Lately, I’ve felt that the girls’ shoes have been a little tight. It’s been taking a bit more effort to squeeze their feet into their shoes, more so with Miranda than Eleanor. We had some coupons for Stride Rite, so we went shoe shopping today. There were lots of kids in the shop, so it was pretty noisy, but that didn’t seem to bother Eleanor or Miranda. Instead, they just started grabbing shoes off of the shelves. Eleanor gravitated towards pink or green shoes with flowers or butterflies on them. Miranda liked the silver and blue boy’s shoes. Miranda sat down, took off one of her shoes and pulled on a new shoe that was two sizes too small–it went over only her toes.

We had the girls’ feet measured. They’re between a size 5 and a size 5 and a half. We ended up getting matching pairs of shoes, which Miranda and Eleanor wore out of the shop. They walked most of the way through the mall on our way out. Here’s the shoes they got.

They seemed pretty happy with them. We promptly broke in the shoes in by going to the park where the girls played in the sand and on the playground.

The girls have been starting to learn their colors. I think it started with Agnes’ mother drilling them with what to call different colors, but one day Eleanor was pointing at the different blocks she was using to build something and started naming their colors. She has also voiced a preference for a particular blue bib and a blue spoon. When we put it on her, Eleanor will say “blue bib” though it sounds more like “bwoo biiii”.

In this video, Agnes is showing Eleanor the different crayons and asking what color they are.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (682KB).]

You can hear Miranda also chime in with “yellow” just before Eleanor names the next color (green).

This video was taken about two weeks ago. In the video, I think most people wouldn’t understand what Eleanor is saying without Agnes repeating the color. Both Miranda and Eleanor pronounce their colors better now.

1. I tried to bathe both kids simultaneously today. It didn’t work. They fought over who was nearer to the faucet. Eleanor kept pouring water onto Miranda’s head. I didn’t have room to recline them and wash their butts. Have to figure out a better way.
2. Eleanor counted to thirteen at dinner.
3. Miranda said “thank you” without being prompted when a book was given to her.
4. During storytime, Miranda saw a picture of a goose and a moose drinking juice and started saying “juice”, “juice” and pointing at the kitchen. I said, “No, you can’t have juice, you just brushed your teeth.” She kept insisting on juice, until I said, “You can’t have juice, but you can have water.” Then she said, “Wawa, wawa”. I got them both a cup of water. They drank some, then wanted to take their cups of water to bed. I then had to take their cups away before they got into their cribs, so they went to bed bawling. Sigh.

With each animal that we come across in the girls’ books, we teach them the animal’s name and the sound that it makes. So, for instance, we’ll say “Bee!” followed by “Bzz!”

Eleanor started pointing out every bee and saying “Bee!” followed by her bee sound. In a Winnie the Pooh book, there can be quite a few bees.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (702KB).]

Agnes must have been tired, which is why Eleanor is sitting on top of her, rather than on her lap.

We haven’t been posting as much, i think, because there aren’t as many major events as there were in infancy. But their second year is flying by and I feel that we won’t really remember what it was like. A lot of little things happen; every evening Bernard debriefs me when he gets home. (I usually have the kids in the evening since Bernard tends to work late.) I think I’ll start posting the debriefings here.

1. Tonight, the kids were sitting together flipping through the same book when Eleanor drooled on Miranda’s hand. Miranda had a digusted look on her face and wiped her hand on Eleanor’s pants.
2. Dinner is always a struggle with Eleanor. Tonight she ate two meatballs and a cup of milk, then, I told her to eat her rice. She said, “No”. I said, “You have to eat some rice.” She scooped some rice onto her fork and made a big show of opening her mouth wide, holding the fork at the edge of her mouth, and, after a few seconds, putting the fork into her mouth. I praised her and watched her eat two more bites. Then, she put her fork down and smiled. I said, “Are you going to eat more rice?” She said, “No”. “Okay,” I said, and took her out of the high chair. It seems like she’s learned to humor us when it comes to food.

