We posted the April 2009 photos.
This Spring and early Summer has included quite a bit of gardening (by my standard, at least). We planted tomatoes and some flowers, we helped with the school beautification project, and our peach tree has started to bear fruit. Eleanor has been the one more interested in gardening. Each evening, I ask if she wants to water the tomatoes and she jumps up to get her sandals so she can come with me. We water the tomatoes, trim any dead leaves, trim the rose bushes, and sometimes we bring in a rose to put on our counter. Miranda accompanies us as well, but she tends to get bored pretty quickly.
I’m sure I’ve written about this in the past, but Miranda listens very closely to all of the conversation around her. Quite some time ago, Agnes was talking to her mom about how we were going to Disneyland, and though it looked like Miranda and Eleanor were busy playing, Miranda’s head whipped around and she said “What?? Disneyland?” She also figured out that when I say “Ben & Jerry’s” that we’re talking about ice cream, and I’m pretty sure she understands some of our code for how we refer to the kids when we talk about them.
The kids’ naps have continued to disappear. For a while, we were putting Eleanor in the guest room to separate her from Miranda, but now that leaves Miranda in their bedroom where all the books are. Miranda ends up staying up to read for the entire duration that Eleanor naps. Yesterday, I put Miranda in the guest room instead, but took pity on her when she was just sitting on the floor staring up at the window. I brought her downstairs and she read for a while. Eleanor will sometimes nap–it’s hit or miss.
The other strange development with Miranda is that she’s been avoiding making decisions for herself. She’ll say “what do I do?” or “which one do I like?”, and we have to pick for her. We’re not quite sure what to make of it, and I am hoping that this behavior fades away. I’ve seen at least one case where she said something similar, but she was actually testing us to see if we knew her preference, but I don’t think that’s the case most of the time. We’ll have to see what happens with this.
Eleanor and Miranda have taken to marching around the house. They say “Hunt, Two, Three, Four”, and instead of marching, Miranda calls it “hunting”. After their bath, we drape towels over both Eleanor and Miranda, and Eleanor drops down to a crawl and starts bleating like a lamb. She says, “Baa. I lost Mary.” It’s cute, but soon enough we have to insist that she has to actually get dressed.
Reading is still progressing well for both Miranda and Eleanor. I think we have to continue with the phonics work with Eleanor, but all of the reading that Miranda is doing is really helping. They recently decided that an exclamation point meant that you have to scream the last word in the sentence. They’ll say, “I will not eat them here or there. I do not like them ANYWHERE!” Our bedtime reading has become punctuated by a lot of screaming.
Eleanor has started to be more interested in kissing. When someone gets hurt, she’ll ask if she can kiss it. At night, she also asks if she can give five kisses. They’re very tiny kisses.
Hopefully the May pictures will be up before too long, but there are a lot of pictures to sort through for the month.