The photos for May 2009 are up. It was a busy month for us with a wedding in Houston, and with Albert and Erin visiting on their way back from Hawaii.
In May, we introduced the kids to playing cards. They have a rudimentary ability to play Go Fish, Crazy 8s, and War. Miranda seems to grasp the rules of the game better than Eleanor, but they both have trouble fanning the cards. Out of the three games, War is the easiest to understand for them.
At school, they also learned to play Tic Tac Toe. We’ll play with the kids sometimes. Agnes noted that Eleanor can recognize when she’s won, but she cannot block, and she cannot see where she should go to win. Miranda cannot block, but she’ll see where she should go to win.
I’m still struck by the strange language constructs that the kids come up with. I’m starting to think that I should gently correct them when they use a weird one. Miranda has long used “look-it” instead of “look at this” or “look at it”. When I told her it wasn’t right, she tried “look-it, please” and a few other variations.
Eleanor will say, “but how do we?” She uses this after she says that she wants to do something that she doesn’t know how to do. It’s like, “Let’s go up there. But how do we?”
More recently, Miranda has developed a strange way of saying her A’s. It mostly comes out when she’s reading, but instead of “daddy”, it comes out “dyaddy”. Some people we know from Chicago stretch out their A’s like that, but we have no idea why it’s cropping up in Miranda’s speech. I have not been correcting it yet.
The kids went through a period of time when they were afraid of spiders. My mom showed them how they could get a tissue and squish them, which they were willing to do for a while, but then became scared again. After telling them that spiders are our friends for a while, they’ve finally gotten used to them again. Now, they blow on the spiders to see the scurry around.
Finally, the month of May was a month where we went to a number of beaches. We checked out Huntington Beach and Seal Beach, both of which are pretty close to where we live. We made a trip to Redondo, and while we like it because we’re familiar with it, it’s a little far from home now.