Chapter Three: New Looks, Imaginary Friends, and Tutors
Garrick Ollivander's Diary
This time I am writing at three years old - a few weeks after Melody's third birthday.
We have started slowly letting people we know come to visit our house. Curiously, Melody is very quiet and reserved in public. She needs to feel secure before showing her playfulness, her deep feelings, or her deep loyalties.
Once, she was apparently playing too loudly and one of Nicolas's friends spoke sharply to her. She sat stoically in a corner without moving for the rest of the visit, and when the stranger left, toddler Melody began crying inconsolably. We knew she was upset, though, because in a feat of accidental magic, all the plants around her had begun wilting and dying as she'd sat in the corner.
She seems quite determined to be reserved around those she doesn't trust and know well. So she is warm and proud and a leader, but she also carries a kind of innate reserve in public that adds to her stoical nature.
Determined to capitalize on this, her aunts have begun teaching her how to be a graceful, warm, proud reserved young woman, with great class, composure and etiquette. These lessons have started early. We are trying to take her quiet into becoming a good upper-class "hostess." Only with those close to her, it is beginning to happen, does she show loyalty and playfulness.
In general, whenever families come over, she is hesitant around adults and bigger or more aggressive children. She avoids them - once a bully tried to invade her space and she even used her magic to push him away. She becomes very shy and stoical around strange, big adults. In child playmates, she likes soft-spoken, gentle people and often plays with smaller kids.
Although fairly reserved in public, at home alone with us she is loud, boisterous, uninhibited, and energetic. She can be giggly, expressive, even silly. She just doesn't seem good at showing this to people she doesn't know well. As she grows, she seems to be becoming the "shy or reserved until you become her friend" sort of person. Her primadonna toddler years are slowly leaving her behind. She already dislikes aggression and violence in playmates, even with much confidence detests it.
As she is a girl, her love of gentle kindness is encouraged and cemented, as is her "quiet until you get to know her, big sweater, sweet inner nature" personality. At the same time, she is still quietly warm and a good leader, stoical but with passions underneath the surface. More of her older personality is starting to shine through, with growth and discipline, at long last.
On the note of appearance, she has started wearing big sweaters and sweater dresses in Winter shades - along with dark pants to hide the knobby, dimpled knees she already doesn't like. She has started tying her black curls back in a low, loose ponytail behind her head, with a blunt fringe to cover the forehead scar she is self conscious of. At about three years old, she was taken to her first eye appointment and was prescribed glasses. We chose fashionable big square dark frames that, like her curls, broaden her thin face, compliment her coloring, and highlight her almond-shaped bright green eyes and high cheekbones.
She fiddles with her glasses in the mirror uncertainly a lot, but she is actually turning out to be in her own way rather a pretty girl.
There is more to Melody's personal growth than this, however. She has begun asking countless questions at all hours of the day - an activity we try to encourage, even when it gets frustrating. We want her to be intellectually curious. She seems to love the intellectual, knowledge aspects of learning - if not their discipline and rote counterparts - and we try to encourage this by indulging in her fascination with reading to her big books of information. She likes cosmic, big, universal ideas but can sloppily forget the rather boring details.
Direct and blunt, she will have to be taught tact and that other people have sensitive feelings - adults included. She once told a particularly wealthy old friend of Perenelle's who was visiting, out loud to her face, that her hat looked like a bird had just built a nest inside it and the pink frills on her dress were stupid. "You should dress better," Melody finished matter of factly in her tiny girl's voice.
Red-faced and upset, needless to say the woman left in a huff.
So we have been trying to teach her… sensitivity for feelings and, well… tact. "Sometimes," we say, "being honest but also kind gets better results." She is trying to learn tact, but only on the surface and only reluctantly.
More happily, Melody loves unorthodox ideas such as those put forward by her parents, and is consuming theoretical and eccentric and artistic magic easily like a sponge. Our ideals are becoming important and impassioned to her as well. She has also started asking lots of questions about religion and languages.
She is also idealistic. Nothing can bring on a tantrum faster than a little white lie or a broken promise from one of her parents. Melody has an incredibly strong faith in those she loves, and any kind of disappointment in that arena can eat away at her.
On a more amusing and uncomfortable note, Melody has been found, well, playing with herself as a small child like many toddlers do. She's too young to really have any sense of embarrassment over being caught out. On the contrary, she always comes across as rather matter of fact.
