Twenty Words that Siena Knows at Four and You Didn't

Quesedilla

DVD

Doodlebop

Tofu

Melrose

Snowboard

Website

Bindi

Higglytown

Penne

Madagascar

Eiffel Tower

Green Tea

Print

Tahoe

E-mail

Remote

Laptop

Fruit Roll-up

Notre Dame

Pretty Baby

Siena's growing so fast that sometimes you can see a difference between dropping her off and picking her up at preschool. But evidently that's not fast enough for her. "Three going on Thirteen" is an old joke now, and like most old jokes it's no longer funny.

Siena's long since noticed Mommy's daily routine of applying makeup, and has always been intensely interested in this curious ritual. In Mommy's bathroom there's a stack of used makeup containers (I have no idea what the names for each kind of container is, so don't expect me to paint as vivid a picture as usual) which Siena uses to apply her pretend-makeup alongside Mommy. On a side note, we have two bathrooms and three people, so how do we handle this? Obviously, one bathroom is exclusively Mommy's, at least for showering purposes, while Daddy and Siena share the other. Or so I thought, until the day I told Siena to go wash her hands in my bathroom, where the step-stool resides, and she told me, "You don't have one."

Where were we? Oh yeah, makeup. So in the hectic minutes before going to church, say, you can catch Siena standing over her bookshelf in her room, pretending to brush something onto her cheeks or eyelids. Cute, fine, whatever, right? Not right. Because now it's starting to affect Daddy.

It's not that I'm creeped out about the kid growing up too soon; her arms aren't yet long enough to make potty-time a completely independent experience. It's that now I have to wait for Siena to finish her makeup, or sometimes help her apply it. Somewhere she got a tube of lip balm, a kiddie version of Chap Stik. Now she keeps it in the car all the time, and can't go to school without putting on her "lipstick," even if Daddy has to crawl around the back seat and find this terribly important cosmetic device.

It happened this morning, on the way to preschool. Now, the mornings are usually a race against time, because if you show up to school after 9:00 they literally lock the doors for the kids' all-important morning meeting, and you can't drop off your kid until 9:45. And I'm not looking to dump Siena off any earlier than I have to, so I've got it timed that I drop her off a few minutes before nine -- and then have a great excuse to cut out early, rather than spend a half-hour playing Legos in a long goodbye. But because we're cutting it close anyway, any complication ro delay could seriously mess up my morning. So when our well-oiled machine grinds to a halt so that Little Miss Sunshine can find her un-lipstick somewhere under the seats, Daddy gets just a little bit aggravated.

I know, just wait until she's a true teenager, Ha, Ha, Ha. At least then she can drive herself to school.

Reading is Fundamental

But what is reading, really? I ask because the answer will determine whether Siena has beaten her peer group to another developmental milestone -- and it's never too early to compete vicariously through your children.

To any impartial observer, the first step would be to define "reading," then look at what Siena can and can't do, and see if she fits the definition. But I'm about as impartial as a Soviet figure-skating judge, so we're going to analyze -- and euphemize -- Our Little Angel's achievements, and then craft a definition of reading that allows Daddy to walk out of this with at least a partial victory. I do not, however, warrant this as a generally applicable foreign policy strategy -- and even if any of you even got that joke, you're almost certainly not laughing. But I digress.

Siena has the alphabet down cold; she can recognize any letter. At least, the uppercase letters; as I write this, I wouldn't want to put money on her recognizing a lowercase "q." See how we're already defining literacy down? She can also write just about any letter, though the more common letters -- the ones that turn up in "Siena," "Mommy," "Daddy," and "Love," she writes with more practiced familiarity. (BLOG UPDATE: just yesterday, Siena pointed out to me that she can no execute the "S" maneuver when she signs in at school. Thanks for all your prayers in this regard. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog post.) But she asked me how to spell "Mother" the other day, and needed a quick tutorial in "R." Of course, I attach no significance whatsoever to the fact that she won't write in lowercase letters; if I was thirty-nine inches tall, I'd want to make as big an impression as I could at all times.

And there's plenty of words that Siena can "read," in the sense of looking at them and knowing what they say and mean. For example, whenever a package comes for her (which, given MiMi's proclivities, is about every thirty-six hours) she can tell right away that it's for her because she can read "Siena Jensen DelliCarpini" without breaking a sweat. There's plenty of other words as well: the obvious "Daddy," "Mommy," "Doodlebops," and key words in the Angeleno vocabulary like "Ralph's," "Pink's," and "Trader Joe's." And she can spell the words when she's looking at them, too. In fact, there's whole books in her little library that Siena can "read" to you -- but then, she could read them to you just as easily without the book, because she's memorized them. But even I can't count this as reading. Once I had to play a Korean DVD (not at all what you think) and after a while I could recognize the hieroglyphics that meant "Menu," "Scene Selection," and "Bonus Features," but I wouldn't pretend for a second that I could therefore read Korean. I wouldn't even say that I could read those particular words; I didn't understand why they meant what they did, nor could I pronounce them -- or even draw them, for that matter.

