I wrote the following before I read the comments on my last blog entry. I really appreciate the comments, by the way. More thoughts on Eleanor’s eating:

1. Crying during mealtime does not encourage enjoyment of food or enjoyment of eating together. Therefore, I don’t think mealtimes should be punitive. Bernard, however, has many memories of sitting at the dinner table alone for over three hours because he refused to eat something and couldn’t leave the table until he ate it.
2. Bernard and I are really worried that she’s going to continue to have a severely limited diet, e.g. we can’t go to a restaurant because there’s nothing that she will eat. Therefore, we can’t just give her the things she likes. We need to continually encourage her to eat new things. I guess just not to the point of tears.
3. If she doesn’t want anything we offer her, then I guess I would give her something that she will eat. What’s to keep her from just holding out until we give her something good? Nothing, I guess. As she gets older, we can involve her more in preparing meals, making choices, and learning about healthy eating. I think as she gains more control, she’ll be willing to eat more things. I hope, anyway.
4. Our concerns with this plan are that Eleanor is going to treat mealtimes like eating at a restaurant, i.e. we’ll be stuck making a whole separate meal for her every night. I guess if she doesn’t want what everyone else is eating, we choose the secondary option, and if she doesn’t want that, then too bad.

Bernard and I both dread mealtimes because it has turned into what we call “Showdown with Eleanor”. Meals usually end with Eleanor in tears and me leaving the room because I’m too upset as well. Basically she isn’t eating anything that we put on her plate.

Here are the foods that she will eat: milk, cheese, yogurt, cold cuts, cereal, pancakes, bagel, and snack crackers (goldfish, teddy grahams etc.) Note that it’s mostly breakfast and snack food. She will not touch any fruits or vegetables.

We’ve tried the following approaches to this problem:

1. Insist that she eat what we give her to the point of crying, i.e. keep the fork in front of her mouth until she opens her mouth. This usually works for about three or four tearful bites. Then she starts screaming and spitting out the food.
2. Give her the foods above that she will eat and forget about giving her a balanced diet.
3. Put the food we want her to eat in front of her and wait for her to decide if she’s hungry enough to eat it or if she’d rather just say that dinner’s over. I can’t do this technique because she starts crying and saying, “Cheese, cheese, cheese”, and I usually give in.
4. Bribe her bite by bite. I use this technique–Bernard doesn’t have the patience for it. She doesn’t understand, “Eat your rice and then you can have the treat”, so what I do is hold a tiny piece of cheese in one hand, and hold a forkful of food in the other hand. As she reaches for the cheese, I put the fork in front of her mouth and say, “Eat your rice. Eat your rice.” She resists a little but does seem to understand that if she eats the food we want her to eat, she can have the cheese. We do this bite-by-bite, i.e. one spoonful of rice, one piece of cheese until she’s had a few ounces of food. I’m worried that this technique is just reinforcing the idea that the food we give her is gross.

Just writing this blog entry is making me depressed. We don’t know what else to do.

Miranda loves the Dutch bunny, Miffy. My mom bought these great Miffy flash cards which are very thick and therefore indestructible. Miranda has no idea how to play “Memory” yet–otherwise known as “Concentration”, where you lay out all the cards face down and try to find the pairs–but she does like to flip over the cards to see what’s underneath.

With only three cards, this game is more a test of attention rather than memory.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (692KB).]

Last night, Eleanor was so thrilled to find that she knew how to draw circles with her crayons. She loves circles. She has a blue tool to sift through sand, which she calls her “blue circle”. She points out that the sand bucket is a circle; She points out the little circle design on the spoon that she uses.

Up until last night, Eleanor had been drawing zigzags with her crayons, but suddenly she started moving her arm in a circular motion and she had circles! She was so happy, she did a little dance every time she drew another circle.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (710KB).]

We think it helps that she’s been holding her crayons like a pencil for a while.

The girls just turned twenty months, and we posted some pictures. We also thought it would be nice to pull out a picture from one year ago, when the girls were eight months. They were sitting, but they weren’t very stable.

Over the past month, Eleanor has cut her two top canine teeth. They’re not all the way in, but the teeth have definitely made it through the gums. These will fill the gaps between their lateral incisors and molars. Miranda has one of her canine teeth, but it’s just barely there.

This month, the girls have shown a lot more independence. Whereas last month they tried to monopolize Agnes’ time, this month, I’ve seen them wandering around the house a lot more. Eleanor learned to open doors, so she likes going from room to room to open and close doors. Miranda hasn’t been as interested in opening the doors. Eleanor also likes to open drawers. She seems particularly interested in the silverware drawer, so Agnes moved the knives in towards the middle of the drawer where Eleanor still can’t reach it. I’ve put a child safety lock on our pantry, but I still need to put other locks on the cabinets and drawers.

