Daley Ponderings

As I looked at the maps for the third day, we were going to be biking near various battlefields and other tourist-type places to visit, and so in the interest of resting a little, I decided we should drive for a ways and then maybe bike in the afternoon.  (More)

I've wanted to bike to DC for a while, but there never seemed like a good opportunity to do so.  Once we purchased the tandem bike, and started thinking about the possibility of biking all over the country, the Washington trip seemed like a good first step.

The trip did get shorter over time, and originally other people were going to come with us, but everyone backed out at the last minute.

I thought it would be best to start at the highest point of the trail, rather than biking all the way from Pittsburgh, in order to avoid the uphill climb, and also shorten the trip from 334 miles to 207 miles.  And to avoid Heather having to drive in downtown DC traffic, I shortened the other end of the trip by 8 miles as well.

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As Heather mentioned, it did take us a while to get this post written, but I thought it would be good to have a record of it, so here goes...

Each year for the last several years, Paul has organized a two day bike trip for the kids of BCF.  This year, we drove to Rockwood, PA and biked to Cumberland, MD, and then to the Paw Paw Tunnel the second day.

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Someone asked what timer we recently purchased, and I figured I should post it here, since it seems to work pretty well.  We bought the "Meinor Aqua Flush", I chose this one because it was the only one available at Target while I was buying our third sprinkler (I should do reviews on the sprinklers, since most of them were junk - I don't think the manufacturer can claim 45' x 45' coverage area when it can't do that with a 55psi 10 gal/minute connection.  Perhaps they need an * next to that which says, "when connected to a fire hydrant on full blast). (More)

This is going to be woefully brief.  The bike trip was adventure after adventure, lots of fun, but lots of work.  Among the things you'd normally expect on a bike trip, it included four tire blowouts on the triple-tandem, a torrential downpour, a tent with no stakes, Jonathan riding on someone's back carrier platform for seven miles (and two others each wheeling an extra bike those same extra miles), lost-off-the-top-of-the-car gloves and found again, new tires but now the brakes broke, little or no cell reception, a young man left behind, a purse left in a restaurant.  More details?  Maybe never, because... (More)

Cycles did not return after the miscarriage, and that along with other symptoms leads me to conclude that I am pregnant again.  The due date I am calling March 1. (I don't really think I can count the miscarriage as LMP and I have reason to believe that ovulation was a week later anyway.)

I have mixed feelings about this, I think mostly because of the miscarriage.  I am now further along than I was at the miscarriage and I know that God is in control.  I guess I hesitate to get too excited.  Also, I get exhausted quickly by this little one - maybe it's that I'm just too tired to get excited yet.  The boys and Faith (yes, I think she does understand to some degree) are very happy.  (Jonathan's first words at my announcement were, "I hope this one doesn't die." Me, too, dear heart.)

Jonathan is hoping for a sister, and Noah a brother.  Then Jonathan acknowledges that a brother would be nice, too.  For Faith, any baby is great!

6/28 - Noah's fourth birthday!  New nephew born!  Faith says, "yoo" (balloon)

Some more Faith words: "adj-yih" = chocolate; "nah-nih" = napkin; "ow-dih" = towel; "yeh" = leg

7/2 - Jonathan, "Know what I want to be when I grow up, Mom?"  "What?" "An inventor.  Actually, I already am an inventor, I just don't have all the right parts."

7/2 -Jonathan, "When Magic Shell ges on a bowl it's stuck like a barnacle."

Two weekends ago when we went camping and sailing, we also got to go on a friend's 25-ft sailboat.  It has a cabin and a motor.  The wind was lovely that day, but I learned that Noah is our Roger.  "When can we use the motor?  Let's use the motor!  Can we use the motor yet?"

7/4 - Faith, flipping through Go, Dog, Go! : "Ay ha?  No!"  That is, "Like hat?  No!"  She repeated this for every page.

7/6 - Faith opened the public bathroom door with her paper towel.

I decided to (mostly arbitrarily) call today the last day of Kindergarten.  Tomorrow will be the first day of First Grade.

I wanted to post because of Jonathan's answers to some of the logic problems he had today.

For each line, there was a list of five objects or items.  He had to circle the one that didn't belong and write down the commonality of the other four.

One was "Jupiter, Saturn, moon, Pluto, Uranus"  He asked me if he should count Pluto as a planet, which for this problem it looked like he should.

Here are two more that I will let you think about. and give his answers lower down.

flour, pepper, sugar, salt, soda

1 cent, 5 cents, 15 cents, 25 cents, 10 cents  (More)

6/11 - We planted more seeds in our garden.  Faith helped me plant beans and she very carefully placed the seed in the hole and gently covered it with soil.   It was so sweet to see her tender care.

I discovered a robin's nest in the bush outside our bathroom window.  We watched mama diligently sitting on her eggs and papa guarding while mama took her breaks.  On 6/12, we saw the babies had hatched!  We watched the parents feed them a few times.  But then on the morning of 6/14, I saw the nest askew on the branch and stuffing falling out.  Bad sign.  I took the kitchen stool outside to closely examine - all inhabitants were missing.  Papa robin scolded me from a high branch of a nearby tree.  Interestingly enough, Faith was the only one to ask about the birds after that.  (More)

We generally try to avoid corn syrup of all kinds (but we only "try", meaning it isn't banned or anything like that). But, when I'm looking for cereal or granola bars or whatever, I check the ingredients and particularly try to gauge if sugar (in whatever form) would be the first ingredient if they hadn't split it into different types to try to hide that fact.

