Mae at two years

Mae invented a game we call "My say 'no'". Months ago when she was saying 'no' a lot, I started saying 'yes' back to her and we'd volley for a few rounds. Then one morning when the girls woke up, we heard Adi saying "no!" and then Mae started saying "yes!" in response. A little while later at the breakfast table, Mae instructed Adi: "My say yes, Adi say no." To which Adi promptly responded "Yes!" and Mae said "No" and they were off. Now they play it a lot, telling each other or one of us what to say.

Her language skills have really taken off. She speaks in sentences now and it's so amusing to hear what she's thinking. She is quite concerned with propriety, one time telling me to "watch out" and "move" when someone was walking past (I really wasn't in the way!). One morning Dave casually asked if I'd seen his coffee cup and Mae said "Right there, Daddy" and pointed to it on the bookcase. Once when we were playing with her tea set, I was handing out the saucers and couldn't remember the word for them- she jumped right in with it.


As most kids this age seem to be, she's concerned about her 'owies' and will point to them: "Owie on my knee. Sidewalk. Owie on my other knee. Healing."

She seems to know almost the entire ABC song. Our favorite part is her pronunciation of the last line: "Nes-time won-cha sing-wih ME!!!" She can sing a lot of the 'Itsy Bitsy Spider' although she loops around to previous parts from some key words. I also realized that, when she picks up the plastic maracas, she sings "Hurrah! Hurrah" (The only marching song I can come up with is 'The ants go marching one by one...').











She's been climbing a lot and amazes me with what she can get on to at the playground (read: gives me heart attacks). So far she's staying in her crib, except at playtime when she's climbed over the end to play with Adi three times. On the neighbor's trampoline, she learned to do somersaults (front rolls) and can now do them on the floor or outside on the grass. They are a great skill for her to show off to friends or strangers; she really enjoys the attention. She's not very careful about what she's going to run into, though! Mae continues to be quite tough-- she'll cry if she really gets hurt but even then is quick to move on from her injury.



Even though she likes testing herself physically, she isn't obsessed with doing things herself. She wants our help getting her shoes off, pulling up her pants, etc. And on the playground, if I'm 'spotting' her as she climbs high, she'll often want me to help her down. I try to make her do it herself but she knows that I'll catch her if she lets go. One exception to this is that she wants to turn on the water whenever she washes her hands and gets quite upset when we do it for her.

One of the funniest verbal exchanges we had was a month or so before her birthday. Someone asked her how old she was and she said "twenty-eight." We were amazed, having never heard her say a number larger than ten. Finally someone figured out that she'd picked up on the *date* of her birthday. Now, when asked her age, she tends to say "September".


Mae is mostly agreeable-- our favorite phrase of her is a simple "okay." When she gets upset, she winds up to it with escalating "no. No. No! NO!" and flails around physically as if expressing her emotions with her body. She went through a few weeks where she was hitting or pushing Adi, often unprovoked, before running away, but she hasn't been doing that as much lately. When we tell her to go to her room or sit on the time-out chair in the living room, she'll stay until we come to get her and usually apologizes to Adi with minimal prompting. She seems to realize that it is easy to get a rise out of Adi and, although she's often affectionate with her, it does seem to amuse her to push Adi's buttons.



Her tastes in food have become pickier. I think she still eats more than a lot of kids, but she's started to say 'no thank you' to things and has occasionally asked for a specific food that wasn't served. Her absolute favorites are cake & ice cream-- about 50% of her play seems to revolve around pretending things are cake, and for her birthday all she said she wanted was an "ice cream cone" (which she got-- and purple to boot!) She likes all fruits, grains and most dairy products. When I asked her what her favorite food was she said "breakfast" (pronounced breck-sis) which is pretty much true: fruit, cereal and yogurt. But so far she's often amenable to the 'take one more bite of your [usually vegetables] and you'll get some more [usually fruit]' cajoling. She will also eat as much tofu as you put in front of her and likes noodles, beans, eggs and even some spicy food so I really can't complain.

One of the most endearing developments is that Mae has started to spontaneously thank us for cooking. The first was "Thank you Daddy making pancakes" (another favorite food) but often when you give her something now she'll say "thank you." I can't explain why it is so nice to hear that! She is also very good at sharing. She does take toys away and doesn't want to give them back but when I set the timer to beep at the end of someone's turn, she spontaneously gives the toy away without complaining.

