We bring the girls to the park on most weekends, and Miranda and Eleanor have been getting better at making their way around the playground. They know where the steps are, and which way to go to find the different slides. We don’t let them go down any of the slides unsupervised, and we put them in our laps for the larger slides.

In this video, Miranda is climbing the last bit necessary to reach the large spiral slide. Miranda seems to like climbing, and she’s pretty good at it. Fortunately, she still has no fear of climbing, even though she bumped her head last week while climbing on a chair at home.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.66MB).]

In the video, you can hear another woman telling her daughter (also named Miranda) to stay out of the picture.

This past Sunday Miranda fell and hit her head. She was climbing on a chair when it tipped over. Her face hit the door of our TV cabinet, and then she hit the ground. There was screaming and crying and when we scooped her up, she had a big goose egg on her forehead.

This bump was literally the size of an egg, and it had blackish marks on it. We tried to put a bag of frozen vegetables on it to bring down the swelling, but this just made her more upset. Agnes ended up just holding her while she cried.

Later in the evening, the swelling started going down and it no longer seemed tender to the touch.

On Monday, when we took the kids to their eighteen month doctor’s appointment, the pediatrician didn’t comment on the bump. I guess they’re common enough that she didn’t think it was a big deal.

Monday afternoon Miranda went to daycare and the teachers there didn’t notice the bump at first. When they finally did notice, they were pretty alarmed. They thought Miranda had hurt herself while at daycare, and they just didn’t realize it. They called Agnes, who couldn’t get to the phone, and they ended up writing up an “ouch report”.

Yesterday morning the bump was pretty much gone, but instead she has a dark bruise on her face between her eyes. We took another picture this morning. It doesn’t look nearly as bad as in the original picture.

There wasn’t much to report from the eighteen month doctor’s appointment. Eleanor is 32 1/4 inches tall and 20 lbs, 13 oz. Miranda is 31 3/4 inches tall and 20 lbs, 4 oz. They’re pretty light for their age, but they’ve been following the same growth curve for a while, so it’s not anything to be concerned about. The girls were pretty good at the appointment. They liked the waiting room. They didn’t like having their ears examined or getting their shots, but that’s to be expected.

The girls turned a year and a half this past Friday! The pictures from the past month are up. We ended up taking fewer pictures than normal this past month. It has continued to be busy at work, and we dealt with a couple of bouts of getting sick again.

Both Miranda and Eleanor are walking more and more. They will occasionally resort to crawling to get somewhere quickly, but if I say “Miranda, stand up!”, Miranda will stop to stand up and walk. Eleanor’s probably a little more proficient at walking, but Miranda seems to walk more at daycare.

Miranda has twelve teeth: in front she has four on top and four on bottom, and she has four molars. Eleanor has one fewer tooth; she’s missing her lower left lateral incisor, still. She just got the one on the right at the end of this month.

We made another change to dinner time. Up until this month, we had been feeding the girls in their high chairs first, and then eating dinner after the girls were in bed. Late this month, Agnes tried pulling the high chairs up to the dining table and eating with them. It seemed to work fairly well, so we’ve all been eating dinner together recently. Sometimes we just eat a snack and then finish up dinner after the girls are in bed, but Miranda and Eleanor seem to like being at the table with us. The only problem is that there is a gap between the edge of the table and the pocket of their bibs where a lot of food falls. Cleaning has become a little more troublesome, but I think it’s a good change overall.

We noticed something about Eleanor’s speech this month. She tends to get the number of syllables correct, as well as the vowel sounds for words, but she seems to almost completely miss the consonant sounds. “Bunny” becomes “duddy” (or sometimes “daddy”). “Sun” becomes “nuh”. She’s been getting better over time, but it does still mean that only Agnes and I have any chance of understanding her.

Miranda’s pronunciation is quite a bit better than Eleanor’s, but she’s also more conservative about speaking up. Whereas Eleanor will try to say a word the first time she hears it, Miranda seems to wait until she has the sound straight in her head. It’s still not quite right, but it’s a lot closer. Her speaking vocabulary is smaller, but she can point out as many things as Eleanor.

We try to go to the park regularly. Miranda and Eleanor will both go down the smallest of the slides on their own (with our hands ready to guide them the entire way down). Then they’ll turn around and try climbing back up the slide. Last month we found a nice indoor playground, but fortunately, we haven’t had to use it. Being outside is much better.

The girls’ eighteen month doctor’s appointment is tomorrow. We’ll report back about their weight and height afterwards.