No, I have to admit that none of the above constitutes real reading, any more than push-ups on your knees are real push-ups. The sine qua non of reading is to be able to look at a word you've never seen before and say it correctly. You don't have to know what it means, and given English's incoherent pronounciation rules you don't even have to get the correct pronounciation (that's the rule on Jeopardy, by the way). No, you just have to be able to come up with a plausible pronounciation based on the correct spelling. And if that's the test, then Siena, at the ripe, old age of forty-five months, cannot read.

But no one else at that fancy-shmancy WeHo nursery school can read, either. I guarantee that, if any of those kids could read, they'd be doing it all day for audiences like a Stupid Pet Trick; kids don't miss a chance to show up each other, especially in the presence of adults. And we do try to get Siena to sound out words, letter-by-letter. But when you do that with a word like "Mommy," and you have to tell her that "y" is, in this instance, pronounced like "ee," then you just lose all credibility. No wonder immigrants have trouble learning English; there's no rules to the darn language. So not only am I confident that we're not losing ground to the Russians, I've got plenty of excuses to sustain me until the kid can straight-up read.

It still bugs me, though, when friends tell us that their two-year-old can read. You knew that was what inspired this post, didn't you? Two years old, and the kid can pronounce words that aren't hanging from a mobile in his room? Words that Mommy and Daddy don't read to him every night? I'll believe that when I see it on YouTube.

And when I do, I'll come up with another reason why my child is, depsite the lack of quantifiable measures, a prodigy.

Wargames

Which is worse: that when I play Tic-Tac-Toe with Siena I don't let her win -- or that she still manages to beat me?

Siena's been playing Tic-Tac-Toe for months. And I think that it's a good game to introduce early on. First, it gets kids writing letters, if only "X" and "O." Second, any game-playing is an opportunity to teach rules of good sportsmanship: play fair, obey the rules, take turns, and take winning and losing with equanimity -- which isn't how I put it with Siena, but you get the idea. Third, it's a game that Siena can play with any grown-up, which is great when far-flung relatives pop in and want to instantly connect with their little granddaughter/niece.

But everyone else who plays with Siena lets her win. The most flagrant offender in this regard is Pop-Pop. On our last family vacation, the guy let her win so many times that even Siena started getting suspicious. But how can you fault him? Who would be so competitive that he couldn't let a three-year-old win a head-to-head competition? Who would value anything higher than the happiness of such a sweet, little girl?

Evidently, her father.

It's not that I need to beat the child at anything. It's not that I get any satisfaction out of beating her. It's that Siena can tell when adults are playing for real or just playing around. We all have an intuition as to when we're being patronized or condescended to. And I want my daughter to get, at least from me, the respect that comes from an honest competition. I don't think that Pop-Pop is doing anything wrong. It's just that grandparents and parents have different responsibilities and prerogatives.

So when I play Siena in tic-Tac-Toe, I play to win. And of course, most times the games end in a draw. I probably wouldn't play to win if the game didn't have such intrinsically low chances of anyone winning. But as it is, when we play I expressly play to win. And this certainly hasn't dissuaded Siena from playing. In fact, a marathon session of Tic-Tac-Toe propmpted this post.

And of course, when I win I explain to her where she went wrong. That's another great thing about playing Tic-Tac-Tow: it's such an easy game to understand that even a three-year-old can grasp the basics of tactics and strategy -- and learn from her mistakes. That's where this gets interesting.

We just played about a dozen games. I won once. Siena won twice. How in the heck, you may ask, did this happen? Isn't Daddy kind of smart? And thirty years older than his daughter?

All I can say is that sometimes you get cocky, and forget the one lesson about Tic-Tac-Toe that Siena's learned quite well: always play defensively. If you simply look to keep your enemy from winning, you will never lose. Not that this is a universal rule: as Marty Schottenheimer could tell you, you can't win at football by playing not to lose. But it works well in Tic-Tac-Toe, and Siena's learned it. She knows to go wherever she has to so that I won't get three ina row, and she follows that rule pretty much all the time. Daddy, however, is too smart for his own good. He tries to set up the can't-lose positions, where you can win in either of two moves -- and ends up overlooking the two-in-a-row that Siena's got lined up nicely. Good girl.

