When Nathan and Elena came over after school yesterday, Nathan having been advised to do his homework first, I decided that a quick stop at the park was in order.
The park is the elementary school playground at the end of my street, and this year it's sporting all new playground equipment and tarps to give the kids shade.
When Nathan was much younger, we played there one day and enacted The Three Billy Goats Gruff on the bridge. "You were the troll," he reminded me. "I was the billy goats."
When we got home, I gave Elena homework--so she'd have something to do while Nathan did math. It was a bilingual book about a mama bear and her baby bear. The title was Te quiero mamá.
"I'll read the English words and you'll teach me Spanish," I said. "That's your homework."
So I read "I love you, Mommy" and Elena "read" it in Spanish. Then I tried it in Spanish and said, "I'm not sure I'm saying it correctly because I don't speak Spanish." She looked at me reassuringly, like an adult might look at a child, and said, "That's okay, Yenna. You got it!"
Nathan was pretending not to be interested in the story as he was subtracting his nine peanuts from the 13 on the table, but he soon sidled up closer to follow the story. I had devised the peanut game because he was having a bit of trouble with subtraction.
Later, after a bath, homework, and an hour of swinging and climbing, we were driving to The Purple Eggplant with their parents. Elena spied her name. "Look, Mommy--it says Elena!" It wasn't actually her name--it was the word "Elementary" on the school sign--but hey, close enough!
The Purple Garlic has an added feature outside. If you eat on the patio, there's a huge sandbox in which about thirty little kids were playing. Elena and Nathan joined them.
It was interesting to observe how their personalities are evident in how they play. Nathan is a child who is so focused on what he's doing, he's totally intent on doing his thing; Elena is all about making friends. She walked up to a little girl and asked, "Are you my friend?" and the girl apparently said no. Quite matter-of-factly, Elena reported the results of her query to us: "She's not my friend."
Okay--moving right along. She looked around for her next prospective friend.
Upon leaving the huge sandbox, Elena thought she'd play the baby card, just in case it worked. She didn't want to go, so she contorted her face into a full-fledged cry. (This is not her style and we watched,amused and mystified.) Her little drama lasted about two seconds, then she got tired of it and stopped as quickly as she'd started, tears gone.
Gathering up the things we'd brought I handed her the book, Te quiero mamá.
"Oh yeah," she said. "My homework."
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