Back in January when the girls were five months old, Miranda had just learned to roll over. Eleanor had learned a couple weeks earlier. We took a couple of videos of them rolling over, but we never got around to posting them. While going through some older photos and videos, I came across this one of the girls doing some synchronized rolling.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (944 KB).]

Eleanor is a little late with finishing her turn, but it’s also harder for her to tell what Miranda is doing during her roll.

About a week ago, Miranda was playing with our foot stool and Eleanor came over as well. Miranda tends to scratch her nails along the top of the stool. Eleanor likes to beat it with both her hands. As it turns out, Eleanor found that Miranda was in her way, and quite deliberately grabbed Miranda’s arm and moved her out of the way. Miranda lost her balance and got upset. I was a bit shocked–I have no expectation that Eleanor knows anything about sharing, but I also didn’t expect her to consider Miranda and obstacle and attempt to move her away.

Confronted with this situation, I didn’t know what to do. At this age, I have no meaningful way to communicate anything to Eleanor. In fact, she was beaming at me. I tried moving her away from the foot stool for a bit, but she came right back and moved Miranda away again. I tried moving her arm off of the foot stool every time she did it to Miranda, but while Eleanor knew she was getting upset, I had no confidence that she understood the Golden Rule. I ended up taking a video of the interaction to ask Agnes about it later, and then I moved Eleanor to the other end of the room where I gave her a different set of toys.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (2.79 MB).]

When I showed it to Agnes, she didn’t have any other suggestions for what we should do. We decided that distracting Eleanor with something else was probably the best course of action at this age. Anyone have other suggestions?

I was talking to Anna the other day about a video that they posted of Kali crawling, and I realized that we never did capture a video of our girls crawling. They started crawling some time last month and while they aren’t zooming around everywhere, their coordination has been improving. Yesterday, I took the opportunity to set down both Miranda and Eleanor at one end of the room, and moved to the other end. The idea was to see who could get to me faster.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (892 KB).]

Unfortunately, Miranda couldn’t be bothered to race Eleanor. She was more interested in something she noticed on the floor.

Until recently, we’ve had a Symphony in Motion mobile above each of the girls’ cribs. We bought one and Sophia let us borrow the other. They’re nice–they play three different pieces of music and the dangling animals twirl around.

A couple weekends ago, I heard some noise coming from the nursery. I peeked in and saw that Miranda had reached up and grabbed her mobile and was yanking it over and over. She hadn’t quite brought it down onto her head, but it was pretty close. When I walked in, she stopped her yanking and turned to look at me. She just had a matter-of-fact sort of expression on her face. She wasn’t trying to play innocent or anything.

I straightened the mobile and a little later we took it away. The base of the mobile that plays music is still there, but no swirling animals for Miranda. The mobile itself seems to be undamanged, which is good because it’s the one we’re borrowing. Eventually we’ll need to lower her crib mattress, but for now she seems okay without the mobile dangling above her. She has a rattle that is shaped like a duck in her crib, and when we put her to bed she grabs it and turns over to smother it.

We have a video clip of Miranda throttling her mobile. It’s available in a few different formats. The quality of the video isn’t significantly different from one format to another–just the file size and the video format.

In the earlier blog entry A Look of Concentration, we described a distinctive yelp that Eleanor and Miranda make by drawing in their breath. They only make this sound after pooping. We have a video of Eleanor making this sound.

Please choose the format that works best for you or let me know if you would prefer a different format. The quality of the video isn’t significantly different from one format to another — just the file size and the video format.