Merry Christmas everyone! We had a nice Christmas. We’ll share more photos in a few days, but we wanted to post a video of Miranda unwrapping one of our gifts. This was a gift that Agnes received. It’s a Tiffany Oyster Bay Note Cube^® Pad from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This video is longer than usual at about twenty-nine seconds. In the background, you can hear Eleanor unwrapping another gift at the same time. They both loved ripping into the wrapping paper.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1,691 KB).]

I like how Miranda kind of stares at the cube for a moment after she’s done unwrapping it. She’s trying to figure out what to do next.

We didn’t send Christmas cards this year. If you were hoping for one from us, we’re sorry. We received lots of nice cards and a surprising number of Christmas letters from everyone this year. As for us, we thought we were going to take a nice picture and send it to everyone, but it just didn’t happen.

Right after we got back from our Thanksgiving trip, I got sick. It was one of those phlegmy, ugly kind of colds. Then, everyone else got it. Then, I contracted conjunctivitis. Then Agnes and I both got slammed at work. The long and short of it is that we’re lame. We didn’t take a Christmas picture, and we haven’t made cards. None of you are going to get one from us.

Here’s a picture of our sick kids.

They’re better now, and hopefully we’re going to all enjoy seeing our extended family this weekend. For everyone we won’t get to see–Merry Christmas!

Last month we wrote that Eleanor took her first steps, though we weren’t sure if it counted. She barely made it three inches before sitting down again. Eleanor hasn’t made a serious try since then.

Yesterday, Agnes’ Dad and Max came over to our house, and while they were here, Agnes and her Dad tried getting Miranda to walk between them. With a lot of encouragement, she finally made the crossing a couple of times.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (812 KB).]

Miranda didn’t repeat it today, but that’s because we were pretty busy with both of them for most of the day. I’m starting to think that our girls are more likely to walk if Agnes and I can work with them one at a time. Anyway, that’s a thought for another time. For now, yay!

We bought some Washable Crayola Crayons a couple months ago so that the girls would have something to draw with. These crayons are nice and thick and the marks they make can be wiped off of most things with a damp cloth.

Recently, we’ve been under pressure to draw. Eleanor will hand a crayon to us and make a noise. We’re supposed to take the crayon and draw something. If she recognizes it, she’ll say what it is, then hand us the crayon again to draw something else. If she doesn’t recognize our drawing, she’ll just hand us the crayon to try again. Talk about pressure. Neither Agnes nor I are particularly artistic, and crayons aren’t the best medium to work in. Miranda watches to see what we draw, but she doesn’t insist we draw anything. She’s more than happy to make her own marks with the crayon, or push the paper off of the table.

One thing I’ve been drawing is a turtle. The girls recognize a stylized turtle that I copied from a T-shirt I got from Hawaii. It’s the turtle on the left. Eleanor will say “tuh tuh” when she sees it.

The picture on the right is also supposed to be a turtle, but Eleanor will say “ee ee” (beep beep), which means she thinks it looks like a car. It’s a turtle, Eleanor! Well, after telling her that enough times, she’s starting to see the difference in how we draw cars and turtles.

The sixteen month photos are up on the site. This month we flew to Atlanta for Thanksgiving with Suephy, Ed, Jared, and Dylan. Albert and Erin flew in from New York, and my parents also joined us. Ed’s parents joined us for Thanksgiving dinner itself. Albert ended up taking about 900 photos over the course of the week we were there, and we used a number of them in this month’s photos.

Eleanor decided to sprout molars this month. We wrote about her first molar on November 13, but since that time, Eleanor has cut a total of four molars. They still haven’t quite cut all the way through–you can see the inner and outer edges of the teeth, but the gum is still covering the middle. It looks painful, and sometimes Eleanor is okay eating things she needs to chew, but other days she still like pureed stuff. This brings Eleanor to a total of ten teeth. She still has only two bottom front teeth.

Miranda’s teeth remain the same as last month–four on top, three on the bottom. A lack of molars still hasn’t slowed down her ability to eat various foods. Recently, we started giving the girls dried apricots. They take a long time to eat in the car, and they’re not messy. There’s a chance that they can be a choking hazard, but both our girls seem to know how to take reasonable-sized bites from the apricot.

