Daley Ponderings

The boys (and Heather has enjoyed it too - I haven't gotten to it yet) have really been enjoying Khan Academy this last week.  It is an educational tool, with lots of questions to test you on different skills.  Jonathan is especially motivated by the reward badges it gives you when... (More)

I was poking around the logs today, and saw that of the 500 comments that were attempted on the blog yesterday 0 of them were actual people, and the blog successfully marked all of them as spam, and didn't bother asking me to verify that.  I wonder how long that will last. I regularly... (More)

11/18 - Jonathan, when meaning to say cylindrical said, "cylindicular" 11/23 - Joy took her first step, accidentally. 11/26 - Joy climbed up a whole flight of stairs.  This was the first time she had done more than one small step.  She was so thrilled with her newfound skill... (More)

Jonathan's new adventure in earning money is a lemonade stand.  He thought maybe he could call it "Lemon Daley" as part of the family theme. At first, he had all sorts of grandiose ideas, including a frequent buyer's club, a toy day (when you get a toy with your purchase), and a fancy... (More)

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".... (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... (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... (More)

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... (More)

This morning, we drove up to the birth clinic where Jonathan and Noah were born.  Their midwife has retired (she wanted to before Noah was born, but actually did right before Faith was born) and her daughter has taken over the job.  We had met C before, when she was helping out her... (More)

We arrived at the Fitzkees' house on Thursday night, and Nick said we could stay as long as we wanted.  We ended up extending our trip by a day and coming home on Tuesday, which was a good decision.  I think we spent the right amount of time for the whole family to enjoy the... (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... (More)

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... (More)

Here's my take on the biking/camping trip. With last year's notes, it was actually pretty fun planning camping meals for 14 people, the vast majority of which are young men.  I only made two mistakes, one was forgetting oil for the eggs (we used some butter from the mountain pie... (More)

So, as most of you know, in March I went on my first ever short-term mission trip to Hato Mayor in the Dominican Republic with college students from Penn State, University of Pittsburgh and a handful from other places. It is almost a month later, and I've been meaning to write down... (More)

"Francis of Assisi is alleged to have said, 'Preach the gospel always; if necessary use words.'  That may be a great medieval sound bite, but it falls short of what the Bible teaches about evangelism." I used to like that quote, and the evangelism models it leads... (More)