Today, Eleanor drew this picture of a house. When asked about the second, smaller house, she said “the little house is far, far away.”

I have no idea when she picked up on this idea of perspective in her drawings.

Last week Miranda was looking at a book in the car. She asked Agnes who the woman in the picture was. It was Anne Geddes. Agnes said that she wrote the book and took the pictures. Miranda stared at it for a bit, and said that she needed “that thing that makes your hair straight”. Last month, when we took a trip to Houston, I entertained Miranda by showing her the different products in the SkyMall catalogue. One of them was indeed a hair straightener. Miranda then said “Ah-mm (Erin) needs it, too.”

We explained that curly hair is pretty, too.

Miranda wanted to try a wasabi pea, so I let her. She had it in her mouth for half a second before she gave it back to me with a disturbed look on her face.

Eleanor just woke up screaming. This happens occasionally, and it’s usually because she’s having a nightmare. I turned her over to wake her and she said that there were ants on the wall, and that she was trying to get them. I said that there are no ants any more. Eleanor turned back to look at the wall, then picked up her stuffed animal and looked under that. When she didn’t find anything, she went back to sleep.

I wish there were something I could do about these nightmares. Fortunately, she calms down quickly enough after waking up.

A few days ago, we sat down to watch Madeline: Lost In Paris, which is an animated movie based on the books. About a third of the way into the movie, Madeline is kidnapped by a man pretending to be her uncle and is forced to work in a dark, underground lace factory. At this point, Miranda bursts into tears and can’t stop bawling. She starts screaming, “This is scary! Stop it!” Eleanor starts crying too, although she doesn’t quite understand the plot.

It took several minutes to calm Miranda down and she was able to explain to me that the bad man was scary. In a stupid attempt to try to teach her something, I said that the bad man was a stranger and that Madeline shouldn’t have gone with him. And that if a stranger tried to talk to her she should run away. Then, Miranda started crying again saying, “But I can’t run very fast!!” Sigh. Next time, I’ll read the synopsis.

Tonight a few minutes after the girls went to bed, I heard some crying. When I went in, Eleanor and Miranda were both sitting on their beds. Eleanor was crying. I sat down next to her and asked what was wrong. She said her tongue hurts. I asked her if she bit her tongue. She said she bit her tongue. I asked her why she bit her tongue. She said because it hurt.

The kids don’t always understand how to use “why” and “because”, so I tried a different approach. I asked what happened just before she bit her tongue. Eleanor got stuck.

“I just… I just… I just…”

Then she trailed off. I told her she could get a drink of water, which would help her tongue feel better.

While Eleanor was getting her water, Miranda walked over to Eleanor’s bed and claimed her stuffed animal which had somehow made it over there. I asked her why her stuffed animal was in Eleanor’s bed. She said it’s because Eleanor said she could sleep there.

I don’t think I’ll ever know what happened, but I wonder if we’re starting to see the beginning of the kids wanting to sleep in the same beds.

We posted the April 2009 photos.

This Spring and early Summer has included quite a bit of gardening (by my standard, at least). We planted tomatoes and some flowers, we helped with the school beautification project, and our peach tree has started to bear fruit. Eleanor has been the one more interested in gardening. Each evening, I ask if she wants to water the tomatoes and she jumps up to get her sandals so she can come with me. We water the tomatoes, trim any dead leaves, trim the rose bushes, and sometimes we bring in a rose to put on our counter. Miranda accompanies us as well, but she tends to get bored pretty quickly.

I’m sure I’ve written about this in the past, but Miranda listens very closely to all of the conversation around her. Quite some time ago, Agnes was talking to her mom about how we were going to Disneyland, and though it looked like Miranda and Eleanor were busy playing, Miranda’s head whipped around and she said “What?? Disneyland?” She also figured out that when I say “Ben & Jerry’s” that we’re talking about ice cream, and I’m pretty sure she understands some of our code for how we refer to the kids when we talk about them.

The kids’ naps have continued to disappear. For a while, we were putting Eleanor in the guest room to separate her from Miranda, but now that leaves Miranda in their bedroom where all the books are. Miranda ends up staying up to read for the entire duration that Eleanor naps. Yesterday, I put Miranda in the guest room instead, but took pity on her when she was just sitting on the floor staring up at the window. I brought her downstairs and she read for a while. Eleanor will sometimes nap–it’s hit or miss.

The other strange development with Miranda is that she’s been avoiding making decisions for herself. She’ll say “what do I do?” or “which one do I like?”, and we have to pick for her. We’re not quite sure what to make of it, and I am hoping that this behavior fades away. I’ve seen at least one case where she said something similar, but she was actually testing us to see if we knew her preference, but I don’t think that’s the case most of the time. We’ll have to see what happens with this.

Eleanor and Miranda have taken to marching around the house. They say “Hunt, Two, Three, Four”, and instead of marching, Miranda calls it “hunting”. After their bath, we drape towels over both Eleanor and Miranda, and Eleanor drops down to a crawl and starts bleating like a lamb. She says, “Baa. I lost Mary.” It’s cute, but soon enough we have to insist that she has to actually get dressed.

Reading is still progressing well for both Miranda and Eleanor. I think we have to continue with the phonics work with Eleanor, but all of the reading that Miranda is doing is really helping. They recently decided that an exclamation point meant that you have to scream the last word in the sentence. They’ll say, “I will not eat them here or there. I do not like them ANYWHERE!” Our bedtime reading has become punctuated by a lot of screaming.

Eleanor has started to be more interested in kissing. When someone gets hurt, she’ll ask if she can kiss it. At night, she also asks if she can give five kisses. They’re very tiny kisses.

Hopefully the May pictures will be up before too long, but there are a lot of pictures to sort through for the month.

From Twitter: Taco night was a success with the kids. They like making their own, though it ends up being just taco meat and cheese in a shell.

From Twitter: Miranda said that the blue things (blueberries) in her waffle taste like chocolate. She usually gets chocolate waffles. I didn’t explain.

From Twitter: Eleanor woke at 5:30 this morning yelling “what’s happening to me??” over and over. I woke her and she said she needed to pee.