The sixteen month photos are up on the site. This month we flew to Atlanta for Thanksgiving with Suephy, Ed, Jared, and Dylan. Albert and Erin flew in from New York, and my parents also joined us. Ed’s parents joined us for Thanksgiving dinner itself. Albert ended up taking about 900 photos over the course of the week we were there, and we used a number of them in this month’s photos.
Eleanor decided to sprout molars this month. We wrote about her first molar on November 13, but since that time, Eleanor has cut a total of four molars. They still haven’t quite cut all the way through–you can see the inner and outer edges of the teeth, but the gum is still covering the middle. It looks painful, and sometimes Eleanor is okay eating things she needs to chew, but other days she still like pureed stuff. This brings Eleanor to a total of ten teeth. She still has only two bottom front teeth.
Miranda’s teeth remain the same as last month–four on top, three on the bottom. A lack of molars still hasn’t slowed down her ability to eat various foods. Recently, we started giving the girls dried apricots. They take a long time to eat in the car, and they’re not messy. There’s a chance that they can be a choking hazard, but both our girls seem to know how to take reasonable-sized bites from the apricot.
The girls are not walking yet. There was a day this month where Eleanor seemed willing to stand on her own and inch forward by shifting her weight back and forth, but she hasn’t repeated that attempt since then. Both Miranda and Eleanor stand quite easily, and they’ll walk fine if they can hold something, but the moment they need to let go, they’ll go back to crawling. When we pick them up from daycare, we’ll often find them sliding along the walls.
The girls’ vocabulary grew quite a bit this month. Eleanor has continued with her “ba va” for flower, “ba” for ball, and “bvv” for balloon. She also has added “tuh tuh” for turtle, “woo woo” for dog (sounds like woofing), “eeow” for cat, “raarr” for lion, “sssh” for fish, “aa aaa aah” for duck (sounds like quacking), “moo” for cow, “ee ee” for car (sounds like beeping–we say “beep beep” for car), “daah” for star, and “chssh” for cheese. As you can tell, no one but her parents would understand most of what she says. She does clearly say “hi”, “bye” and “daddy”, though. In sign language, Eleanor knows “help me”, “more/food” (she uses the same sign), and “done”. Miranda has a similar vocabulary, but with slightly different sounds for each word. For instance, her word for flower sounds closer to the actual word. It’s “fowa”. They both can point out different body parts–head, hair, eyes, ears, mouth, nose, hands, feet, teeth. Eleanor sometimes gets confused about where “mouth” is though. Miranda doesn’t say “hi” and “bye” quite as clearly as Eleanor, but she does have one very useful piece of sign language. She’ll pat her diaper when it needs changing.
Miranda has continued to improve with the shape sorter. She can relatively quickly identify a shape and put it in the right hole now. It still takes her a little bit to orient it, but it’s clear she’s identifying the right hole before she puts the shape in. Eleanor still continues with a trial-and-error approach.
We noticed one pretty cool thing about Eleanor this month. There is a test called “Mirror Self-Recognition” that checks if one can recognize that the image in a mirror is a reflection of oneself. In general, this ability is only demonstrated in humans and great apes (and maybe elephants). The standard test is to place a mark on the person and show her the mark in the mirror. If she points at the mark on herself, then she proves that she realizes that the mirror is showing her, rather than someone or something else. This month, I was giving Eleanor a bath and used a towel with a hood to dry her off. The hood has a picture of a duck. When Eleanor saw her reflection in the mirror, she pointed to her own head and said “aa aaa aah” (her sound for duck). I don’t think this test has any correlation with anything else in life, but we still thought it was pretty cool.
We’ll have more pictures in another month.