I told the kids that I was going to run around the park four times while they were at the playground. Eleanor responded, saying that it was two miles. Later, I was telling Agnes about it and we were wondering how she knew how far it was. She said that I had told her that riding her bike around the park one time was a half mile. She said two times would be one mile, and four times would be two miles. It was quite surprising.

Miranda has been starting to compare herself to her peers, including her sister. This has led to her saying things like, “I’m only 5 and I know how to read.” Bernard and I have come down harshly on these statements, teaching her about modesty and humility. At one point, she seemed contrite, saying, “Yes, sometimes I do brag a lot.”

Last night, Bernard asked me a question, “Do you think we would be trying so hard to squelch her bragging if she were a boy?”

It was a good question. We both know people with sons where this kind of thing would be encouraged, or at the very least laughed off. I think we’re going to back off a little and see what happens. I would hate this to be the start of her “dumbing herself down” so that people like her.

We posted the photos for March 2010.

We posted the photos for February 2010. We’re slowly catching up.

We posted the photos for January 2010. Obviously, we’re way behind. I think we may stop with July 2010, just as the kids turn five.

As we were finishing dinner at Red Lobster tonight, Eleanor started talking about how she used to be as small as a dot, which she read about in When You Were in Mommy. Agnes said, “Both of you were as small as a dot when you were in me.”

Miranda asked, “How did we get in you?”

Agnes stared at Miranda for a moment, looked at me and said, “Daddy?”

Uh…

I told them that I put them in there, which isn’t a very good answer, but I hoped it would be enough.

Miranda persisted, “But how did we get in there?”

I told them that it was complicated and didn’t explain any further. We changed the topic.

It wasn’t a very good answer on our part. We have to think about this one.

We made a toy airplane out of locking blocks, and the kids were playing with it tonight. Miranda said, “I need to pee pee!” and had a pretend person go to the back of the plane to use the bathroom. I’ve never heard of kids pretending to use the lavatory as part of playing with airplanes.

Even though Miranda learned to read earlier than Eleanor, and she’s generally better at spelling, Eleanor is better at unscrambling words. These are the puzzles where the letters in a word have been mixed up and you need to decode what the original word is.

An example of a scrambled word I gave both of them is “KROF”. Eleanor instantly wrote down “fork”. Miranda got frustrated, and kept on saying, “Frok? Frok? What’s frok??”

They both remain interested in doing these kinds of games though. I like it because I think it encourages learning how to spell words. Both Miranda and Eleanor have been scrambling words for me to unscramble. It gets tricky when they have missing or wrong letters, but it’s usually easy enough to tell what they originally picked.

As is often the case in the evenings, Eleanor and Miranda started drawing the moment they got home from school. After working on their drawings for a bit, they showed us what they made.

Miranda drew this one.

She had asked me how to spell several of the words, but the phrasing is all hers: “I want to be a firefighter because so I could help people when they are on fire”.

Eleanor drew this picture.

Eleanor wrote: “I am a artist. I paint in a museum”. She also labeled (and misspelled) “paint brush” because she said that she didn’t want people to think it was a carrot.

Eleanor’s been talking about being an artist recently, though she has also said that she wants to be a scientist so she can go into outer space.

I don’t know where this fascination with firefighting came from with Miranda though. This was the first we had heard of it.

We posted the photos for December 2009. There’s just three more months of pictures to catch up on now.