The June 2009 photos are up. In June, the big event is that we went to Yosemite with Shane, Anna, Kali, and Sienna. It was the longest car ride we took with the kids, but they did great.
This month we started letting Eleanor and Miranda get their own water from the refrigerator. Eleanor figured out how to open the refrigerator first. We have a vertically split refrigerator and Eleanor puts her left hand on the freezer part and pulls the other door with her right hand. Miranda had more trouble with it, possibly because she’s left-handed, but she also learned to open the door. We have a tiny water pitcher, and the kids can get small plastic cups from one of the cupboards.
At school one day, the girls got their faces painted. They each came home with a butterfly on one cheek. Miranda looked at Eleanor and said that their butterflies were on the same side, but actually, they were mirror images of each other. I wonder when it’ll be that she’ll understand that distinction.
I’ve noticed that the kids have been trying to measure things. They don’t measure with any consistent unit, but instead they just start counting. To measure how long something is, they’ll run their finger along it and start counting, “one, two, three, four…” fairly quickly. One time, I asked Miranda how much water she wanted. She thought about it a bit, and said, “one?” I gave her just a little bit of water.
Eleanor likes printing things from the computer. We’ve set up a rule that they can print only one paper each day.
The other day, Miranda was sitting with her legs crossed. She informed Agnes that women sit like that. The funny thing was that she was completely naked from her bath as she was demonstrating this.
Eleanor and Miranda have both started to understand puzzles more. They can do a twenty-four piece jigsaw puzzle with pretty much no problem. Forty-eight is more of a challenge. We’ve helped them recently complete two puzzles each with one hundred pieces. They know how to gather pieces with similar colors and try to find where they are on the picture on the cover of the box. They don’t always rotate the pieces in ways that make sense though.
They’ve also been picking up how to do word searches. I’ve seen Eleanor even find a word that ran diagonally from the bottom right to the top left.
July pictures will hopefully be soon.