Kindergarten: ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from German, literally ‘children’s garden.’

Another big day in the Johnstone house: Ellie has started kindergarten! Our big girl just keeps getting older… funny how that works. And now she is starting the next level of schooling (flashback to last year). She was very excited and has been really looking forward to it. The last week or so she has been getting new school supplies and such to get her ready, so anticipation has been building. Last night we drilled four things she was to do at school:

1. Be good.
2. Obey your teacher.
3. Be polite.
4. Pick good friends.

We spent some time talking about the importance of wise decisions, especially in picking friends and how her friends would influence her, for good or for bad.

She was very happy to go this morning when I said goodbye and gave her one more thing to remember: Have fun! After a quick hug and kiss, she ran straight to her new teacher. What a keener!

The day wasn’t without tears for Ellie… one of her life dreams didn’t happen. She was very disappointed at the end of the school day when Naomi showed up to take her home. She cried because she thought she was going to get to ride a school bus home.

We thank God for this little girl and her enthusiasm, and pray that she will learn much about Him and and the world He created while having fun at school.

Image used under Creative Commons

A couple years ago Ellie started talking to Snake. She would have great (one-sided) conversations with her imaginary friend and would tell us what he was doing. We were curious where this suddenly came from. I was worried she had befriended some snake-tattooed person or something. We now think that it is based off the Disney snake character, Hiss, from the animal Robin Hood movie.

As Ellie talked more and more about Snake…

we learned that he isn’t any ordinary snake, not that we expected him to be…

Snake apparently has two feet and two hands. When I tried to point out that snakes don’t have hands or feet, Ellie explained that he is the only one. Snake is starting to sound more like Trogdor, although she assures me he has no wings and does not shoot fire.

Trogdor, the Burninator from Homestarrunner.com

Snake has been with us for well over a year now, and we still learn new things about him through Ellie’s stories. For example, if we tell Ellie not to jump on a chair, she might start a new story by saying, “Once, when Snake was jumping on a chair, he…”

Ellie talked about Snake so much that Adelaine started talking about him too. Adelaine, of course, likes to do whatever Ellie does, so shortly after Adelaine turned two and was still barely able to put a sentence together she started doing things like laughing and saying, “No, Snake, no,” over and over. This of course made Ellie angry that Adelaine was apparently talking to her imaginary friend.

Now that Ellie is drawing a lot more, I finally asked her to draw a picture of Snake for me. So here he is, straight from Ellie’s imagination:

As you can see, Snake is purple with arms and legs. He can also drive a car, fly a airplane and a spaceship, and many other funny things.

Snake is no longer alone now as a new cohort of “friends” has been added. Frank was the next one to come along. Apparently, Frank is a red tractor. It wasn’t until months later that I put it together that the inspiration for Frank likely came from the Pixar movie Cars.

Frank’s gonna get you by ~Splapp-me-do on deviantART

Other friends include Door and Lily, who seem to be human, possibly brother and sister. We expect many more friends in the years to come from this girl’s very active imagination.

A couple of weeks ago Ellie was the Special Helper at preschool. One of the things she got to do was bring a big bag home to put a special toy or something into and then the next school day all the other kids were going to ask questions to try and guess what was inside. Ellie decided to give the person who guessed correctly a prize. At first it was a little blank piece of paper that she said they could draw on. After I suggested that it might be more meaningful if she drew something on it first, she ran off with her markers and came back with this:

She drew a connect the dots picture for the winner to complete. The picture is a tree with one branch (requiring a new number “1” for the branch). Ellie is always trying to think up of activities for everyone else to do and I thought this one was very clever and very sweet.

On the darker side, Ellie was playing a drawing game with my ipod. It has a bunch of little stamps that you can put on the screen. Things like kittens, hearts, flowers… nice stuff.

She created this:

I asked her what the picture was and she said “Someone went for a walk, and someone died.”

Either she or I need counselling.