The Notebook

Julia recently acquired a notebook gloriously full of blank, ready-to-be-written-upon lined paper. She has entertained herself by filling the pages in a variety of ways. Sometimes she composes little love notes:



And sometimes, she uses it to practice writing her numbers:


(She was doing pretty well up through twelve... unless her 31, 41, 51, etc is not meant to be an accidental reversal of the numbers but instead an intricate mathematical pattern.

1.) {1, 2,...n+1} until n=12
2.) n+19,
3.) {31, 41...n+10} until n=91
4.) n-71

Wow - she's a math genius!)


Other times, instead of a series of numbers, Julia likes to write out the alphabet:




Or copy down things she sees on the front of a cereal box:





And that's not all - sometimes she even uses it as a means to write out her own musical compositions:


I'm going to save this in case she turns out to be the next Mozart. And she very well might; some of her songs are pretty rad. Come on, we've all heard "Hold My Hand on the Sidewalk," haven't we?


And then there are the pages filled with one simple word: "No." Whether this is like the warning message in a private diary: "PROPERTY OF SO-AND-SO. NO SNOOPING!", or whether she just likes writing this word is yet to be determined:




It just happened to turn out that Madeleine began flipping through Julia's notebook today. Stopping on the above page, Madeleine exclaimed, "Look, Mommy! It says NO! See? That says NO!"

Wait a minute. The child who acts as if she has absolutely no idea what the word "no" means when it is spoken to her actually knows how to READ it? What?? Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that the first word Madeleine has learned to read is the word "no"??

Apparently she is not only a whiz at recognizing words written in the Roman alphabet, but Madeleine has also mastered Egyptian hieroglyphics. After carefully and studiously drawing the following, she turned to me and said, "Look, Mommy, I did it! I wrote 'no' too!":


Translation: "No."