Daley Ponderings

Faith has started calling Jonathan, "Ohnny-int"  This is related to how she says medicine ("meddy-int") and other words that end in /n/.

She also says her own name, which sounds unfortunately rather like "Hate" but the /t/ is a bit softer, maybe halfway between that and "Hathe".

3/30 - In the morning, I woke to the sound of the floorboards squeaking in my bedroom.  I opened my eyes and there was Jonathan with a tray of toast and juice!  What a sweetheart. (More)

3/11 - Faith can count to six.

3/12 - Faith counted to ten.  She isn't consistent with this.  She'll get stuck after six, but if someone says seven, she can do the rest on her own.  I don't think she has quantity recognition past five, though.  And she sometimes likes to start counting with nine.

3/21 - We've been listening to CDs and tapes a lot on my old stereo.  Noah comments, "Mom, tapes are really cool.  But CDs you can skip to the next one.  But tapes you can stop it and then it starts right where you were."

Jonathan has been reading Greek myths and has made himself a Zeus costume, complete with eagle-topped staff and thunderbolts.  Then he discovered an old tape of mine with Holst's The Planets on it.  He was very excited to recognize the personalities of the gods in their respective movements.  He and Noah were marching around with invisible guns to Mars before I even told them what it was.  Holst sure did a good job!  It is fun for me to see me kids enjoying a piece of music that I enjoyed so much (well, I still do!)

Joy has been smiling a lot this week, mostly for her siblings.  I think her hair is growing.  It never fell out as her siblings' birth hair did.  Maybe her hair will start out brown?

Noah is learning simple addition and beginning to read.  He is enthusiastic about this learning and schooltime is fun with him.  It's so neat to watch them figure out things!  School with Jonathan has not been as much fun, but I think we need to find something that challenges him more.

I bought 6 Seagate hard drives from Amazon and Newegg, and both companies sent me drives that already had half their warranty expired.

Amazon, after waiting for the customer support guy to handle 5 simultaneous chat sessions, and so was quite slow at responding, did send out a mailing label with no restocking fee.

Newegg took a half hour on hold before they answered, and initially said that there is a 3 year warranty.  I pointed out that there was only two years left on the warranty, so even if it were true that Seagate only offered a three warranty (which they don't - they have 5 year warranties on their drives currently), this drive is still partially expired.  She then said that she could not accept a return because, "Unfortunately, we are unable to make the changes since the warranty was provided by the manufacture directly."  I asked if she was authorized to refuse a warranty claim and she said she would be sending an RMA form shortly.  She did, after request, provide a return shipping label and removed the restocking fee.

While on hold with the online chat folks, I called Seagate on the phone, and after waiting maybe 5 minutes on hold, got an English speaking person who offered to send out an email where I can take a picture of my invoice, with the appropriate serial numbers, and said that "usually, not always" they would update the warranty date.

She said that often vendors keep the items on the shelf and sell them with expired warranties.  So - now I know to always check the warranty right when I get it.

It's irritating that companies sell old devices without mentioning that on their product specifications page.

2/11 - Faith, looking at cousin Cole's cute pictures. "Me wikey 'at wittle Tole, Tole, Tole."

2/24 - Milk started coming in Thursday evening.  Joy is a good nurser.

2/26 - Joy's cord fell off.  Noah called it the "umbilicord" when talking with Faith about it. Faith is very excited about the bellybutton.

2/27 - Faith, talking about Joy's hiccups, "Baby 'Oy had hip-up twenty-teen long time."

Things are going well.  Everybody has adjustments to make.  Faith loves her new little sister and likes to hold her a lot.  She is having a bit of a hard time with the reduced Mommy time.  She gets weepy about things that weren't such a big deal before.  Noah is more of a silent sufferer, but I can sense he is also adjusting. Jonathan seems to be doing great and he is very helpful.  He loves to check in on Joy throughout the day.

Jon and Mom are wonderful about doing lots of work and letting me rest.

I'd been having these strange contractions for a few days. Not the simple Brackston-Hicks that I have throughout pregnancy that feel tight but do not hurt. Not crampy labor contractions, either. They were very tight and they hurt. They came usually when I was sitting – on the couch or in the dining room – and relief came rather quickly if I stood up. This baby didn't want me sitting down! I talked to my friend Mary on Sunday (2/20) who had had similar ones with her son – for 26 days! I figured I could deal with it for another week and a half or so.

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Heather will surely write a more detailed post for those wanting those details, but for now, a shorter post will have to do.

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Here is our Christmas letter - if you are reading this blog, you probably know most of it anyway, but I figure there are some people that we didn't mail this too, and who don't read every word of these posts...  :)

2010_christmas_newsletter.pdf

1/20 - Jonathan, as usual, singing while he plays and works.  This time it was, "Come, Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadil.  Come, Tom Bombadil..."