This is just one of the ways that she is very resilient and easy-going for a toddler. She generally doesn't let things upset her and I feel like I could learn a lot about being happy with what I have instead of focusing on what I don't have.



Another one of her skills seems to be a good sense of direction. If I take a route different from the usual to the playground, she reminds me where to go. One day, I stopped at a few intersections on the way home and asked the girls which way was home; she knew right away at every one. When we leave our house, we usually go the same way to one major intersection and there turn left or right, depending on our destination. Sometimes Mae is concerned that we're going the wrong way; I don't know if she's remembering from our last trip or where she wants to go (Grandma & Grandpa's house) or what. And she also points out the building I work in whenever we go to Boulder, from the spot where I first showed it to her.

The one thing that seems to bother her right now is unexplained motion. I let her ride the 'penny ponies' at the grocery store (still just a penny, isn't that great?) and as soon as it started moving, Mae started crying. The same thing with a mechanized jeep at the local children's museum. When we're going downhill and she's in the bike trailer, she'll ask me to go "not fast", and just this week she's started telling me to slow down when driving. I'm not going over the speed limit, but that explanation seems to be lost on her: "too fast, Mama. That's enough" [speed, presumably].

She seems to be getting the idea that pictures of things are just pictures, not the things themselves. Although we had one funny episode when Dave drew a tree with a swing on it, then she sat on the swing.


But it does seem that she understands now but just likes to play the game.

Bedtime is when we have the most trouble with Mae. Instead of going to sleep, she likes to have a drink of water, her nose wiped, or Annie (her lion doll) covered up with the blanket. Now that she is potty-trained, she has realized that she can get us to take her to the potty, too. Even though she wears pull-up diapers at night, we want to encourage her to use the potty and so we let her go. It isn't unusual for her to say she has to go and then be unable to (even during the day) so she might repeat this three times or so. As I write this, she is going to bed and sleeping well through the night, but it seems that she just has bad stages with it. Dave thinks she's afraid of the dark so maybe that contributes, too.

There are a few 'baby' things she really wants to hold on to. As an infant, she really liked her pacifier-- we finally took it away in the early months when she started waking up at night when it fell out of her mouth. I'm sure that she would be addicted to it now if we gave her the chance-- whenever she sees one she wants it and I finally threw away all the spares that I had stashed around the house when she was a baby. I've noticed that she'll be content in the bike trailer or on a walk if she has a part of her coat, or a strap of the seat belt, in her mouth and I assume this is part of the same phenomenon. She also loves high chairs, booster seats and other kids' sippy cups.

Now that she can run well, she runs everywhere she can. Tonight she ran the three feet to clean up toys, announcing "I run to clean up!" In the house, she will run around a short wall, saying "Go, Mae, go!" as we've coached her to cheer for one of us in bike or running races. She loves to do races, toeing a line and saying "ready, set, go!" One day I heard her doing this with another child in the rec center child care before I came in the door. I've noticed that she often gets other kids to play with her-- perhaps they gravitate toward her because she is agreeable with what they want to do, or her enthusiasm for most activities in infectious. She tends to hang on to groups of older kids, too, and certainly isn't intimidated (or even aware of) the age difference.

Adi at two years

We took a parent-tot gymnastics class at the rec center this summer and Adi loved the mini-trampoline. She would spend several minutes standing on it, trying to jump with both feet. Over the summer, we've had a lot of trampoline time thanks to our neighbors and friends and she really learned to jump there. Now she hops around the house, saying "Mommy, watch! Daddy, watch! Mae, watch!" She can hop, both feet off the floor, several times in a row and has a great time doing it. It is very portable entertainment! We call her our little 'jumping bean.'

While staying in a hotel room together, we learned that Adi talks in her sleep. The most common phrase seems to be, "No, Mine!" It seems that is the dynamic of their early-morning waking up: Adi talks in her sleep, waking Mae up and then Mae talks and Adi wakes up too.


Adi's is talking in 6+ word sentences and likes trying to tell Mae what to do. Several times I've been alerted to a misbehavior by Adi saying, "Mae, don't! No Mae, don't!" As Mae was climbing up the little slide at my parents house, Adi was trying to correct her: "Up stairs, Mae. Go up stairs." At lunch, she'll get upset, saying, "Use spoon, Mae." (It is pronounced 'ooze foon').

