Almost a week ago the girls turned nineteen months old. We posted some pictures from the past month.
Last month, I said that the girls were walking more and more. This month, they’ve switched to walking pretty much exclusively. Miranda’s faster than Eleanor, but she’s still not up to running yet.
Both girls have twelve teeth (four molars, four central incisors, four lateral incisors) each. We think that Eleanor’s starting to cut her lower canine teeth. Agnes has seen something, but I haven’t had a close enough look yet. Eleanor definitely is drooling a lot these days.
I had a small victory this month in finding something that Eleanor will eat pretty consistently. My mom makes some meatballs out of ground pork, napa cabbage, scallions, and ginger, and it turns out it is one of the few foods that Eleanor is likely to eat. My mom gave me the recipe earlier this month, and Eleanor liked the ones I made just fine. I’ll have to post the recipe when I get the chance. It’s pretty similar to how one makes the filling for dumplings.
Last month, Eleanor spent a lot of time trying to get Agnes to pay attention to her exclusively. She constantly tried to get Agnes to walk with her to a different room, and therefore away from Miranda. This month, Eleanor has been playing on her own a lot more, and instead it is Miranda who wants all of Agnes’ time. Miranda’s been sitting on Agnes’ lap every chance she can get. She’ll bring a book to Agnes and when Agnes takes it, Miranda turns around and starts backing up to sit on Agnes’ lap.
I think the biggest change we saw this month was a big increase in vocabulary. At school, the daycare teachers were surprised to find that Miranda knew the names of all of the kids in the class. She doesn’t say their names, but we can ask her “Where’s Sean?”, “Where’s Aaron?”, “Where’s Elizabeth?”. In every case, Miranda will wordlessly point to the correct child. Our kids’ list of animals that they recognize has grown as well. Miranda can almost say “koala” and “wombat”. Eleanor will say “octopus”, but it’ll sound like “ah-oh-uh” because she drops all of the consonant sounds. They’ll point out the moon and say “moon” whenever they see it, and they’ll do the same for clouds and birds.
We also found that the girls know quite a number of letters. Eleanor will correctly identify A, D, E, I, N, T, Y. I’m not sure why it’s those letters. There are all kinds of things you can spell with those letters: “identity”, “deity”, “tiny”, “attendant”. We haven’t been trying to spell anything though. This is just Eleanor calling out letters she sees in our foam tiles, or in alphabet books. Eleanor recognizes numbers as well: she knows 1, 2, 3, 5. I think the first three were drilled into her whenever we would count to three. Five is easy because we show her our hand and say “five!”. Somehow, four has been missing so far. We’ll have to remember “four”.
That’s it for now. We know we haven’t been writing much recently, but there are a number of blog entries we know we want to write.