Shenandoah Robot & Song

The email I wrote to Laura today entitled "A Pull At Your Heartstrings" says it all:

Just HAD to tell you this! Leia is still talking about Shenan every single day. ; ) She wants to go up and visit so badly! (How I wish we could swing it in May!) She's so missing Shenan, that now Leia's making a "Shenandoah Robot" complete with "cord so I can plug her in" so that Leia can play with a pretend Shenan, if she can't see the real Shenan. ; ) "And she's got a Darth Vader on her shirt because she likes Star Wars!" (Which she spelled "Sto Wos" this time, . . . is she from Boston?) "MOM, they're not polka-dots on the pants! They're Millennium Falcons!!!" Is this a friend who loves your daughter, or WHAT?!? ; ) Here she is working on her "Shenandoah Robot." The head and shirt are done (they both have two sides taped together, by the way, so that if you were the right size, you could put the shirt on). She's working on the pants in this picture. ; ) Please show Shenan for us. ; )

Love you guys!

Love, Noelle
And then Leia Rose wrote her very first song about Shenandoah! ; ) Whoa, this sucker was REALLY hard to read, and Leia got a bit frustrated with us, but here's the gist of it called the "Shenandoah Song:" "I was sad until I went to . . . . It's going to be a long time before I go to . . . . Shenandoah's house." [repeat] But what it really looked like was this:

The title page: "THE NiNDOWU SONG" or "The Shenendoah Song" (See how Leia sounded out the second part of Shenandoah's name phonetically? Pretty good!)

Whew! No wonder Leia got frustrated! It was like translating a foreign language! (You can even see my notes in the margins!" First I would see, "inti L i WET toot in BEULO!" Oh my! Then my mind would morph it to, "intil i wet too tim be u lo." And finally, "intil i wet to, . . . be u lon tim." Which is where I got "Until I went to, . . . Be a long time" etc. Man! The good thing about Leia's writing, though, is you just take the short sound of a letter (like the short sound of "u" for the word "a" as in "a trip") and that's what she uses. It's all phonetics, really. I felt like Henry Higgins.