At the playground, she'll stand at the bottom of a slide and say, "I catch Mae!" She also likes to say "Adi turn!" before attempting to take a toy and "Adi do it too!" is a common sentence. She parrots just about anything we say-- even the other day when Dave and I were talking about it and he said that they repeat 'it exactly', she started repeating 'it exactly, it exactly, it exactly' as a case in point.

Her focus is strongly on Mae ("What Mae doing? Where Mae go to? Where Mae is? Me touch Mae? Me touch Mae's eye? Mae's eyes pretty.") and she often will lose interest in a toy once it is her turn because she wants to play with whatever Mae picked up instead. Her phrasing alternates between "I" and "me/my," the latter which sounds just like "Mae" so we are always asking if she means herself or Mae. Prepositions are being explored right now, with 'on' and 'in' being used a lot (not always correctly). She likes to imitate us helping Mae-- the other day, Adi washed Mae's face after a meal, and I've seen her trying to help Mae put her pants on.


She has become much more relaxed in strange places, still shy at the beginning but opening up in about half an hour to play with other kids, toys and even sometimes pet a dog. She is quite interested in animals, "Pet the doggie! Adi pet the doggie!" but occasionally can't overcome her fear until the dog leaves. Then she gets upset that she didn't get to pet the dog! Along those lines, we're definitely seeing the classic toddler indecision/regret when she has to choose between two things: she chooses one, then the other, then immediately cries that she wants the first thing again. It is so frustrating to deal with but also fascinating to see how hard it is for all of us to deal with the exclusive-ors in life.




With her advancing language, Adi is able to tell us when she is tired and wants to take a nap or go to sleep, which she'll readily do. It's no surprise, really- as an infant she had clear transitions between happy wake-time and fussiness which could only be solved by going to sleep. Her affinity for peek-a-boo hasn't decreased either; around a year ago, you could get her to stop crying most of the time by putting a blanket or box over her head and asking, "Where's Adi?" (This looked mean until you saw it work). She *still* loves peek-a-boo, whereas a lot of toddlers I know have grown out of it. She'll put her hands over her eyes and sit quietly for a rather long time until we notice, or she'll ask us "Where Adi go?". Then she flings her hands from her face and says "peek-a-boo!". (Repeat about 20 times).


We do a lot of counting around the house because I count down from 10 to warn them of a transition (e.g. "In ten seconds, you have to give the toy to Mae. 10... 9... ") When both girls started to repeat numbers backwards, we started counting upwards, too. But we rarely go past ten so we were surprised a few weeks ago when Adi counted all the way from one to eleven! She also knows some of the alphabet song (which she calls "a b c d next time won't you" and will prompt me to recite "humpy dumpy" or "hickory dock", neither of which I've been saying to her much. She's been singing tunes and just yesterday asked me to sing 'a b c d' and then sang some (unrelated) tones while I sang. It seemed like she really wanted to do a duet!

One of the biggest changes lately has been that Adi's allegiance switches between me and Dave. Starting as an infant, she was quite attached to me-- crying when I left the room or when she didn't get put to bed by me. Occasionally she'll revert to that but now she often wants Daddy to do everything. I'm pretty happy to say, "Okay, Daddy can lift you up/wash you off/carry you/play with you" or whatever the request and so far Dave is accommodating, too.


We're definitely seeing more obstinate behavior and a striving for independence. Sometimes I feel like I spend all day manipulating her into doing what I want her to do, in the following way:
Mom: Do you want me to do it for you or do you want to do it yourself?
Adi: No!
Mom: Okay, you want me to do it? [Make motion to do it]
Adi: No, myself
[Repeat for each tiny step of the process].
It is tedious but predictable and so far quite effective.

That said, there is a lot she can do herself. She's been able to put her shoes and even boots on and take them off since August. And this month she started getting her own socks on! (This might not seem that amazing if you don't have to put socks on kids, I myself find it challenging). She can pull her pants up by herself, climb into her high chair, climb into her car seat and buckle some simple buckles. We rarely attach the booster seat buckles but she often does it herself. One day I realized she was getting all the (simple) puzzle pieces into their holes, which had looked so difficult six months ago when we got the puzzles.

One more thing that I don't think I've mentioned yet-- we're pretty sure Adi is left-handed. She has used her left hand for eating utensils and often draws with it. They say this can change up to age three or so but it seems pretty well established to me.