We read to the girls before they go to bed, and recently we got a new bookcase for our living room where we keep all of their books. Agnes has been asking the kids to pick out what they want us to read to them, and it’s been interesting what they’ve been picking. Eleanor consistently picks One, Two, Three! by Sandra Boynton. Miranda’s been picking Elmo’s Little Playhouse. The funny thing is that we have two copies of Elmo’s Little Playhouse, and Miranda brings over both copies because she wants us to read the book twice.

We read the books that they bring over, and then the girls go to bed. Miranda’s been known to bring her copy of Elmo’s Little Playhouse to bed with her.

We’ve also found that Miranda likes to look at books upside down. She’ll grab a book and sit down to look through it, and more often than not she’s looking at it upside down. I’m sure it’s a preference thing, rather than random chance, though I have no idea why she likes upside down books. Anyway, every time we see her holding a book upside down, we say “Miranda, your book is upside down”, or “Miranda, turn over your book”, and she’ll turn it over.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (764KB).]

In the background, you can hear Eleanor say “Da!”. I don’t remember what she was pointing to, but she was reading her own book at the time.

Almost a week ago the girls turned nineteen months old. We posted some pictures from the past month.

Last month, I said that the girls were walking more and more. This month, they’ve switched to walking pretty much exclusively. Miranda’s faster than Eleanor, but she’s still not up to running yet.

Both girls have twelve teeth (four molars, four central incisors, four lateral incisors) each. We think that Eleanor’s starting to cut her lower canine teeth. Agnes has seen something, but I haven’t had a close enough look yet. Eleanor definitely is drooling a lot these days.

I had a small victory this month in finding something that Eleanor will eat pretty consistently. My mom makes some meatballs out of ground pork, napa cabbage, scallions, and ginger, and it turns out it is one of the few foods that Eleanor is likely to eat. My mom gave me the recipe earlier this month, and Eleanor liked the ones I made just fine. I’ll have to post the recipe when I get the chance. It’s pretty similar to how one makes the filling for dumplings.

Last month, Eleanor spent a lot of time trying to get Agnes to pay attention to her exclusively. She constantly tried to get Agnes to walk with her to a different room, and therefore away from Miranda. This month, Eleanor has been playing on her own a lot more, and instead it is Miranda who wants all of Agnes’ time. Miranda’s been sitting on Agnes’ lap every chance she can get. She’ll bring a book to Agnes and when Agnes takes it, Miranda turns around and starts backing up to sit on Agnes’ lap.

I think the biggest change we saw this month was a big increase in vocabulary. At school, the daycare teachers were surprised to find that Miranda knew the names of all of the kids in the class. She doesn’t say their names, but we can ask her “Where’s Sean?”, “Where’s Aaron?”, “Where’s Elizabeth?”. In every case, Miranda will wordlessly point to the correct child. Our kids’ list of animals that they recognize has grown as well. Miranda can almost say “koala” and “wombat”. Eleanor will say “octopus”, but it’ll sound like “ah-oh-uh” because she drops all of the consonant sounds. They’ll point out the moon and say “moon” whenever they see it, and they’ll do the same for clouds and birds.

We also found that the girls know quite a number of letters. Eleanor will correctly identify A, D, E, I, N, T, Y. I’m not sure why it’s those letters. There are all kinds of things you can spell with those letters: “identity”, “deity”, “tiny”, “attendant”. We haven’t been trying to spell anything though. This is just Eleanor calling out letters she sees in our foam tiles, or in alphabet books. Eleanor recognizes numbers as well: she knows 1, 2, 3, 5. I think the first three were drilled into her whenever we would count to three. Five is easy because we show her our hand and say “five!”. Somehow, four has been missing so far. We’ll have to remember “four”.

That’s it for now. We know we haven’t been writing much recently, but there are a number of blog entries we know we want to write.