Although we’ve been trying steadily to give the kids more and more finger foods, we’ve found that a major limiting factor is that our kids still have no teeth. Yes, they’re almost ten months and there’s no hint of a tooth anywhere. We didn’t realize this might be an issue until we looked back at pictures of their cousin Jared, who at ten months was happily eating corn-on-the-cob and gnawing on a pork chop. You can’t gnaw without teeth.

As a pediatric resident, I occasionally got questions about baby teeth, and in one instance, I ordered x-rays for a concerned parent whose 12 month old still had no teeth. (The x-rays showed the teeth right under the gum.) There are a number of genetic syndromes with delayed tooth formation, but I’m not too worried about those. There may be issues with speech development if our kids don’t get their teeth soon though.

Recently, Bernard saw something on this photograph that we had never noticed before.

That’s Bernard at sixteen months with his brother Albert who is three and yes, Bernard has no teeth! Sixteen months! We asked his mom about it and she vaguely remembers that he didn’t get any teeth until after he was a year old, so he might have two bottom teeth that you can’t see in the picture. Oh well, I guess that explains that.

By the way, thanks for all your helpful advice both on the blog and in emails about making baby food. Now it looks like my hopes of them eating adult food by twelve months are unrealistic, and we’re seriously considering buying one of those handheld blenders, because who knows how long they’ll need to eat mushed up food.

In our last food update, Agnes talked about how the girls don’t yet eat what we eat. We’ve been preparing them finger foods so that the girls can move on from the jars of baby food, but it’s still different from what we eat. This past week, we finally all shared a meal together.

When we tried to think of something mushy enough that Miranda and Eleanor could eat it without problem, split pea soup came to mind. We like split pea soup, but we don’t make it very often. We normally add salt and pepper right at the beginning of the recipe, but since we were all going to eat this, we didn’t put in any salt or pepper at all until the soup was served. We had salt and pepper in our soup. The girls had none–they can have salt and pepper when they’re older. Babies get enough salt in their diet as it is, and they might find the pepper too strong.

Miranda liked her split pea soup well enough. Unfortunately, she got her hands on the container we were using to feed her and made a bit of a mess.

Eleanor was a little less certain about the split pea soup. She willingly ate her portion, but she made this face every time she had more in her mouth.

Overall it was a success! Unfortunately, Agnes and I can’t always eat food this mushy, but eventually the girls will get better at eating and we’ll be having more and more of the same foods.

Back in January when the girls were five months old, Miranda had just learned to roll over. Eleanor had learned a couple weeks earlier. We took a couple of videos of them rolling over, but we never got around to posting them. While going through some older photos and videos, I came across this one of the girls doing some synchronized rolling.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (944 KB).]

Eleanor is a little late with finishing her turn, but it’s also harder for her to tell what Miranda is doing during her roll.

In our nine-month photos, we posted a picture of Miranda with a Fisher Price tower of rings. At the time, I said there was a similar picture of me with some rings sitting with my Dad.

This is Miranda with me:

And this is me with my Dad:

I know–I should have flipped around the first picture to match. I’m younger in my picture than Miranda is in hers. I guess I also had more hair. I’ll need to find a chance to take a picture with Eleanor like this as well.

[Edit: I’ve added the picture with Eleanor]

Anyway, I found it interesting how the toy has changed and what about it is still the same. The newer version has a tapered pillar so the smaller rings cannot slide to the bottom. The older version had a dowel for the pillar where the width remained constant. That’s why in the picture of me with my Dad, it’s possible for some small rings to be at the bottom. It also looks like the older toy came with more rings.

The base of the toy has remained the same. Instead of being completely flat on the bottom, it’s rounded. This allows it to rock back and forth a little bit instead of being tipped over.

The new toy also has two small beads embedded into the smallest ring, which rattle and move–it makes the ring a little more interesting to play with when it’s by itself.