Happy Birthday, Adi & Mae

Our beautiful girls are two years old today!

Ice cream with Katie

Our favorite nanny, Katie, went back to college at the end of summer. On her last day she took the girls for ice cream.







We're still hiring Katie a night or so a month, because the girls love her so much.

Potty Training

In August, we did a "one day potty training" method with Adi & Mae. It was so hard for me to think of anything else, and I found myself telling so many other parents about the process, that I ended up writing an article about it for my mom's group newsletter. So here it is, if you're interested:

Potty Training in Just One Day?
With 22-month old twins, we go through a lot of diapers: seventy a week from the cloth-diaper service plus about twenty disposable for nighttime and day trips. Soon after they were born, I read in a parenting book that 18 months was the earliest some children are ready to be toilet trained and this stuck in my head as a goal. Of course, when they reached that age, we didn’t seem to be anywhere near it. However, an extended visit from my sister’s family a few months ago—with her 2 ½ year old, potty-trained daughter—inspired an enthusiasm for the potty that I wanted to capitalize on. We would sit them on the potty seat on our big toilet but they rarely did anything. It seemed to me that they were prime candidates for the ‘One-day’ potty training methods: they were interested but needed practice to understand what their bodies were supposed to do. I wanted to try it before they got too resistant toward doing anything we suggest, a behavior that seems to be creeping in more and more each day.

So we checked out a few books from the library: “Toilet training in less than a day” by Nathin Azrin & Richard Foxx for my husband and I and a “Potty Book for Girls” for the girls. We waited until our summer travels were over and a weekend was free. And then we tried it—unsure if we would magically be free from diapers or ruin everything trying too early.

Saturday morning: We clear the toys from the living room, roll up the rug and stock a shelf with treats: cheerios, gold fish, chocolate bunnies, yellow pear tomatoes, boxes of apple juice, cans of orange soda, sippy cups of herbal tea. Two little potties sit against one wall; we bring out our Camelbacks and the doll-that-pees that the neighbor lent to us.




The girls change into their big-girl panties—of course Mae picks purple. The doll sits on the potty and doesn’t pee… they give her a bottle and then she does pee! We jump around and celebrate and offer her some juice as a reward but since she doesn’t drink it the girls get it. They rarely get juice and even more rarely from a box so they suck it right down. Repeat a few times before the doll has an accident and has to clean up the mess and practice going potty. The girls like the doll and playing with her. They find the Camelbacks and absorb more liquid. Herbal tea? Of course! Salty snacks? Of course! Are their panties dry? Yep—more treats. Now it’s time for Adi & Mae to sit on the potty, but nothing happens. We don’t make them stay the recommended ten minutes: three seems like an eternity.

We try to keep them in constant motion—feeding the doll, watching her pee, always checking that their panties are dry and getting treats. I’m not sure why this is part of the method but it seems like it should be hectic with activity.
In an instant, Adi is standing in a puddle. Uh oh. Wet panties, we don’t like wet panties. Clean up the mess, practice running to the potty, pulling down your panties, sitting down, standing up, pulling up your panties. We’re supposed to do this ten times but on about the third trial, she pees on the potty. Yay!! Potty party!!! We jump around and cheer and abort the practice rounds. Then Mae pees on her potty. Yay Mae! Such a big girl!! Let’s call Grandma and Grandpa! Here’s some soda and a potato chip for being such a big girl! A little parade of chubby babies carrying their pots to the toilet to flush away.

And then all the liquid starts coming out. I think they peed every three minutes for the next three hours. Some of it went in the potty. A lot of it went on the floor. Some on the couch and some on Daddy’s leg. Mae was having such a hard time getting the panties pulled up over her copious bottom that she started refusing to put them back and just ran around naked. Part of the method is that the child is supposed to do everything for themselves which seems impossible the first day of the training. Getting the panties up and down is very difficult and dumping the little potty into the toilet seemed impossibly dangerous. Not that the floor hadn’t already been hit with a lot of urine!





After Adi got ‘bit’ by the lid of the potty falling down on the peak of her bottom, she had about an hour of crying and refusing to sit on the potty. But at lunch time (a picnic of nachos on the living room floor) she jumped up and said “have to pee!” and made it to the potty. Sometime during the morning, Mae did it too. Then they both had accidents.

