Daley Ponderings

While it is impossible to keep up with all of the new words Jonathan can say, there are interesting stories every once in a while (how "interesting" is measured is probably different among the different readers of this blog) and so I like to share them. Also, I realized that sometimes we say he... (More)

Jonathan has fallen in love with Dr.Seuss. He will quote from the books while we are doing other things, and laugh - "Pat, cat, No, that!" He also can identify most of the words in Hop On Pop, likely at this point by the illustrations rather than the words themselves. One thing that I really... (More)

Jonathan is great at couplets now, for example, "yellow button" "dry diaper" "one hand." He is also increasing his use of complete sentences. One thing he said yesterday was "Yes please, Daddy" which is the first time ever that he has said all three in a row like that for a request. (More)

Jonathan was playing with Heather's hair band, and was calling it a bandand, his word for rubber band, (close to his word for baid-aid: bandane)Heather encouraged him to call it a rubber band, and he made the face that means, "that word is too hard for me to say", so I just said, "rubber", but he... (More)

Sunday after church Jon suggested we go sailing again since we did not make it the day before. After lunch, we headed out again, this time to North Park because it is closer. The wind was strong, the best we've had in Pittsburgh so far. However, it was also gusty and changed direction a lot in... (More)

Jonathan now identifies two of his butterfly bits by name: "morpho" for brown morpho and "lady" for painted lady. By the way, I always type his words the way he means them, but often they are not exactly like that. For example, these two words actually sound like "my-foh" and "yay-dee." He has... (More)

On Tuesday, Jonathan discovered how to stand on tiptoes, and he thought it was great fun and asked me to "Watch!" him and share in his joy. Yesterday, he figured out how to open the front gate. So now keeping him inside the fence is truly a matter of discipline and not force. But he understands... (More)

On Monday, Jonathan said what sounded like "van-fan" so I tried to figure out what he meant. He pointed to the shelf and said it again, maybe differently. I looked up, and there were the bits - works of Rembrandt! I said, "Rembrandt?" And he said, "yes, Rembrandt!" (or a close approximation.)... (More)

It is a new month, and therefore, a new point on my email graph . A couple interesting things this month: one, you can tell I went on vacation, and probably also that I knew Heather was gone the week before, so I wasn't emailing her as much either. Two, spam has now hit the 30% mark (note: the... (More)

Since I always need to go back to my email to find out the instructions of how to set up the server, here are the settings we need at DynaVox to make Tracker work properly.We no longer need to install Oracle locally (yay!) Simply run tracker setup (can be over the network). You only need... (More)

Colors - just before we left for vacation, Jonathan and I were sitting on our tshirt quilt. I pointed out a yellow sun, and he repeated me. Then he pointed to another yellow sun and named it, then to a blue shirt and said "blue", to a green shirt and said "green" and finally to a black shirt... (More)

One day for dinner I prepared a noodle dish from a toddler-friendly cookbook that was "toddler rated 10 out of 10." I also made asparagus as a side dish. Jonathan loves asparagus and helped me taste test it as I was preparing it. Then at dinner we had to tell him that he had to eat a couple... (More)

I have not been consistent with the bits recently, but this morning, Jonathan let me know that it's time to get with the program! When he woke up, he sat straight up, pointed at them and said, "This!" When we finished the butterflies, he asked for the African countries and when we finished those... (More)

It seems that lots of people have trouble typing in keywords into search engines that result in the hits that they want. Every once in a while I have to go to the second page of results, but generally things are available on the first page.For example, I was recently asked, "How do I get... (More)

Jonathan is saying new words so quickly now that it is impossible to keep track of them. Here are a few highlights from the past week. I once overheard a neighbor boy across the street complain to his aunt, "That baby is so annoying, he just keeps saying 'hi.' " But the other day, Jonathan did... (More)