And even when she plays Daddy, Siena gets to win now and again.

Maybe it's time to dust off Risk.

The Lazy "S" Ranch

Good to be back. I've neglected this blog for almost a year, while I focused on polishing and marketing my screenplays. That having proved a complete waste of time, I've decided to return to the only writing of mine that's ever earned any praise. No point in trying to comprehensively update you all on the change in Siena from last July to now. Let's just return to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

Siena can write her name now. Or rather, she tries. Or rather, if you saw what she wrote you'd immediately recognize it as saying "Siena" (she's not up to trying her last name yet; that'll be our summer project) but you'd just as quickly recognize that what she's writing isn't quite right.

You have no idea how tough it is to write some letters until you see a four-year-old try to write them. And yes, though her birthday's in September this kid is, for all intents and purposes, a four-year-old. She's ninetieth percentile in height and weight, and puts on makeup before going to preschool for goodness' sake. Okay, it's sunblock-lip gloss and an empty brush from Mommy's old makeup, but still. Now, where was I?

Oh, yeah. Some letters can be darn tough when you're learning them. Does the "E" have three little arms or four? Does the "N" go up-down-up or down-up-down? Fortunately, Siena's not only gotten these two letters right; she's actually learned from her mistakes making these letters. But one letter persists in giving Siena trouble: "S."

How do you screw up the "S?" Assuming that you've got the motor skills to write any letters, that is. Some letters really are easier to write than others. "I," for example. "A" was also pretty easy, I suspect because it involves only straight lines. This is not the case for "M" or "N." Sure, they look like they're just straight lines. But when you write an "A" you pick up the pencil three times. When you write "M," you write one big line with three turns. That's three chances to screw up the letter, and over the months Siena's taken every chance.

But now she can write those other letters pretty well. Sure, her spacing can be off, leading to a very scrunched "Birthday" after a billboard-sized "Happy." But for the most part, she can write quite well. "S," however, remains a stickler.

I see her struggle with this every morning. At school, right beside the parents' sign-in sheet, there's a separate sign-in sheet for the students. Siena's group, the Starfish, ranges from two-and-a-half to four years old. So you get a broad range of developmental skills, and you can see how far along everyone is in their name-writing. Some kids' spaces are perpetually blank; they have absolutely no interest in writing their names, and parents aren't pushing it -- and I'm the first to admit that they might be right about that. Other kids have recently turned four, and can write their names quite well. Siena's up there with the top of the pack -- and I do care about these things, almost as much as her grandparents. Every now and then she gives us an "E" with four legs (what do you call them, then?) but by and large she writes quite well. Except for the "S."

What does she do wrong? Her esses (a real world; check the Scrabble dictionary) are flat on their backs. They look like loopy, backwards ens (another proper word, whatever Blogger's spell-check says. Heck, Blogger thinks that "Blogger" is a typo). Lord knows, I don't miss a chance to point this out to her. I'm not one of those parents who tells his kid that her every poop smells like potpourri. And while I'm well aware that I could slide into being one of those parents who tells his kid that her potpourri smells like poop, I feel that I'm right to politely and constructively correct her on her esses.

Now, why does she persist in making this mistake, after months of patient instruction and correction by Daddy? I suspect that "S" is just a tougher letter for kids than others -- because of how you move the pen. I suspect that we all write "S" like I do: start at the top, then move left, then down, then right, then down, then back left. God, who else could make writing the letter "S" sound so complicated? Anyway, whenever Siena tries to write "S" this way, she hesitates, trying to follow orders, but then the pen heads south instead of west. I can totally believe that it's a physical development issue; she can't write left yet, just like Zoolander can't turn left (just lost everyone over thirty; come back, people).

And Siena's corroborated this hypothesis -- yes, my daughter has become a guinea pig -- by coming up with her own workaround for writing "S": she does it backwards -- right, up, left, up, right -- and it comes out flawless. She doesn't do it all the time, as if she knows that she should be trying to do it the right way, results be damned. But she knows that, one way or another, she can write a proper "S."

I suppose that I shouldn't be too worried about all this. After all, she knows her way around a laptop, can surf the Web, knows a few of the States, and can handle some very easy arithmetic. Come to think of it, I should probably be worried about myself.

Imaginary Friend

I have to start blogging more frequently. Things keep piling up in my brain to blog about, and in my advanced age I can only keep track of so many before I forget them. But this one's easy to get down, because Siena adds to this topic just about every day.

