From Twitter: After reading “A Cow, a Bee, a Cookie, and Me” (http://tinyurl.com/lafbn4), Agnes baked honey cookies with the kids this morning.

From Twitter: We got a new camera to replace the one the kids dropped. The Canon sd780 is thinner than our old sd1100. We haven’t taken pictures yet.

Wow these pictures are late. I’m even late for the April pictures and in two or three days, the May pictures will be coming up. Anyway, the March 2009 photos are up.

Aside from the occasional tweet that hits this site’s homepage, we also haven’t written a whole lot on what the kids have been doing.

The big news from the last time we had a monthly update is that Miranda has made great strides in learning how to read. It started with basic phonics (what sound does each letter make? what sound do combinations of letters make), to games where we think of words that all start with the same letter or combinations of letters, and then suddenly Miranda was sounding out words. She can generally read most of the words in Dr. Seuss, and the Berenstain Bears.

For a while, Eleanor was lagging behind. She would get so frustrated when we would be thinking of words that start with a particular letter. And when we would read, she would see the first letter of a word and make a guess at what it was. “Are” became “and”. “Now” became “not”. She wasn’t understanding that combinations of letters represented the sounds that made up the words. For a while, she was faking reading by reciting whole books that she had memorized, but more recently, she’s been starting to read. She is still less proficient than Miranda, and Miranda shows a greater interest in reading, but you can see Eleanor sounding out words and making reasonable guesses at words based on more than just the first letter. A teacher at their school said that she has never seen any kids so engrossed in Dr. Seuss.

Eleanor’s eating has generally improved a lot. She knows that she needs to eat “soft vegetables”, which is how Agnes’ mom originally described the soft green leaves of the different vegetables we cook. She also knows that she needs to eat ten bites of her food (which usually is equivalent to everything that we’ve served her) before she’s done for dinner. If she doesn’t finish her ten bites, then she can’t watch TV or play games on the computer in the evening. The funny thing is that as a matter of being in control, she insists on negotiating the number of bites to nine or eleven or sometimes twenty.

The girls are very particular about getting their fair shake. If we’re doing things with them, like allowing them to stir things on the stove, or help with making pancakes, or singing a song to them at night, they absolutely know who’s turn it is. If we get out of turn, they’ll complain, “It’s supposed to be Eleanor, Miranda, Eleanor, Miranda and you went Miranda, Miranda, Miranda (or Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor)”. It’s more wordy than saying that it’s their turn, but it conveys the point.

Miranda has picked up saying “fine” when she’s resigned to something. She doesn’t always use it entirely correctly, but you’ll hear her say “oh, fine”. She also has been prone to rants when she’s upset, rather than tantrums. She’ll think of all of the bad things she knows how to say. For instance, she’ll say, “I don’t like you. You doesn’t smell good. You’re bad. You’re bad, and I’m good. Mommy’s bad and Daddy’s bad, and only Eleanor and Miranda are good. You’re poo poo.” It’s hard not to laugh at her.

I don’t know where it came from, but Eleanor likes tying a jacket around her waist. She likes it tied so that the knot is in the back so that it looks like she’s wearing an apron. She’s figured out how to tie it herself. I haven’t seen her do it, but I don’t help her with it in the morning and she has it tied on.

Now that it’s staying light later, and it’s warm still in the evenings, we’ve been spending some time outside after school. Most often, the kids help me water our tomato plants and some flowers. They also like pointing out the mushrooms and cat poop in our yard. Sometimes, Agnes or her mother will have them try to hit a ball with a bat. They connect in maybe one in three or four tries, and when they have a hit, they know they’re supposed to drop the bat and run in a loop around the yard. We don’t have bases set up though.

Again, hopefully it won’t be so long before the next set of photos, but I think I say that pretty much every time.

From Twitter: We were pulling the kids in a wagon and hit a bump. Miranda fell out and hit her head. After a little crying, she seemed okay.

From Twitter: Miranda colored a nice checkered pattern. When Eleanor saw it, she said Miranda forgot some spots and colored in the white squares.

The kids were looking at a picture of Agnes when she was pregnant. Agnes told them that they were in her tummy–that that is where babies come from. They both thought it over for a bit. Then, Eleanor laughed and said, “That’s silly!” Miranda thought about it more, and decided it was correct because she saw a pregnant woman in Kiki’s Delivery Service.

From Twitter: The girls were taking pictures at a family get-together and dropped the camera. It broke.

From Twitter: We read the Sunday LA Times today. Miranda found a few of the comic strips funny.

From Twitter: Miranda just walked straight into the edge of an open door.

From Twitter: Miranda about her lunch: I spilled my juice on the pizza and it tasted yucky so I put it back in the box and put it in the lunch bag.