preschool find out about the kind of parties we throw...