We just posted the photos for month thirty-three.

The girls have been getting better at telling us what they want. When we don’t understand them, we ask them to say it another way and they often can find other words to describe what they mean. Sometimes it feels a little like the game Taboo. For instance, we were having dinner and Miranda said that she wanted the “other rice”. Agnes couldn’t figure out what she meant so she asked Miranda to say it a different way. Miranda indicated that it was round, and said that it had lettuce in it. From that, Agnes deduced that she was asking for the cucumber sushi rolls we’ve been giving her recently. With that mystery solved, Agnes was able to tell her that we could get cucumber rolls the next day.

One big change in the past month is a sudden fear of bugs. When they see one, they’ll both let out a high pitched scream. “Mommy! Get it! Get it!” They’ll stop only after Agnes kills the bug. They’ve done this only once while I’ve been around, but Agnes was closer, so she’s the one who killed the bug.

For the most part, they’re okay with larger animals like cats and dogs, but there’s this one very small black terrier in the neighborhood that seems to have really frightened them. It’s not on a leash, and one day it started walking up the pathway to our house as the girls returned from daycare. Now, a month later, they’ll still say a number of things about the experience.

“The black doggie’s scary.”

“Go away black doggie! It’s not your house! It’s Eleanor and Miranda’s house!”

“You can’t come inside!”

“It’s going to get you!”

I don’t think they’ve even seen the dog again since that first day, but they keep on talking about it.

Miranda’s gotten quite proficient with her tricycle, while Eleanor’s become more tentative. The kids had a day at daycare where they brought in their tricycles to ride around with everyone else and after that day, Miranda’s been zooming around on her tricycle. They ride around in circles in our backyard, and Miranda often catches up to Eleanor from behind. This freaks out Eleanor, who doesn’t like being tailgated.

Eleanor has been insisting that we answer her in unison when she gets her toothbrush at night. She’ll go into the bathroom to get her toothbrush, and then she’ll come out and address Agnes and me and say, “Say it together, okay?” Then, when we say okay, she prompts us with: “Is this Eleanor’s?” and if we don’t both say “Yes” together, she gets upset and makes us do it again. We’ve been humoring her.

We’ve been reading one book a lot this month. It’s called A House for Henrietta. It’s a hardcover book from 1958 with almost no pictures. There’s only a picture at the beginning of each chapter. It’s Eleanor’s favorite book and she likes us to read it to her every night. I have a hard time believing that she can understand it, but she sits very quietly while we read a few pages each night.

Hopefully it won’t be long before out next monthly update, considering how late this one came out.

This is the bead that was in Eleanor’s nose.

Back when I was a pediatric resident working in the emergency room, I saw, at least three times a week, kids with foreign objects stuck in various orifices. There were dozens of kids who swallowed coins (yes, most of them eventually pass, but many do get stuck in various anatomically “tight” regions of the esophagus). There was a 3 year old who got a peanut stuck in his trachea, and another one who got a piece of steak stuck down there. There was an 18 month old with a raisin deep down in his ear. The most interesting one was a 17 year old (yes, a teenager), who had a thumbtack in his trachea. The story was that he was putting up a banner at school and had a thumbtack between his lips. Suddenly, he inhaled to sneeze, and the thumbtack just flew straight into his windpipe. And then it didn’t come out when he sneezed. You could see the thumbtack clearly on chest x-ray.

Anyway, you can see where I’m heading with this. We were driving to a restaurant for lunch today, when suddenly, we heard Eleanor start whining. She had a finger up her nose, so Bernard and I had the same thought–she was picking her nose too vigorously and caused a nose bleed, or irritated something. We both started yelling, “Get your finger out of your nose!” When she moved her finger though, I suddenly saw a flash of color. I yelled, “Oh my God, she has a bead in her nose! Pull over!”

So she and Miranda were playing with these little plastic beads that they got from school. They’re really great for occupying them–they can spend a half hour just stringing all the beads onto a necklace. And the assumption is, once they’re in preschool they know not to put inappropriate things into their bodies and they can chew and swallow more challenging foods. For example, there are no whole grapes, raisins, hard candy, nuts, or popcorn allowed in the toddler class, but they’re okay in the preschool. Well, apparently this is not a good assumption.

So Bernard pulled into a shopping center and I climbed into the back seat. It was really lodged in her nostril and there was no way, using fingers, to get it out. I needed tweezers. Luckily, there was a drug store across the street and Bernard raced over there to get some. In the meantime, I had to keep Eleanor calm, so that she wouldn’t inhale it. I also kept a finger on the bridge of her nose to keep it from moving upwards. I had no way to keep it from moving back into her pharynx though. Miranda kept craning her head over saying, “I wanna see it!”

I let Miranda out of her car seat and she looked up Eleanor’s nose. “Oooh, it’s green!” she said.

I didn’t bother asking Eleanor why she put a bead up her nose. I did make her promise not to put things up her nose though. Then, we sang a few songs and Bernard was back with the tweezers. Luckily, the hole in the middle of the bead was still visible, so I was able to yank it out fairly easily. Eleanor saw the bead on the tip of the tweezer, then, she picked up the bag with the rest of her beads, handed it to me and said, “Here, I don’t want them anymore.”

Last weekend we were at Target and found some foam stickers of the letters and numbers. We pulled out some sticker books (filled with waxed paper so you can remove the stickers later), and let the kids play with them.

This is how Miranda arranged her stickers.

She liked peeling the paper backing from the stickers, and she arranged them all around the page.

This is how Eleanor arranged her stickers.

Eleanor’s obsessions with circles, clocks, and stars (anything arranged in a radiating pattern) shows through. She had more trouble with the backing of the stickers, so she asked Miranda to peel them for her. I told her she needed to do it herself, and she figured out the trick.

Conversation while driving the kids home from preschool:

MIRANDA: Mommy, this my froggy? (holding a stuffed frog)

ELEANOR: Yeah, Miranda’s froggy!

MIRANDA: No! You is not Mommy! Her is Mommy! (pointing at me)

ME: Yes, that’s your frog Miranda.

They wouldn’t have this problem if Chinese were their first language. (No conjugating verbs, one pronoun for everyone) English is hard.