The girls’ room is at the back of our house which you reach by walking through our office. Eleanor’s crib is placed where she can see us in the office from the end of her crib. She just needed to look out from their doorway and through the glass panes of the office door. Miranda’s crib has a view out of their doorway as well, but it’s angled in a way that she can’t see the office.

At night, when we put the girls in their cribs to sleep, Eleanor often sat up and looked for us in the office. If we were there, she kept on crying. If we weren’t, she settled down to sleep pretty quickly. We thought it would be a good idea to cover the window panes of the office door so she couldn’t tell we were there.

It turns out this wasn’t enough. Eleanor could still tell when there was something going on in the office around the edges of those pieces of paper. It was enough to convince her that there was someone there to respond to her. Finally, we went out and bought a cheap window shade–it’s essentially a long piece of paper folded like an accordion with an adhesive strip at one end. We used it to cover the whole door.

Now, if we keep the lights off in the office it seems that Eleanor can no longer tell we’re there.

In April, the girls did a number of activities at daycare during parent appreciation week. One of the things they did was make us stationery by applying green fingerpaint and glitter to some good heavy paper stock. We decided to put it up on our refrigerator as the first artwork they’ve given us.

I took this picture of their work on the dining table. We think they have distinctive styles. Can you tell who did which one?

We’re in that awkward period now where the kids are starting to prefer finger foods to the puréed baby foods, but they can’t eat what we eat yet. We’ve been preparing some soft finger foods for them like cubes of boiled potato, cheese, green beans, avocado, banana, and sweet potato. Trying to do this during the week is difficult. As I described in my “Day in the Life” blog entry, we have a whole routine of chores that we do after we put them to bed and after we prepare dinner for the two of us. Now, we have to add “preparing their food” to that whole routine.

I suppose that once they can eat what we eat, we can set aside some leftovers from dinner for the kids to eat the next day. I’ve decided to liberalize Miranda’s diet a little so that she can start to have a diet that’s more similar to ours. Not being able eat onions and tomatoes eliminates a suprising number of adult foods. We’re still avoiding large amounts of wheat for her though, and that cuts out pasta unfortunately. I know there’s non-wheat pasta out there, but Bernard and I are hesitant to try that ourselves. It just sounds gross.

At some point, we’ll be eating dinner as a family, but that means once we get home from picking them up from daycare (around 6 pm), we have to make dinner while watching them, eat, bathe them, do bedtime bottles all before 7:30 pm. How is this possible? I’m considering digging out our old crockpot, so that we can prepare stuff the night before, throw it in the crockpot in the morning, and hopefully, we’ll have dinner waiting for us once we get home. We welcome suggestions from other working parents out there.

For the month of April, Agnes went to work at 5:40 AM for her neurosurgery rotation. This early start left her no time to help the girls get ready for daycare in the morning, so the plan was for me to send the girls to daycare, and since I had the minivan with our carseats, also pick them up in the evenings. As it turns out, the routine I fell into was quite different than the one that Agnes wrote about.

When Agnes was taking care of the girls in the morning, she was getting up between 5:15 and 5:45. With the daylight savings time change on April 2nd, this shifted forward an hour. I woke up at 6:30 to start the day. Already I’d start to hear the girls stirring, but there were things that I needed to take care of first. Once I had the girls out of their cribs, I couldn’t do anything that took me out of the living room for more than a few seconds without worrying about the trouble they would get into. So, I started with my morning routine of brushing my teeth, washing my face, shaving, and combing my hair. Finally, around 6:50, I went to the girls’ room to get them.

By that time, the girls had been up for a while and were wondering where I was. Mostly, it was Eleanor. She would usually be at the end of her crib where she could see us coming in. Sometimes she had been crying for a while. Miranda was usually ready to get up as well, but she was not usually so desperate. Most of the time, I started with Eleanor.