For the first time, Miranda has started really showing a preference for something. Before, it was always Eleanor that had to have something, but now Miranda really likes to carry around a bucket that we bought for playing in the sand. She calls it “bu-bee”. We have no idea what that name comes from since we’ve always just called it a bucket, but she and Eleanor have adopted the same name for it. I suppose this is where the idea of a secret twin language comes from.

Compared with last month, Eleanor now knows about half of the letters of the alphabet and she can count to thirteen, though you really have to listen closely to make out the sounds that she’s trying to make. She knows the colors of all of her crayons, and she’s shown a strong preference for things that are blue. She has to have her blue bib, her blue fork, her blue spoon, the blue sand sifter, which she calls “boo ker-kel” (blue circle). She loves playing with the Mega Blocks that we got last Christmas, and she can sit for quite a long time, building different things. Her favorite book is Hop on Pop.

Miranda really likes bubbles. She doesn’t run after them or try to pop them, but one day as we were heading to the park, she noticed that we had the bottle of soap for blowing bubbles and she insisted that we blow some. When we told her that we needed to wait until we got to the park, she threw a tantrum. It took a while for her to calm down after we reached the park.

Miranda is also more likely to wander away. We’ve found that when the girls are playing at the park, Eleanor will happily play in the sand for a while, but Miranda will suddenly stand up and start walking away. She’ll wander around and pick up rocks, pine cones, and other things on the ground. Miranda has a keen eye for ants–she’ll watch them for a while, then start to press on them with her finger. Fortunately, she hasn’t run afoul of a swarm of ants.

It’s funny to see how Eleanor and Miranda react to something new (and not scary). Eleanor will say “Waah!” (wow). Miranda will ask in informal Taiwanese “Heh-sha?” (what’s that?). They were doing this all the time when we took them to the aquarium.

Our daily routine for weekdays and weekends hasn’t changed much in the last month or two. The kids go to daycare on weekdays. On Saturdays, I sleep in a bit while Agnes takes care of the girls. Then, around mid-morning, Agnes takes a nap while I take the girls out to the farmer’s market. We’ve been buying fruit, bagels, and roasted corn. Miranda loves roasted corn. When we get home, we all go out for ramen for lunch. The girls take their nap, and we either take our naps or run some errands. When the girls wake up again, we try to make it out to the park for a bit. They end their evening with dinner, bath, brushing their teeth, playing, story time, and bed. Sunday is similar, but a little more ad hoc.

That’s it for now. We’ll have more pictures in another month.

We’ve received comments that most of the videos of the girls talking features Eleanor. Eleanor and Miranda both talk a lot–they just talk differently. Eleanor likes to answer when we ask what something is, what color it is, what number or letter, etc. It’s a big exercise in naming things. In contrast, Miranda talks in much longer sequences. Much of it started out as babbling. We first noticed it as she spewed a steady stream of syllables while flipping through some books.

Recently, we realized that in many cases Miranda was speaking in Taiwanese, and we just failed to recognize it. For instance, she’ll sometimes point to something and say, in Taiwanese, “what’s this?” I feel bad that she’s probably been doing this for a while, and we’ve been answering her with blank stares. It’s not that we don’t understand Taiwanese–we just haven’t been listening for it in their speech.

Case in point: Miranda was carrying around a doll and a toy bottle with orange liquid the other day and pretending to feed it. I recorded a video of it, and it was only after watching it again that I realized what she was saying. Agnes starts by saying “Baby jah bottle.” Miranda responds with “Juice. Baby jah … juice.” (Jah is my best phonetic representation of the word that means “eat” in Taiwanese.) She was saying that she was feeding the baby juice. It’s a little hard to understand, but she was definitely putting together a whole sentence.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (782KB).]

We assume that Miranda’s Taiwanese and Mandarin (e.g., she says “ant” in Mandarin) vocabulary comes mostly from Agnes’ mother. Since then, we’ve been listening a little more closely.

Today, when I brought the kids home from daycare, there was a package in front of our house addressed to Eleanor and Miranda from Albert and Erin. I ripped open the box in front of them and a whole bunch of rubber duckies fell out. The kids started squealing and laughing and Miranda even brought a few ducks up to her mouth to kiss them. Later, when Eleanor was taking a bath with the ducks, Miranda came into the bathroom and started saying, “Duck duck duck”, and pointing at the ducks. I had to stop her from lunging headfirst into the bathtub to get the ducks. Eleanor picked up one of the ducks and handed it to Miranda. Miranda said, “Thank you” and took the duck out of the bathroom and into the family room. Then she was back in a few seconds empty-handed, wanting another duck. Eleanor gave her another duck and this went on about six times until I was done with Eleanor’s bath and we brought the remaining ducks back into the family room. Then, the kids lined up the ducks in front of the TV. For the first time, the kids didn’t fight over a new toy–probably because there were plenty of ducks for them to share. Thanks Albert and Erin!

Not all of the ducks are in this photograph. Eleanor brought two of them to bed with her.