1/22 - When boys have a tea party:  Noah, Faith and I were playing with Faith's tea set.  Noah said he couldn't eat his soup because the bad guys had poisoned it.  It was such a deadly poison we couldn't even touch it and I had him call 911 to send a squad out to take it away.  I never remember anything like this happening at other tea parties... (More)

12/23 - Noah: "Tomorrow's tomorrow is Christmas!"

Both Jonathan and Noah were sick in the car on the way to New Hampshire.  Blessedly, they both managed to get everything in the bowls and nothing on anyplace else in the car.  By the time we arrived, they were fine and the rest of the visit was sick-free.

12/27 - Jonathan and Mommy were discussing dollar amounts of Christmas presents and what was even thinkable to ask about.  I had said that a $200 set was out of the question.  He then said, "[A particular lego set] is in the question."

12/30 - We went to the Boston Children's Museum with Grammy and I was with Faith at the bubbles section.  She played a long time there and I got to observe other kids as well.  This note is a quote from a young girl next to us, with obvious glee in her voice, "Science is messy!" (More)

Heather asked me to give her the monthly time logs for invoices today, so I took the opportunity to run my brand new script that shows how I've spent my time over the entire year.

I averaged:

13.7 hours a week on directly billable work

7.6 hours a week on maintaining the company, phone systems, servers and any time spent at our rental house

1.1 hours a week on LifeType

8.1 hours a week checking facebook and blogs and also email (lots of which is work related, but I don't differentiate between work and personal email, and I don't get paid for anyway)

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We bought a "new" minivan last year, and it had the lowest mileage, and highest cost of any car we've owned so far.  It is a 1997 Oldsmobile Silhouette, and it had 107,000 miles on it.  We did a lot of driving (I hit 135,000 today, after a year and a half).  Heather and I both take one trip to Pittsburgh each week, and we took a lot of vacation trips this year.

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Since we're now into the second year of using the woodstove, I thought I would post an update about it.

I bought five cords of wood this year, (we bought around four and a half last year, and used around three).  I got around one cord of black locust each year, and that wood is really nice for long burn times.  I think we've spent somewhere around $1300 on wood, and I expect (hoping at least, we've been using almost no gas heat so far, so we've been burning more wood than I originally estimated) that this wood will last into next year.

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If Heather hasn't been writing recently, that means I'm not writing at all...

First, the basement - after all of the ongoing water problems, and finding out this year that only fixing the gutters was not going to fix the entire problem, and if one is going to get water a couple times a year, you still can't use the basement very easily, and so fixing it is worth looking into.

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I haven't been writing things down much recently, but here are a few.

12/14 - Faith likes to "write" and rarely draws, but she asked me to make a guy for her, which I did.  When she asked for more and more I reverted to a quick stick figure.  Then she started drawing her own guys!  A head with two toes sticking out.  Her first time drawing people!  They are very cute people, and I have her assurance that they are toes and not legs.

12/15 - We watched an Alfred Hitchcock movie.  They are hit or miss and this one was a miss.  Faith got restless before it ended and said, "Me no wikey moonie."  Jonathan and Noah knew to keep still until the end but both were disappointed.  Hoping at least for some comic relief to redeem the time, Noah asked, "Daddy, can we please watch the outtakes?"  Jon just had to laugh out loud at that one.  They didn't do outtakes in the thirties...

12/22 - This morning Jon did some shopping after his meeting and as we were putting away the groceries, Jonathan asked, "Mom, are perogies panterable?"  What?  "Are perogies panter-able?"  He meant "able to be put in the pantry" as opposed to the freezer.

12/16 - Headed up in the snow for another midwife appointment.  I gained more weight this time, but Thanksgiving was in between visits...  My iron was low again, despite diligently eating that horrible molasses, but she was suspicious that her hemoglobin tester is off calibration.  All other stats are on track.  The one concern was that the baby was head up, which I had suspected for about a week before.  Since this one and Isaac were the only ones to be head up at this stage, I was tempted to worry and imagine scenarios.  But I kept repeating to myself, "Do not be anxious about anything but in everything by prayer and petition make your requests known unto God and the peace of God that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus."

C gave us some ideas for turning that I had not heard before.  The one we tried a few days later was placing an ice pack up on top of where his head is and a nice warm compress down low where it should be.  Our baby definitely moved a lot in response to the ice but did not seem to turn all the way, we think he liked his feet warm.  Then yesterday we prepared to try it again and as I was feeling around, it seemed that he had turned!  This morning, I definitely felt little feet kicking on top.  Praise God!  Those who pray for us, we would appreciate if you continue to pray that this little guy stays head down.