Miranda has officially moved into the preschool class at the daycare. Overall, she’s transitioned pretty easily. Last week, she brought flowers to the toddler class and said goodbye to her old teachers. She’s gone over to the new classroom without any tears. I guess it’s been kind of overdue, and it helps to finally be with her sister again. That said, we now know that we’ll definitely want to separate them for kindergarten. More than one teacher has commented on how Eleanor’s behavior is definitely worse when Miranda’s around. She basically stops listening to them, and is only focused on bossing Miranda. Given that she’s been in the preschool class for a couple of months ahead of Miranda, she sees Miranda’s joining her as an invasion of her space.

[Edit by Bernard]
Here’s a note that Miranda put together for the flowers. Agnes helped her write her name and the message, but the picture of the whale (as she called it) was all her.

Two weeks ago, Miranda and Eleanor did a couple of drawings that I liked. The first one is from Miranda. She drew this picture of a person. When Agnes asked where the arms were, she added the two lines above the head. The funny thing is that Miranda often has an expression on her face that looks just like this picture.

Eleanor has been obsessed with clocks and circles. She’ll draw the circle, a dial in the middle, and the 1 in approximately the right position. Then she asks for my help in writing in the rest of the numbers, but I make her call out the next number around the clock before I write it in. Then, she wanted to write her name. I wrote it for her above the clock, and then she tried writing it at the top of the page. She’s come up with some clever alternate ways of writing letters. For instance, her lowercase N is two vertical lines that are then connected at the top.

We just posted the photos for month thirty-two. This is two weeks late (but better than last month), so my update on what the girls have been up to are going to be mostly relevant to what is going on now, rather than when these pictures were taken.

For the most part, the girls have been easier to understand. Miranda and I had a frustrating time in the car last week when I was taking them to daycare and she kept on saying “I want this” or “I want that one“. My usual questions of what color it was or where was it didn’t help. Since that time, both Eleanor and Miranda have been better at trying to think of different words when we don’t understand them–it makes all the difference in the world.

I think the girls are getting a little better when faced with disappointment. Two nights ago, Eleanor asked to read the “Clifford” book, which is a book that we read pretty much every day. I told her that we could read it the next day. After she asked a few more times, and I responded in the same way each time, Eleanor got a really sad look on her face, and she sat down at the far end of the room. She didn’t throw a tantrum or start whining–she just looked sad. I ended up reading the Clifford book to her because she had a very appropriate reaction.

Yesterday, the kids experimented with jumping again. Strangely enough, they still don’t jump, even though we see kids a year younger who are hopping all around daycare. They know how to hang between two pieces of furniture, but they don’t really get both feet off the ground when they try to jump. Yesterday, the girls found that they are more comfortable actually jumping if they can also put a hand on the table to balance them when they land.

Miranda is officially making the transition to the preschool class this week. I think someone else in the preschool class moved on to the next class, which finally freed up a slot for Miranda. There are at least two other kids who are also toilet trained who are waiting to move up as well. We used to see a bit of a change in behavior in Eleanor when Miranda would visit, but we haven’t been seeing that this week. What would happen is that Eleanor would try showing Miranda how everything worked, instead of letting Miranda explore on her own. Miranda didn’t like it.

Eleanor’s recent obsession has been clocks. There is an owl clock at school that she has to play with every day. The clock belongs to the kindergarten class and when we don’t find this clock in the morning, the kindergarten class sometimes needs to stop what they’re doing and help look for it. Eleanor gets a little unsettled when she can’t do everything she considers part of her routine. At home, she’s been drawing clocks, asking Agnes or me to fill in the numbers on the face. She even arranges her goldfish crackers in a circle.

Miranda has really latched on to a doll this month. She calls it her baby, and she likes to pretend feeding it with a bottle. Of course, she sometimes puts the dolls head in her mouth and I have to tell her not to eat the baby, but usually she’s quite gentle with it.

Agnes showed me some drawings that the girls did today, and I thought they were worth sharing. In these pictures, the green is Miranda, and the brown is Eleanor.

This first picture is Miranda’s rendition of an octopus. I can make out how it looks like an octopus. There are two eyes, a bulbous head, and a number of lines that could be arms.

This next picture is of two spirals. We’re not sure if they intended to draw spirals, but Eleanor’s (the brown one) is surprisingly clear. She holds her crayon more like a pencil. Miranda tends to hold her crayon in her fist.

After this next drawing, Miranda declared “I make a eddle”. Eleanor took a look at it and agreed “Miranda make eddle”. We have no idea what an “eddle” is, but they both were pretty sure that this is a picture of one. Is this a hint of the secret twin language?

Finally, we have drawings of cats. Agnes guided Miranda’s hand at drawing the cat at the bottom of the page. Miranda then tried another cat right above it, free-hand, and ended up with that trapezoidal shape with a face. Eleanor said “It need a bell” (as all cats wear bells around their necks, of course) and drew in the brown circles as bells. I’m not sure what that picture in the upper right or upper left is, but apparently the one in the upper right deserves a bell, too.