Genevieve

Isabelle has a naughty alter ego. For a long time I thought she was calling her "Jenna-thief," and if I ask her about "Jenna-thief" she will answer as if I have correctly named her. Carrie heard the name as "Genevieve," which is probably what Isabelle intended. But I keep hearing her say "Jenna-thief," probably because the name is evocative for me. When I listen carefully, I can tell that her 4-year-old effort at the sound /v/ is unformed, and often sounds more like /f/. Since /f/ and /v/ are allophones most of the time in English (that is, one can substitute one for the other without changing the meaning -- "vor" is heard as a variant on "for," whereas "gat" is not a variant of "hat"), my ear hardly notices her unformed consonant, I simply translate it into something that makes a word. "Jenna-thief."


What does Genevieve do? Everything naughty. She first emerged in an ecstasy of storytelling, with Isabelle running about her Grandparents' home in Massachussets describing the havoc Genevieve wrought.


"She took those books and threw them on the floor. She took that pot and she broke it. She ripped up those papers."


Eventually she ran around the room pointing at various objects, "she broke that, and she broke that, and she broke that."


Later, Genevieve became more sophisticated, although her goal of thorough naughtiness remained her raison d'etre:

She rides in the car without her seatbelt
She parks on the sidewalk
She goes shopping in her pajamas
She makes people climb on the roof and then pushes them off
She feeds the cats milk and chocolate
She throws Mommy's shelves without taking the horses off.

But have no fear. If Genevieve comes near, Isabelle says she'll get Mr. Incredible to throw the house at her.

"But honey, if he throws the house at her, where will we live?"

"That's okay. We can live in the hole where the house was."