Daley Ponderings

At least, it might be.  A bill recently passed the house that very specifically makes non-CNM midwifery illegal.  In 1972, (three years after they started licensing CNMs) a bill was passed declaring Mississippi to be a legal state for direct entry midwives.  I only heard about it today, and I gather that there aren't that many CNMs in the state anyway (ie. not enough to cover the population) so I wonder who is driving this legislation.  I suppose it could be the medical community that knows there aren't many CNMs, so this is really a move against all midwives, I'm not sure.

Unfortunately, unlike lots of other bills Rep. Holland introduced, (my favorite is the bill to specify the state song) this bill didn't die in committee.

2/11 - Noah, as we started school for the day, "I have my gun in my pocket in case any bad guys try to interrupt school."

2/13 - Faith says something that sounds very like "all done" when she is finished eating or going to the bathroom.  She also says "doe" for toes or nose.

2/20 - Faith is now consistently using the toilet sign (it looks like she's shaking an invisible pencil).  She does not use it every time she needs to go, but when she thinks about it, and sometimes at diaper changes.

Noah's work with putting the /g/ and /k/ sounds into his regular speech is coming along great!  Many words now come out correctly without him thinking about it, many more come out correctly the second time.  Since he is now listening and paying attention to how he is speaking, he has also improved other words, such as "seven".   It used to be "eh-uh" even though he can say /n/.  Now it's "eh-un."  /s/ and /v/ will come later.  I just ordered the second Speechercise cd and am looking forward to working on these new sounds with him.

Jonathan made a Lego olympics, with figure skaters, speed skaters, and luge riders.  He even made the bench that the figure skaters sit on with their coach while waiting for their scores. (:  (One of his sets of figure skaters are Han Solo and Princess Leia.  Their coach is a droid!) The ice rink was a flat base turned upside down.  He and Noah had two zambonis.

Jonathan has been reading up a storm.  He found a Star Wars book and has been steadily working away at it.

He had been having trouble with the fact that we solve math problems from left to right no matter where the unknown is.  For example, if the problem was [ ] = 9 - 5, he would write -4 in the blank spot.  "Five minus nine equals negative four."  He was quite frustrated with this for a few days, but the last time I gave him a worksheet with that kind of problem, I simply reminded him that the problems read from left to right, and he did fine.

I was telling my mom the other day about how strange it was that Pittsburgh is all but closed down after the snowstorm on Saturday.  Even the major roads (5th, Forbes, Negley, Penn) are not plowed, or rather, seem to have been plowed after one foot of snow fell, but then they didn't come around again for the next six to twelve inches. (More)

Taxes weren't too bad to calculate this year, though last year we paid TaxAct, so apparently, they decided we aren't ever allowed to go back to the free version again, unless I sign up with a new username.  So, we ended up just doing them on paper, and discovered that in some ways, TaxAct makes it more difficult, since they require you to type in lots of extra information that isn't actually needed.  e.g. they make you type in all of the contents of the 1099-MISC forms, (and this year we have ten of them or something like that) and really all the IRS wants is a total number for all self-employed income, so the paper version is much quicker. (More)

2/1 - Jonathan, munching on dried cranberries, "I would have a happy life with air, cranberries, a Bible, and chips."

2/2 - Faith followed two-step directions:  go get her shoes (from the other room) and put them in the shoe rack.

2/4 - Jonathan, "Life is so fun, I can't resist it!"

The last several days, Noah has been spontaneously saying words with /k/ and /g/ sounds, and coming up to us to show us that he can do it.

The boys have been praying for another baby sister.  Recently, Noah thought he'd ask for two.  Then he commented, "Then we would have three!"  Noah can add!

I got a video of Noah showing me the bits.  If he didn't know one, he'd say, "hobo" or "hada" or some such made up word.  It's hard to catch what he says if you don't know it, so I'll write what he does say, "American Flag" (amehuhu a), "potato", "carrot" (eh-huh), "orange" (it's really a grapefruit, but you can't blame the mixup), "green grapes" (een ape) and my favorite "strawberry" (ah-bee-beh-hee).  I'd been wanting to record him saying strawberry for a while.

We've added our pictures for the last couple months, as well as adding a bunch of pictures that Stephan took at the Maggie P and at Thanksgiving - the delay was mostly because I hadn't gotten around to figuring out how to add a credit in the bottom right corner for Stephan's pictures. And I just realized that Stephan's camera is not in EST; we weren't really up at 3 in the morning.

I think my favorite (non-person) picture is of the stump I purchased.  I would have liked to see that "stump" prior to it being cut and split - it must have been gigantic. Note, also the nifty racks we got to make stacking wood easier (and safer - the wood is much less likely to fall on someone now, though I am getting better at stacking free standing wood as well.

If you aren't on facebook, you probably missed my recent picture (taken from my new cool phone - that has a higher resolution than our regular camera...) of a TV that a friend of a friend gave to us, since it was broken, and he was hoping I could make good use of it.  It turned on when I powered it up, so I haven't worked on it yet, and I figured it was as good a time as any to get our Apple IIe back up and running.  A number of the disks are bad, so that was disappointing.  But, I found an old data disk (after investigation, it turns out it wasn't as old as I thought - I guess we were still using Apples in the 7th grade) but it had some fun documents - some papers for school, and a couple interviews of some teachers from that year (Mr. Kelley and Ms. Cronin), as well as this gem, which neither Pat nor I can remember what it was for.

Other good pictures (since we've published so many at one go, I imagine lots of you won't look through all of them) are our time at the zoo - the sea lions are a lot of fun.

And who says kids have too much energy?