It was a relief to put on diapers for their nap. During the down time, Daddy slept while I went running to burn off the stress and figure out what to do for the rest of the afternoon. Finally free of the frantic, urine-spouting situation, I realized that the girls had both achieved the goal of the method: to decide for themselves to sit on the potty and produce urine on it. But was this “trained?” It certainly didn’t feel like it to me. We decided to lay off the liquids for the afternoon, bring down the pace and let the girls play naked in the kiddie pool, with the potty chair nearby for anyone who wanted to use it.

And Mae did. She woke up ready to conquer the potty-training world and, despite two more accidents in the afternoon, used the potty a lot. On Sunday she had three episodes of peeing a little bit, stopping it and making it to the potty to let the rest out. By Monday, she was really doing the entire process by herself, including a poop in the morning that I only knew about when she asked me to wipe her. She would often sit on the potty going but her only accident of the day was while riding in
the stroller.

Adi, on the other hand, didn’t pee in the potty all Saturday afternoon nor on Sunday. She had lots of accidents, including pooping in her pants and not even telling us about it, but wouldn’t produce anything in the potty itself. On Monday, with Daddy back to work, I sent Mae to the playground with Grandpa while Adi and I re-created the original training. Except this time I slowed down the pace and also made her sit on the potty for three minutes on, three minutes off, in hopes of getting more pee in the potty. And she did pee in the potty- about 8 times by the end of the day. Concentrating on just one child made it easier for me to see when she had to go (she really does cross her legs) and more attentive to making her go often enough to avoid accidents. But she still always answered ‘no’ when I asked if she need to pee so the only reason she wasn’t wetting her pants was that *I* was watching out for her. This is when they say the parent is potty-trained, not the child.

But by Wednesday, she was answer ‘yes’ when I asked if she had to go… and she finally pooped in the potty. Maybe not coincidentally, Mae had two poop accidents on Thursday. On Friday I offered lollipops for any pooping in the potty and they each earned one. By Saturday, we weren’t wearing plastic pants in the car anymore and on Sunday we went grocery shopping, to a picnic and then out for dinner—the girls both used the big toilets at each location (sometimes multiple times!) and no one had an accident. They aren’t spontaneously telling us that they need to go to the potty but when we ask, we trust them whether they say they need to go or not.






Of course, we expect accidents will continue for months to come. And I’ve still got my fingers crossed that one of them doesn’t get scared off of it somehow. But we’re cancelling the diaper service tomorrow, and I’ve started to tell people they’re potty trained. And I’ve started to recommend the method, with some caveats.

The major thing to be aware of is just how exhausting the method is. Maybe it is only one day of intensive training but it really was six or seven days before I felt a little more relaxed. When my husband went back to work on Monday I felt the same sort of panic that I did when the girls were newborns and I wasn’t sure how we’d survive the day on our own. Definitely clear your schedule for two days (although sympathetic house guests after the initial phase can provide a welcome distraction). Expect to stay close to the house and be prepared to take a potty outside if you go. I’m still carrying the potty seat and a square baking pan for roadside urgency. If you can get extra help for the following week—preferably babysitting other siblings or sitting in the house while you get some exercise or making dinner while you watch for signs of elimination—your sanity might fare better. And I would strongly recommend separating multiples for the initial training- they are learning so much that first day that they need to concentrate on themselves.

One thing that I hadn’t expected was how much I would bond with the girls during the experience. When Adi finally peed in her potty again on Monday, I was sitting on the floor in front of her and we pressed our noses together and giggled; I thought I was going to cry with joy that she had actually done it. And still, if I catch her eye when I hear the tinkle, she wrinkles her nose up and laughs, saying “I pee Momma!” I’m so proud of them for achieving what is truly their first accomplishment; watching Mae pull her pants down with ease and carry the pot carefully to dump, it’s just hard to believe she only learned it a week ago. And it’s hard to believe that these little people, still miniatures, are this one huge step closer to growing up.

Hair-dos

We're getting enough hair for pony tails

and (tiny) braids.

Recent quotes

Yesterday, Adi, while running along the sidewalk:
"My pants running, too!"

Today, Dave, while helping the girls feed the fish:
"Adi, your turn. Put out your hand... now give the food to the... No! Don't eat it!"

A week ago, Mae, when we said there was no more granola for breakfast:
"Buy more granola, Mama"