The kid can't catch a ball yet, and her attention span rules out most board games. --DIGRESSION ALERT!-- Except Candy Land. Which is just a bullshit game, let me tell you. Players move based on the cards that they draw from a single deck, so if my card has, say, two yellow squares on it, then I move to the second yellow square down the path. This means that the outcome of every game is predetermined once the deck is shuffled and the order of play is established. You could deal the deck to the players, let them figure out in how many moves they make it to the finish, and declare the one with the fewest steps the winner. This would be just about as much fun as actually "playing" the "game." There's a reason why you haven't played CL since you were three. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

But one area of juvenile recreation in which Siena excels is "dramatic play." Anything involving role-playing or imaginary activities, from cooking ravioli to saving the world as the littlest superhero, is her forte. Maybe this isn't surprising: her parents met at auditions for Taming of the Shrew (Mommy was the shrew, BTW) and have maintained, shall we say, a certain interest in show business. But no one told the kid that she had to run around the house after her bath with her hoodie-towel on her head and tell us she was SuperGirl. She even has her own fanfare, "Da-Da-Daaa!" The best is when she assembles the rest of her rump Justice League: SuperDaddy (whom some of you know has a long and proud history of running around with a towel-cape) and SuperBaby, who by day is Emma, one of Siena's few babies to actually have a name. We'd love for you to see how cute it is, but transmission via Internet of any photos of Siena's post-bath shenanigans would likely land Daddy in jail, such are the times in which we live.

SuperGirl is hardly Siena's only role. In fact, this all started maybe a year ago when someone got her a Cinderella kit with a tiara, glass slippers, and a magic wand. For hours Siena and I would use the magic wand to turn each other into animals, chiefly sharks and tigers, then back into our normal selves. Nowadays she finds it more convenient to transmogrify ourselves with a wave of her finger, but we have broadened our repertoire to include snakes, horses, and... dragons!

Yes, the kid loves dragons. I still can't figure out where that comes from. But she knows what they look like, how to flap her arms/wings to match a dragon's, and how to make that raspy sound from the back of your throat that represents fire-breathing. Sometimes we'll both morph into dragons and terrorize Mommy, though she doesn't exactly sell the fear. Of course, sometimes I'll be the dragon and she'll be the knight, delivering fatal wounds with an extended index finger as she shouts "Sowrd! Sword! Sword!" Siena's so into the dragon motif that at preschool last week, when the theme was superheroes, Siena's made-up superhero identity was Super Dragon. Oh well, at least it isn't unicorns.

The other funy side of Siena's "dramatic play" has shown up since Daddy's been more of a Mr. Mom as Mommy starts her new job. Siena will want to take her babies to the play park for pretend, and when she does Daddy has to pretend that he's one of the babies! Seems odd to me, but it is fun to throw back at Siena a little bit of the nagging that I get from her on a regular basis, and she knows what I'm doing. And she's a good pretend mther, always making sure to pretend to buckle me into my pretend car seat before we drive to New York or Louisiana or The Beach. She'll even rub my back before pretend-naptime, always a nice gesture.

Some day, Siena will abandon all this, and move on to ponies or whatever it is that girls are interested in. Then I'll only have fond memories of towels tucked into shirts and magic wands. Of course, if she never grows out of this, then she can write screenplays with Daddy.

FIfty-One Cents

A quick little post, before I retire after a long day of "work."

If you ever take a toddler to a museum, zoo, aquarium, theme park, or historical preservation site built upon prehistoric tar pits, be sure to take with you multiple sets of two quarters and one penny. Not just fifty-one cents in any old denomination, mind you; exactly two quarters and one penny. And as I said, you'll want to bring three or four sets of these coins.

Why? Because just about every place that you could visit with a toddler has these stations where you can turn a penny into a small medallion with a souvenir imprint from the venue. You put the two quarters and a penny in the slot, like on a washing machine. Then you turn this big ol' crank in the front of the machine, and it flattens the penny and embosses whatever design you picked.

Oh, and make sure before you put the money in you've turned the crank to the design that you want, otherwise you'll get this mutant hybrid cross between two designs, like when Vincent Price in The Fly becomes half fly, half man. And if you didn't know that there was a version of The Fly before Jeff Goldblum's then get thee to Netflix.

That's it. I realize that this entry's pretty lacking in the Oh-Look-What-Siena-Did-Today stuff. I'll get on that. In the meantime, if someone knows hwo the heck it's leagal to mutilate U.S. currency into cheap souvenirs, please cite me the applicable statute, regulation, or case law.