For our kids’ first birthday, Albert and Erin got a Mega Bloks set. It’s held the girls’ attention fairly well over the last ten months, but Eleanor especially likes to sit and build with the blocks. She creates all sorts of fantastical structures. Pieces of them often fall down, and Miranda sometimes takes pieces off of them, but Eleanor is remarkably unperturbed about it and continues to build where she left off. She’ll sometimes take off some blocks so that others can fit on the remaining structure better. Here are some examples.

This last picture is a telephone that Eleanor made.

We go to the park regularly and the girls love to climb all over the playground–especially the slides. While we insist on accompanying them when they go down the tall slides, we let them go down the relatively short ones by themselves. We noticed that they go down the slides differently though.

Miranda sits very upright, and comes to a nice stop at the end of the slide.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.23MB).]

Eleanor goes down the slide on her back, and flies right off the end. Though we didn’t catch the very end of her ride in this video, Eleanor was fine.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (634KB).]

Miranda’s technique seems the safer of the two.

We’re a little late in posting photos for this past month, but they’re finally up. Looking back, here’s a picture from one year ago, when the girls were ten months old. We were trying on dresses that they would wear to Sean and Peggy’s wedding.

This month Albert, Erin, and Suephy came out for our mother’s retirement. Agnes’ cousin came down to visit, bringing her twin girls Anna and Maya.

Miranda’s been telling people what to do. Today she wanted to go outside to walk around, but Eleanor wanted to stay inside. Agnes was at home by herself with the girls so she couldn’t take Miranda out without Eleanor. Miranda kept on saying “Eleanor–outside!” (to which Eleanor would say “No!”). On another day, Agnes was busy reading to Eleanor and so when Miranda came to her with a book, Agnes said to ask me to read. Agnes said, “Miranda, say ‘Read, Daddy!'”. Miranda responded with “Read, Mommy!” At that, we had to switch so Agnes could read to Miranda. I finished reading the book that Eleanor was looking at.

The kids are learning to jump. We have a picture book that shows a rabbit jumping and whenever they see that picture, they try to jump. Eleanor can make it off of the ground sometimes. Miranda doesn’t quite have the motion down yet. It sometimes just looks like she drops down, rather than jumps up.

This month the girls switched over to the toddler class. Our daycare’s criteria for moving from the infant to the toddler class is that the kids walk well and can feed themselves. In their old class they weren’t quite the largest kids. In the toddler class they’re definitely the smallest. Some of the other kids look a whole head taller. Kids can’t switch out of the toddler class until they’re potty trained so there are some older kids there.

From what we can tell, the activities in the toddler class are much more interesting than in the infant class. The kids go outside every day and there are bigger and better toys to play with. Miranda and Eleanor know most of their classmates, who used to also be in the infant class. This class also allows our kids to participate in the school lunches. Some of them Eleanor will actually eat, but we also still pack a backup lunch in case she refuses to school lunch.

We got a kids’ potty recently, but we’ve been so busy with work that we haven’t really had the chance to focus on their potty training yet. The girls sit on it as we’re filling up their bathtub for their bath. Miranda thinks the potty is hers though. When she sees Eleanor on it, she says “Eleanor–no potty!” Eleanor ignores her.