Eleanor realized that if she cuts a number 8 out of a piece of paper, she gets two circles. It seemed to bother her.

Eleanor was upset at seeing a spider. I said it’s ok. She said spiders are our friends. Miranda said she likes ants; ants are her friends.

Woke up at 3AM to the sound of Eleanor in the hallway yelling, “Mommy are you downstairs?”

ME: I’m in my bedroom!
ELEANOR: Where?
ME: In my bedroom! Open the door! (I refuse to get out of bed.)
ELEANOR: (after jiggling the door) I can’t open the door!
ME: (grumble, jump out of bed, then fling open the door) Why aren’t you in bed?
ELEANOR: (looking worried) My sister is not in her bed!
ME: What?
Eleanor repeats herself, then follows me as I storm into their bedroom. A sudden panic as I don’t see Miranda in her bed. I rush to her bed and pull back the covers. Miranda is curled up in the corner and was completely under her comforter. She stirs as I say, “Eleanor, she’s right there!”

Eleanor, satisfied, gets back into bed. I guess she checks on her sister overnight.

It’s pretty telling that I got a question from Albert whether we decided to move to quarterly picture updates. No, we haven’t–I’ve just been lame about posting photos for the past few months. December was a busy month, and we had over two thousand pictures to sort through. It’s not an excuse though, since I picked out the subset of pictures to post, and have been sitting on them for well over a month. Anyway, the December 2008 photos are up.

As I said, it was a busy month. Our old house was scheduled to close escrow on December 17th. We had to move the remaining items out of the house by the weekend before, and into storage. We then went into escrow to buy a new house with a closing date of December 30th (less than four weeks), and needed to arrange all of the paperwork while I was traveling for work to Orlando. The home stretch for closing escrow happened over the Christmas holidays when we had a big family reunion and took a trip to San Diego to visit Legoland and Sea World. We met up with Jeremy and Susan, who came down, and we celebrated Max’s birthday.

The kids took this big flurry of activity very well. It would have been completely reasonable for them to be discombobulated by the lack of a constant routine, but we had a lot of help and support from our extended family as well (on both sides).

Since the November 2008 update, the kids have been taking swim lessons. This is the second session of swim lessons our kids have taken, but this time they are in the pool without us. They seem to like their teacher, Joe, well enough, but Eleanor seems constantly surprised that she’s expected to get her face wet. Today was the last lesson of the session, and we’re planning on signing them up again for the next session, starting February 28th.

Part of our Sunday swim lesson routine has also been that we regularly go out to lunch with the kids on Sundays. We mostly alternate between a pho place and Souplantation. We’ve been to Souplantation enough that we’re considering joining “Club Veg”. The kids like the chicken noodle soup (with “fat noodles”) and the soft serve ice cream. Eleanor usually gets a small plate with shredded cheddar cheese, but mostly eats soup and macaroni and cheese. I usually build a big plate for Miranda from the salad bar, but she picks at all sorts of things.

One thing that Agnes and I noted recently is that neither of our kids will let us forget anything. If we delay them by saying they can watch TV after dinner or something like that, they’ll call us on it if we try to skip it. Miranda in particular will call us out.

We had a recent parent/teacher conference with the kids’ Montessori school. It went fine, for the most part. The girls have settled into the school well, and interact well with the other students, some of which are considerably older. The one thing that was called out was that we need to continue working on finding ways to handle conflict besides blowing up. They can handle conflict between each other, but seem to be at a loss when confronted by another student. It’s natural for our kids to not know how to handle these situations, but at the same time, I understand how this is something that is good to work on. Eleanor was generally evaluated better at physical coordination (jumping, throwing, balancing, etc.), and Miranda was called out for her interest in music.

As the parent/teacher conference was approaching, they sent out a questionnaire to see how independent our kids are at home (can they get their own drinks? do they pick out their own clothes?). Unfortunately, the answer for most of the questions was no. One thing we started this month is that the kids are responsible for dressing themselves. It takes considerably longer, and you have to hover over them to make sure they don’t get distracted, but they can do it. I think it’s a good thing overall, but our morning routine has definitely lengthened.

For a little while, the girls were pretty consistent in their color preferences. Miranda will constantly say “I like that car (or anything else) because it’s red”. Eleanor’s favorite color for the last few months has shifted from blue to purple. Recently, though, Eleanor has been saying, “Sometimes I like red, too”. I was so uncertain about Eleanor’s color preference recently, that I skipped buying crocs for the girls because I wasn’t sure what color Eleanor would want. We ended up going to the store with them so they could pick their own colors. I suppose that this is how things are going to be, though.

Last month, we introduced the kids to Totoro. It doesn’t have a ton of music like the Sound of Music or Mary Poppins, but we thought that it might be an interesting and non-threatening movie that the girls might like. Miranda liked it a lot. Eleanor was scared of the big rabbit, and starts shouting that she doesn’t want to see that scene when it’s on. She mostly likes the opening and closing credits of the movie. The other big addition to our TV watching is Dora. We had mostly escaped watching Dora, but we reintroduced it recently since we have a number of Dora video tapes, and Miranda and Eleanor watch it a lot. Eleanor’s slightly less interested, and she gets very upset when Swiper shows up.

We have also been letting the kids play the web-based games on noggin.com. They’re quite good and age-appropriate. Miranda has had some trouble in holding the mouse button down while moving the mouse, as well as clicking without moving the mouse. I think she’s hampered by her tendency to want to click the right button instead of her left. I suspect it’s a left-handed thing. We switched to a smaller, symmetric mouse, and swapped the function of the left and right buttons, but realized that it just confused things more, so we’ve switched back, and Miranda’s been picking it up. Eleanor was pretty proficient with the computer mouse from the start. Her favorite Noggin game involves helping Tolee jump from bamboo pole to bamboo pole in the Ni-hao Kai-lan game. She’s learned to time when to jump from the swaying poles.

Next month’s pictures will include the pictures of our new house, and hopefully I’ll be able to get back on top of posting these again.

We have a leaking roof above the kids’ bedroom. We’ve called a roofing repair company and hopefully they can come out tonight.

Is it bad we let Miranda have barbeque corn nuts from the vending machine? The package says it is not for kids under six. She likes them.

The kids were riding on my back while I crawled on the carpet and they slipped off and fell. Later, I poked Miranda in the eye by accident.

Eleanor and Miranda have become newly interested in using the computer, specifically to play the games on Noggin. These games are all mouse-oriented, and require moving the mouse, left-clicking, and in some cases, dragging and dropping. Eleanor has an easier time with it, partially because Miranda keeps on clicking the right mouse button. The mouse that we have is also curved to fit a right hand more naturally.

For people who have small children who are left-handed, have you found it it to be any easier for your kid when you’ve switched to a mouse that is built for both hands? Is it worth swapping the function of the left and right mouse buttons? Does a smaller travel mouse work better?

I’m sure that Miranda will figure things out with practice, but she gets a little frustrated, and Eleanor is always trying to show her how to do things.