Her emotions are so vivid and intense that if she wants something or someone, she can be incredibly stubborn and no substitute will be accepted - unless we force her to accept a substitute, as we sometimes have to. She is in that phase where she openly either loves or hates everything. She went through a possessive phase where she did not want to be separated from her parents, not even for a short time - clingy and jealous, she wanted each of us "all to herself." The possessiveness for a while extended even to her toys, which she took to carrying around with her.
The playing with herself is understood as part of a young child and is ignored. Her emotional intensity is already set in stone, as is her stoical stubbornness, but we are trying to work on abating her frowning possessiveness. "People are allowed to be their own people with their own choices," we tell her, and she tries to accept this with difficulty.
In short, we are also trying to work on the "pulling people closer" part of her magic.
I cannot wait to see how she continues to change as she gets older!
Perenelle Flamel's Diary
I now write just a few weeks after Melody's third birthday.
She still has her afternoon nap. She has started to have a better realization of time and space, and of the world and people outside of her home. She has started asking why she never sees the outside, but she isn't pushy or insistent yet - just curious. We also still haven't told her the full details of her past.
We have started feeding her more normal, healthy big-kid foods. Happily, actual conversations between child and parents have started, and we are trying to build her vocabulary and introduce her to as many new intellectual ideas as possible. She talks to each of us about our chosen fields and hobbies. Sybil asks her thoughtfully to articulate her opinions on things. Nicolas teaches her things and dotes over her. I have very adult conversations with her about things like fashion and household magic. Garrick talks about current events and opinions, encouraging debate and stories with wild, excited eyes.
She has started speaking full sentences, needless to say. She has taken a great liking to blocks, puzzles, and overall clutter that litters itself around the house.
She went through a phase of irrational fears and phobias of so many random things. As a child, she has begun testing her limits and we have had to learn to say the word "no" - a lot. Her tantrums continue to be ignored.
In toys, we have bought her big toys to push or ride, wind-up and jack-in-the-box toys, play sets and blocks that can be handled and stacked, puzzles, dress-up clothes, puppets, and art supplies. She also has clay, sand, little musical toys, and books. We have begun taking her places outside the grounds, little Muggle world visits such as the zoo or Blackpool.
A curious thing happened at the zoo. We discovered that Melody can, of all things, speak to snakes - she began hissing quite pleasantly to a snake in one of the tanks. We took her home and, after some discussion, decided the idea of Melody being naturally evil is silly. So we have begun showing her moving snake photos, trying to get her to translate snake speak into English and copying the language down into a little leather-bound journal as a kind of translational text. We have also taught her not to go talking about her Parseltongue to just anybody.
So she has strong magic and magic sensing abilities, alongside Parseltongue and, Sybil believes, possibly symbolic Dream-seeing as she gets older. What a powerful girl!
We are starting to let Melody make independent decisions. She has begun to insist on independent activities. She asks constant questions, why's, and what's that's, and she can't sit still for very long. A bizarre thing we have had to teach her not to do is bite people.
Melody has begun playing strong games of make-believe and having lots of imaginary friends. She is also, peculiarly, we believe beginning to copy things from the parents she is growing up with.
She has my dignity and reserve, Nicolas's penchant for bright interest, Garrick's streak of wild-eyed and grinning adventure, and Sybil's penchant for proud and eccentric statements. She is her own person, but a bit of each of us is forming inside her.
We believe she is turning out to be ambidextrous. Around this time she finally mastered speech and complete, full sentences. At this same time, time-outs began. And we have begun teaching her French and Arabic, so that she will have both early and all of her life.
In more toys, we began buying her puzzles with knobbed handles, lock boxes and latch boards, and dress-up dolls that needed buttoning and lacing. We helped her try to make different little toys out of balls of yarn and string. She took a liking to repetitive motions, as she tried out and began to get a sense of her world.
We are by now reading every day with her - in a sense, "pre-reading" for her. We learned to pick our battles when it came to a three year old. She has begun learning her social skills from adults and not from children. This has the effect of making her seem older and rather more precocious than her age - adding to her love of our eccentric hobbies. She is friendly, but odd and precocious, a bit nerdy. It is an unintended side effect and we love her just the way that she is. Melody turning out to be a bit unusual is largely inevitable. She has also begun "helping" us more in-depth - fetching the correct magical things for us, learning things. She has become an expert at smoothly predicting exactly what we will need next when caught in the middle of a project.
