This week Ella discovered her inner scientist/engineer. She went to the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose and saw a number of machines, and then started building machines of her own. Suddenly it all makes sense: the obsession with fountains, the questions about how gravity, fire escapes and other things work, and the formulation of hypotheses. Ella has noticed, for example, that she and Mummy take vitamins, but Daddy does not; she concludes that boys do not need vitamins. Ella's machines consist of piles of toys laid out on the floor, and their workings are the subject of long and complex explanations. Her birthday present has been chosen accordingly. For it is the eve of Ella's third birthday -- but she still insists that she does not want to grow up. Thankfully, a flurry of last-minute diplomacy seems to have produced a compromise: Ella will have her birthday and become three, but will be otherwise unchanged, and will stay just the same, and never grow up, just like Peter Pan. "When I'm ready to grow up I will not be Peter Pan any more," she says.

Now over to Ella...

"The deal is that I made a pretend machine. I made it out of all my toys. It just mixes things up. Daddy, welcome to making a big machine for making butter. Because we have to make butter for our picnic recipe. And also I have a list of picnic things to eat. So... butter, sandwiches, Roman somali, normal somali and hamburgers, chicken, carrots and soup, toast and honey, crisps, and pretzels, and ginger biscuits, and some fish that are dead. And there's lemonade and some wine, some beer and also some juice. And water. Well, Daddy, I'll show you how the machine works. So, now. I think it's going to work in a minute. I think something's going to happen to the butter. Well, how it works is that you put the butter there in the machine, and it makes the butter squashed so you can put it on stuff. Well, Daddy, now you have to make the machine go, so it works. How you do that is that you go bash, bash, whrrr. You put food in the machine and you press lots of buttons, and it works. Look, it's squashed the butter! Shall we do that again? How it works is that you make lots of food in the machine."