Miranda and Eleanor like it when we blow bubbles, but recently, they’ve been more interested in learning to do it themselves than having us blow the bubbles. They’re not very good at it, though. Eleanor brings the wand to her mouth, but hasn’t figured out there’s blowing involved. Miranda knows she’s supposed to blow, but doesn’t quite connect the concept with holding the wand close to her mouth.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.6MB).]

Miranda’s demonstrating how she blows bubbles. I think that soon after this she accidentally dumped the soap solution into her lap.

We go to the park regularly and the girls love to climb all over the playground–especially the slides. While we insist on accompanying them when they go down the tall slides, we let them go down the relatively short ones by themselves. We noticed that they go down the slides differently though.

Miranda sits very upright, and comes to a nice stop at the end of the slide.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.23MB).]

Eleanor goes down the slide on her back, and flies right off the end. Though we didn’t catch the very end of her ride in this video, Eleanor was fine.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (634KB).]

Miranda’s technique seems the safer of the two.

In the last week or two, the girls have discovered the joys of screaming. It’s like, “This is so much fun I must scream my head off!” In this case, the girls and I had just returned from Costco to find Agnes at home. I brought in some diapers and paper towels while the girls started to play with Agnes. They found that they could hide between the paper towels and our TV cabinet. Each time Agnes would say, “Where’s Eleanor?” or “Where’s Miranda?”, which was then followed by “There’s Eleanor!” and “There’s Miranda!” and much screaming.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.79MB).]

We did this over and over. The last time Agnes’ mom came over to take care of the girls, she said her ears were ringing when she left.

One of the very first books that we read to the girls had a hippo with a mouth that you could open and close. We made a sound effect for the mouth where we would go “Aaah” whenever the mouth was open. Recently, we were reading But Not the Hippopotamus, and Miranda started doing the same “Aaah” sound while pointing out each picture of a hippopotamus.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.75MB).]

We don’t know why the “Aaah”s become so insistent at the end, but they seem very important to Miranda.

Last month Agnes recorded this video of the girls at the piano.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (1.75MB).]

I like that Eleanor carefully arranges the book on the stand before starting to play, and then she checks it again partway through her performance.

Miranda loves the Dutch bunny, Miffy. My mom bought these great Miffy flash cards which are very thick and therefore indestructible. Miranda has no idea how to play “Memory” yet–otherwise known as “Concentration”, where you lay out all the cards face down and try to find the pairs–but she does like to flip over the cards to see what’s underneath.

With only three cards, this game is more a test of attention rather than memory.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (692KB).]

Last night, Eleanor was so thrilled to find that she knew how to draw circles with her crayons. She loves circles. She has a blue tool to sift through sand, which she calls her “blue circle”. She points out that the sand bucket is a circle; She points out the little circle design on the spoon that she uses.

Up until last night, Eleanor had been drawing zigzags with her crayons, but suddenly she started moving her arm in a circular motion and she had circles! She was so happy, she did a little dance every time she drew another circle.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (710KB).]

We think it helps that she’s been holding her crayons like a pencil for a while.

We’ve received comments that most of the videos of the girls talking features Eleanor. Eleanor and Miranda both talk a lot–they just talk differently. Eleanor likes to answer when we ask what something is, what color it is, what number or letter, etc. It’s a big exercise in naming things. In contrast, Miranda talks in much longer sequences. Much of it started out as babbling. We first noticed it as she spewed a steady stream of syllables while flipping through some books.

Recently, we realized that in many cases Miranda was speaking in Taiwanese, and we just failed to recognize it. For instance, she’ll sometimes point to something and say, in Taiwanese, “what’s this?” I feel bad that she’s probably been doing this for a while, and we’ve been answering her with blank stares. It’s not that we don’t understand Taiwanese–we just haven’t been listening for it in their speech.

Case in point: Miranda was carrying around a doll and a toy bottle with orange liquid the other day and pretending to feed it. I recorded a video of it, and it was only after watching it again that I realized what she was saying. Agnes starts by saying “Baby jah bottle.” Miranda responds with “Juice. Baby jah … juice.” (Jah is my best phonetic representation of the word that means “eat” in Taiwanese.) She was saying that she was feeding the baby juice. It’s a little hard to understand, but she was definitely putting together a whole sentence.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (782KB).]

We assume that Miranda’s Taiwanese and Mandarin (e.g., she says “ant” in Mandarin) vocabulary comes mostly from Agnes’ mother. Since then, we’ve been listening a little more closely.

The girls have been starting to learn their colors. I think it started with Agnes’ mother drilling them with what to call different colors, but one day Eleanor was pointing at the different blocks she was using to build something and started naming their colors. She has also voiced a preference for a particular blue bib and a blue spoon. When we put it on her, Eleanor will say “blue bib” though it sounds more like “bwoo biiii”.

In this video, Agnes is showing Eleanor the different crayons and asking what color they are.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (682KB).]

You can hear Miranda also chime in with “yellow” just before Eleanor names the next color (green).

This video was taken about two weeks ago. In the video, I think most people wouldn’t understand what Eleanor is saying without Agnes repeating the color. Both Miranda and Eleanor pronounce their colors better now.

With each animal that we come across in the girls’ books, we teach them the animal’s name and the sound that it makes. So, for instance, we’ll say “Bee!” followed by “Bzz!”

Eleanor started pointing out every bee and saying “Bee!” followed by her bee sound. In a Winnie the Pooh book, there can be quite a few bees.

[If you can’t see the Flash player above, you can download the video in XviD format: XviD (702KB).]

Agnes must have been tired, which is why Eleanor is sitting on top of her, rather than on her lap.