In the last week or two, the girls have discovered the joys of screaming. It’s like, “This is so much fun I must scream my head off!” In this case, the girls and I had just returned from Costco to find Agnes at home. I brought in some diapers and paper towels while the girls started to play with Agnes. They found that they could hide between the paper towels and our TV cabinet. Each time Agnes would say, “Where’s Eleanor?” or “Where’s Miranda?”, which was then followed by “There’s Eleanor!” and “There’s Miranda!” and much screaming.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.79MB).]

We did this over and over. The last time Agnes’ mom came over to take care of the girls, she said her ears were ringing when she left.

One of the very first books that we read to the girls had a hippo with a mouth that you could open and close. We made a sound effect for the mouth where we would go “Aaah” whenever the mouth was open. Recently, we were reading But Not the Hippopotamus, and Miranda started doing the same “Aaah” sound while pointing out each picture of a hippopotamus.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.75MB).]

We don’t know why the “Aaah”s become so insistent at the end, but they seem very important to Miranda.

Last month Agnes recorded this video of the girls at the piano.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.75MB).]

I like that Eleanor carefully arranges the book on the stand before starting to play, and then she checks it again partway through her performance.

The girls just turned twenty-one 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 nine months old. They were just starting to pull themselves to a stand.

This month included Easter. The girls were too young to participate in the city-organized Easter Egg Hunt, but Agnes’ mom put together a great egg hunt in her backyard. Each of the plastic eggs had candy or toys in them. We ended up confiscating most of the hard candy because of the choking hazard, but the girls ended up with some of it.

Eleanor and Miranda have both been getting better at saying each other’s names. Eleanor sounds mostly like “El-nor”, but both of them are starting to pull it out to three syllables. Miranda’s name started out as “Rah-rah” at the beginning of this month, but now Eleanor will say “Rah-dah (dah dah dah dah)”. The extra “dah’s” are an imitation of how Agnes’ mom says Miranda’s name (“Miranda! da! da! da! da!”).

They’ve started using their names when they want something. Eleanor will say “El-nor? El-nor?” when she means “give that to Eleanor”. Miranda just goes with “me? me?” which is a little more sophisticated use of language. Actually, it ends up being “Me? me? me? me? me? AAAAAAH!” when she finally loses it.

This month, the girls learned to kick a soccer ball. They walk behind the ball, and it bumps forward, and they follow it around. When they want to change direction, they pick up the ball, and put it back down in the direction they want to go.

At the farmer’s market, the navel oranges are mostly gone, but we’ve been buying strawberries and cherries. The girls call strawberries “bah beh bee”. They seem to use the same word for cherry as well, even though I’ve tried to explain how they’re different.

The girls started going to daycare five days a week this month. Before this month, Agnes’ mother was coming up on Wednesdays to take care of the kids at our house. She’s been great at coming every week, but it has also been very restrictive for her. The new schedule gives her more flexibility, and she still comes up to take care of the girls occasionally, but not on as rigid a weekly schedule.

That’s it for now. More pictures in another month.