We just posted the photos for month thirty-three.
The girls have been getting better at telling us what they want. When we don’t understand them, we ask them to say it another way and they often can find other words to describe what they mean. Sometimes it feels a little like the game Taboo. For instance, we were having dinner and Miranda said that she wanted the “other rice”. Agnes couldn’t figure out what she meant so she asked Miranda to say it a different way. Miranda indicated that it was round, and said that it had lettuce in it. From that, Agnes deduced that she was asking for the cucumber sushi rolls we’ve been giving her recently. With that mystery solved, Agnes was able to tell her that we could get cucumber rolls the next day.
One big change in the past month is a sudden fear of bugs. When they see one, they’ll both let out a high pitched scream. “Mommy! Get it! Get it!” They’ll stop only after Agnes kills the bug. They’ve done this only once while I’ve been around, but Agnes was closer, so she’s the one who killed the bug.
For the most part, they’re okay with larger animals like cats and dogs, but there’s this one very small black terrier in the neighborhood that seems to have really frightened them. It’s not on a leash, and one day it started walking up the pathway to our house as the girls returned from daycare. Now, a month later, they’ll still say a number of things about the experience.
“The black doggie’s scary.”
“Go away black doggie! It’s not your house! It’s Eleanor and Miranda’s house!”
“You can’t come inside!”
“It’s going to get you!”
I don’t think they’ve even seen the dog again since that first day, but they keep on talking about it.
Miranda’s gotten quite proficient with her tricycle, while Eleanor’s become more tentative. The kids had a day at daycare where they brought in their tricycles to ride around with everyone else and after that day, Miranda’s been zooming around on her tricycle. They ride around in circles in our backyard, and Miranda often catches up to Eleanor from behind. This freaks out Eleanor, who doesn’t like being tailgated.
Eleanor has been insisting that we answer her in unison when she gets her toothbrush at night. She’ll go into the bathroom to get her toothbrush, and then she’ll come out and address Agnes and me and say, “Say it together, okay?” Then, when we say okay, she prompts us with: “Is this Eleanor’s?” and if we don’t both say “Yes” together, she gets upset and makes us do it again. We’ve been humoring her.
We’ve been reading one book a lot this month. It’s called A House for Henrietta. It’s a hardcover book from 1958 with almost no pictures. There’s only a picture at the beginning of each chapter. It’s Eleanor’s favorite book and she likes us to read it to her every night. I have a hard time believing that she can understand it, but she sits very quietly while we read a few pages each night.
Hopefully it won’t be long before out next monthly update, considering how late this one came out.