The girls are not walking yet. There was a day this month where Eleanor seemed willing to stand on her own and inch forward by shifting her weight back and forth, but she hasn’t repeated that attempt since then. Both Miranda and Eleanor stand quite easily, and they’ll walk fine if they can hold something, but the moment they need to let go, they’ll go back to crawling. When we pick them up from daycare, we’ll often find them sliding along the walls.

The girls’ vocabulary grew quite a bit this month. Eleanor has continued with her “ba va” for flower, “ba” for ball, and “bvv” for balloon. She also has added “tuh tuh” for turtle, “woo woo” for dog (sounds like woofing), “eeow” for cat, “raarr” for lion, “sssh” for fish, “aa aaa aah” for duck (sounds like quacking), “moo” for cow, “ee ee” for car (sounds like beeping–we say “beep beep” for car), “daah” for star, and “chssh” for cheese. As you can tell, no one but her parents would understand most of what she says. She does clearly say “hi”, “bye” and “daddy”, though. In sign language, Eleanor knows “help me”, “more/food” (she uses the same sign), and “done”. Miranda has a similar vocabulary, but with slightly different sounds for each word. For instance, her word for flower sounds closer to the actual word. It’s “fowa”. They both can point out different body parts–head, hair, eyes, ears, mouth, nose, hands, feet, teeth. Eleanor sometimes gets confused about where “mouth” is though. Miranda doesn’t say “hi” and “bye” quite as clearly as Eleanor, but she does have one very useful piece of sign language. She’ll pat her diaper when it needs changing.

Miranda has continued to improve with the shape sorter. She can relatively quickly identify a shape and put it in the right hole now. It still takes her a little bit to orient it, but it’s clear she’s identifying the right hole before she puts the shape in. Eleanor still continues with a trial-and-error approach.

We noticed one pretty cool thing about Eleanor this month. There is a test called “Mirror Self-Recognition” that checks if one can recognize that the image in a mirror is a reflection of oneself. In general, this ability is only demonstrated in humans and great apes (and maybe elephants). The standard test is to place a mark on the person and show her the mark in the mirror. If she points at the mark on herself, then she proves that she realizes that the mirror is showing her, rather than someone or something else. This month, I was giving Eleanor a bath and used a towel with a hood to dry her off. The hood has a picture of a duck. When Eleanor saw her reflection in the mirror, she pointed to her own head and said “aa aaa aah” (her sound for duck). I don’t think this test has any correlation with anything else in life, but we still thought it was pretty cool.

We’ll have more pictures in another month.

Our original plan was to stop using bottles at 12 months, but at the one-year doctors appointment they were very underweight, so that plan went out the window. They weren’t eating solids that well, and there’s nothing like whole milk for fatty calories. A bottle of milk is 150 calories, so three bottles a day made up half their daily intake.

The kids are now sixteen months, and I was starting to get anxious about them still being on bottles. I’ve given the “you need to get your baby off the bottle” lecture a million times, so I was starting to feel like a bad parent. There are four main reasons to stop bottle use:

1. Milk bottle caries: toddlers let the nipple sit in their mouth without sucking, and the milk just pools.
2. Open bite malformation: also a problem with prolonged pacifier use.
3. Cows milk anemia: milk has no iron, and the kids who drink a ton of milk are too full to eat other foods, so they get severely anemic. I admitted two kids during my residency who had a hemoglobin of four all because of cows milk.
4. Toddler stubbornness: the later you wait to stop the bottle, the harder it gets.

Sorry for the gross pictures, but I literally see those teeth at least once a week.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we decided to stop their bottles cold turkey. Immediately, their milk consumption went down to almost zero. They just weren’t used to drinking milk from a cup. At one point, Eleanor saw her seven-month-old cousin drinking milk and she started crying and pointing at the bottle. We quickly moved her to another room and did our best to distract her. Miranda had a bout of severe constipation because her liquid consumption was cut by more than half. I tried my best to give them cheese and yogurt so they would still get some calcium.

After a few days, though, I guess they must have realized that the only milk they would get would be from a cup, and they both starting drinking their milk cups. Whew!