Today I came across a research article that found that high fructose corn syrup is worse than other sugars in causing weight gain. I had figured it was the same as other sugars, but just that we all eat so much sugar now, (and all the tv watching) so that had more to do with the obese kids. Who knows if the research was true or funded by a competitor of corn syrup, or someone just against all the subsidies for corn, etc.

6/1 - Noah's use of /f/ in everyday speech has increased immensely and he now uses it in a substitution.  3 = "free"

6/1 - Jonathan cut Faith's bangs "because she asked me to."  Forgot that part about asking Mom or Dad...  He actually did a good straight job of it, so I didn't feel the need to fix it.

6/2 - Faith now says apple with two syllables, "ap-uh"

6/3 - Noah, laughing, "When I first saw Joshua's umbilical cord, I thought it was a raisin in his bellybutton!"  (More)

So, after thinking about it for a while, we decided to go ahead and purchase a new bike.  The reason it took some thinking is that it isn't a regular old bike with one seat, but has three seats, with room for three adults, or with the added child conversion kits, Noah and Jonathan can fit on it as well.

They aren't very common, and are hand-built, so they cost a ton when they are new, and so we gave up on the dream of a five seater, like the Harrisons have.  But, we thought a triplet would be more affordable, and we came across a used one from Tandems East, which looking at their name, you can guess how often you come across a bike shop that knows about tandems. I read a bunch of the stories from the family that owns Precision Tandems, but they are even farther away, and though it is neat to look at all of their bikes, the new ones that they have posted for sale are way out of our price range (as in, we could either buy two bikes or one of our old house...)  (More)

I noticed recently that Armstrong upgraded our connection to the internet from home. We now get 10Mbps download and 1.5Mbps upload.  We still pay a little less than $40/month.  We would use a faster upload connection if we had it, but we rarely find servers that will let us download that quickly.  We are now approaching 2 years with Armstrong, and of the couple of times I've had to call them, I've been pretty happy with their service.

Noah has discovered convertibles and really wants one.  In a parking lot one day, we watched a man put up his roof and that was really cool.  When I explained the reasons we wouldn't get one (too expensive, not enough seats for our family) Jonathan decided on our next car.  A "convertivan"!  Enough seats for the whole family, and the whole roof folds down into the back.  He didn't try to work around the expensive part...

Faith's new words just keep coming.  5/13 - "Mom"  finally!! 5/14 - "two" and I'm pretty sure she understands the concept, though she'll also say it for three.  5/15 -"ap" = lap.  5/17 = "up"  she used to leave off the p and now it's complete.  5/18 - "hou" = house.  5/19 - "ep" = step.  5/21 - "lou" = loud, when describing the waterfall on our camping trip.  5/23 - "uht" = dirt, also on our camping trip.  5/27 - "ip" = drip.  "drip shirt" when she spilled some water on her shirt.  "nah, nah" = knock, knock; when the boys were telling knock knock jokes. 5/28 - "uht ow" = foot out (of her slipper).  5/29 - "ap" = apple; "doll"; "buhb" = bird; "ahb" = strawberry.

5/24 - We discovered that at noon, Jonathan was six years, six months, six days, and six hours old!

Faith likes to sort laundry with me and if I tell her what the name of the article is, she can put it in the right pile.  This also goes for silverware.

5/27 - The boys had spilled some liquid on the counter and left it there.  Faith went to the drawer and got a fresh towel and wiped up their mess, on her own initiative.

5/27 - Jon: So, how about selling our house and car and biking around the country together?  Noah: Yay!!!  What, Dad?

5/28 - Noah was talking about when he was sick last week and he said "fever" with the correct /f/ and /v/ the first time!!!  Hooray!  This was his first spontaneous use of these sounds.  Later, he said "Faith" to me with the /f/ correct.

5/29 - Jonathan and Noah invented a game called "chuck socks" where they throw their socks at each other.  They think this is hilarious and Faith also joins in "uh-ah" whenever they say "chuck socks!"

Noah had a fever on Wednesday afternoon, and was better by Thursday.  Faith had it Thursday and was better by Friday.  Jonathan got it yesterday and is mostly over it now.  This morning his throat still hurt so he asked for a cough drop.  Then later, with his mouth bulging, he got out a piece of paper and wrote to me, "Can I swallow the flewed [fluid]?"  Poor guy!  He's so used to his floride rinse (and the medicine probably tasted enough like it) that he thought he wasn't allowed to swallow it.  He was much relieved when I said he could.

We just put a deposit down for a used triplet bike, with two child conversion kits.  Which means it will look something like the pictures on this site. Though our current plan is for Faith to be in a trailer attached to the back, and each of the boys will have the raised pedals clamped to their seat post.  We need to pick it up in New Jersey (people don't seem to do tandem bikes around here, and this was the best price by far that I've found, so I think we'll do pretty well.

Now I just need to build up my strength to haul all of them, and then Heather needs to work on her strength to bike by herself, though the bike store owner thought with me loaded down, she should be able to keep up pretty well.