For the middle two weeks of April, Eleanor was sick and consistently had morning diarrhea. So, I spent a good deal of time wrestling with Eleanor to get her cleaned up, which included completely changing her clothes because of a daily diaper blowout. During that time, Eleanor became really upset at me because she didn’t care if she was cleaned up–she was hungry. I fed her, put her in the Pack n Play, and repeated the process with Miranda (minus the diaper blowout).

While the girls were waiting in the living room, I quickly packed the girls’ food from the refrigerator. I then changed their clothes and put the girls in their carseats. I dressed for work, and then did a final check to make sure I had everything before we headed out for daycare.

Since the girls had clean diapers and had been fed, they were usually content to wait, but sometimes they got a little bored or impatient. Four things go to the minivan–two girls with carseats, daycare supply bag (food, extra diapers, etc.), and the backpack I bring to work. After dropping them off at daycare, I went straight to work.

Coming home from Santa Monica to pick up the girls before the daycare closed at 6:00 meant that I’ve been leaving work at 4:00. It was early, but fortunately, my work was flexible enough that it wasn’t a problem. Agnes was also getting off work early, so we met at the daycare to pick up the girls.

We fed them some solids at 6:00, bathed them at 6:30, fed them their final bottles at 7:00, and sent them off to bed by 7:30. At that point, we made dinner and prepared the bottles for the next day. Agnes went to sleep around 10:00 and I spent a few more hours catching up with work before I went to sleep.

About a week ago, Miranda was playing with our foot stool and Eleanor came over as well. Miranda tends to scratch her nails along the top of the stool. Eleanor likes to beat it with both her hands. As it turns out, Eleanor found that Miranda was in her way, and quite deliberately grabbed Miranda’s arm and moved her out of the way. Miranda lost her balance and got upset. I was a bit shocked–I have no expectation that Eleanor knows anything about sharing, but I also didn’t expect her to consider Miranda and obstacle and attempt to move her away.

Confronted with this situation, I didn’t know what to do. At this age, I have no meaningful way to communicate anything to Eleanor. In fact, she was beaming at me. I tried moving her away from the foot stool for a bit, but she came right back and moved Miranda away again. I tried moving her arm off of the foot stool every time she did it to Miranda, but while Eleanor knew she was getting upset, I had no confidence that she understood the Golden Rule. I ended up taking a video of the interaction to ask Agnes about it later, and then I moved Eleanor to the other end of the room where I gave her a different set of toys.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (2.79 MB).]

When I showed it to Agnes, she didn’t have any other suggestions for what we should do. We decided that distracting Eleanor with something else was probably the best course of action at this age. Anyone have other suggestions?

The girls turned three-quarters of a year old yesterday and we’ve posted the pictures for the month. While viewing the pictures, you should be able to use the left and right arrows to move between them, or the ESC key to get out of the album.

As compared to last month, Miranda has learned to push herself up to where she’s sitting. She can pull herself up so she’s standing while holding onto something, and she’s started to climb on top of things. Her crawl is okay, but she still resorts to an army crawl when she really wants to get somewhere. Eleanor hasn’t been doing any climbing, but her crawl is much better than Miranda’s. We’ve set both their cribs at their lowest settings.

This month we’ve been trying to introduce more finger foods. We’ve given the girls chunks of avocado and well-cooked potatoes. So far, the only finger foods Eleanor has been interested in are Cheerios and vegetable puffs. Miranda eagerly eats pretty much everything. Both of them can put food into their mouths pretty consistently, which is a significant improvement from last month where they were successful maybe only half the time.

In addition to repeating “deh deh deh deh”, Eleanor has been trying out her “F” sounds. It comes out as “pffff”. Today, Miranda did a couple of “wah”s and she started clicking her tongue. Clicking one’s tongue isn’t that useful for speaking any of the language that Agnes and I know, but it’s still pretty cool. Maybe she’s hoping to pick up one of the Khoisan languages where they use click consonants.

The girls still have no teeth, but we’ve been constantly watching for them. We’re sure they’ll show up some day.