Daley Ponderings

I finally decided to buy a wireless card for my laptop that uses the cell phone network, as opposed to plain wi-fi.  This will allow me to have more/better access when I am not in range of a wifi access point (say, hypothetically, if one were to travel to Middleburg, Virginia to a house that only has dial-up access), and it will probably be useful in other places too.

Last week (actually within the span of three days) four people asked me if I am pregnant.  Really, you ask?  Yes, really, they did.  One of them was Jonathan, whom you have read has been praying fervently for a little sister, and has not yet learned that you don't ask women that (unless, as Dave Barry says, you can actually see the baby coming out.)  My answer was "not that I know of."

I had bought a box with two tests at Christmas time to see if there was any Christmas present announcement to be made to the family (it was negative then.)  The second one was sitting there in the bathroom and Monday morning, I thought, well, I'll just take it so that I can tell people for sure that I'm not.  However, when I looked at the little window after two minutes, what should I see but a positive result!  I could hardly believe it.

So Noah and I rushed back upstairs to bring the news to Daddy and Jonathan, who of course were very excited.

Expected arrival is sometime in October.  This could potentially be a nice birthday present for Mommy, or even a very special 90th birthday present for Great Grandpa Daley.  Jonathan will be nearly five and Noah will be a couple of months shy of two and a half.

I really was not expecting this (cycles had not yet returned due to nursing) but it does explain some things over the last few weeks.  Noticeable drop in milk supply, slight aversion to pancakes, not feeling perfectly up to par (though I thought I just had what's going around), Jon beating me at Scrabble... 

We are all thrilled (well, Noah's rather clueless at the moment) and looking forward to meeting this new little one, boy or girl!

On Sunday after church, we were driving around the area and went to the lake we visited in the summer.  It was frozen over, people were ice fishing.  We walked on carefully, telling Jonathan to stay near us and of the dangers of weak ice.  We found an abandonded, yet fresh, ice fishing hole about three inches in diameter.  From this hole we were able to determine that the ice was about four inches thick.

Whew... For some reason, taxes took longer than they have in other years.  Part of the time was spent trying to get out of a federal tax penalty for not calculating the estimated taxes correctly.  We spent 14.63 hours (courtesy of worklog), mostly together working on them.  I am finally mailing them in today.

We convinced them (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Federal) to only take 15% of our income...  I have wondered about MIT's/Huckabee's tax pseudo-flat sales tax and what that would look like for us.  We do get a bunch of credits and deductions, and under the prebate/sales tax model, I don't think any deductions would apply.  But on the other hand, we also probably spend less than a lot of people, so maybe whatever rate that would be picked wouldn't be that bad.  And of course, the cost of saving 27 hours for having a simpler tax code would be nice.

Noah likes to help set the table.  When I ask him to put forks at the places, he will run to the drawer and grab a fistfull, then put a fork on top of each plate.  I usually have to help him put away the extras, or they end up all over the place.