She came to be able to stack things easier and concentrate on play for longer at a time. She disliked being interrupted, so we took to warning her five minutes ahead of a transition. She has a better sense of time now, so this works. In addition to her clutter, there has been mess she has had to be punished for - books and toys strewn everywhere and left, things removed from shelves and drawers, drawings on walls, spilled juice, teared paper, flung clothes.
Needless to say, I'll be happy if we can just manage to teach her to be neat.
We have been trying to teach her to share. It was also around this time that we as parents took turns spending nights away out by ourselves. It was at this time that Melody's love for colorful wizarding bubble baths started.
In addition to ignoring tantrums, now we had to ignore whining. Each of us learned our own individual discipline strategies. Nicolas talked over her and gave time-outs. Sybil made her clean up and apologize for whatever mess she had made. Garrick and I are better at lectures and scolding, neither of us having any time for whining or tears.
Melody began having an eye and ear for sensory details, and went through the independent struggle of learning how to do things like get dressed on her own. Funny and charming, she began putting weird words together, and she also began giving the "no" word - to us! We began teaching her how to scribble, draw, and color with ink and crayons. She often crawled into bed to sleep with one of us at night. We each provide a different kind of comfort - Garrick soothing bedtime stories in a deep voice, Sybil little displays of Dream-healing and sleep magic, Nicolas and I comfortable late night conversations in the dark with Melody warm between us.
In fun physical games, we began teaching her things like follow the leader, catch, and dance. Her bedtime routine began shortening as she fell asleep at night more on her own with the Pensieve. We taught her alliteration, wordplay, and rhyming games. Her imagination and pretending really began to build around this time. She began playing in the house or the garden more independently, sometimes under the supervision of elves. She got increased swim time in the pond on the grounds, more swimming independently, and we began teaching her upper-class wizarding elegance, etiquette, social graces, and manners.
She will be a classy girl.
To allay her budding fear of the dark and of nightmares and night terrors, we began telling her wizarding fairy tales at night. She showed an increased interest in wizarding treats and sweets. We taught her how to count.
She also began bed-wetting, an increasing series of bossiness and demands, and a love for toddler age humor. Silly faces, slapstick, and strange sounds can make her squeal with delighted laughter. We have been keeping track of her growing height, though she still is and probably always will be small. She began getting her wizarding swears from us, deciding how she wanted to dress on her own - and we have been teaching her wizarding game, from Wizard's Chess to Exploding Snap and Gobstones.
She has begun doing tea parties with her dolls. She is getting better at kid's broom flying and trike riding. She has started making collections of little nature things she finds on her own on the grounds. We have been teaching her color-learning games.
She loves story time, and has been using the "love" and "hate" words with almost alarming frequency. She seems determined to finally decide the things she likes.
Dumbledore has been coming over more often as the "fun uncle" - I think she gets some of her cheerful, smiling airiness and intellectual determination from him. By now, Melody Potter's world is fairly set.
Melody came to actually start helping and learning with each of her parents in their offices. This led to a good deal of intellectual eccentricity, but also a wealth and breadth of power and knowledge. Her first order of business was to learn from her parents how their jobs and their hobbies actually worked.
This was the time when she began soaking in information like a sponge.
She began taking an active interest in their hobbies, and also in stories of her own budding Wiccan Pagan religion, and in the intellectual and artistic discussions she had with her parents. Slowly, she began internalizing all of these things as important.
She began exploring and learning more about the intricacies of her homes and their grounds on her own. She had countless imaginary friends - and this was the time that she finally learned that house elves were helpers, with magic, as well as being friends. The elves loved her, mostly because she was nice to them she felt.
All four parents sat in front of the nervous middle-aged man, square and pale with a toupee, in a black cloak before them. He shifted in his seat there in the vast sitting room hall of the chateaux, everything around him empty.
"… Yes," said Perenelle, reserved. "You will do as a childhood scholarly tutor for our daughter.
"Can you start immediately?"
Author's Note: I'm thinking one or two more childhood chapters and I'm done. Now things start going faster.