Daley Ponderings

Colin Portnuff, a guy who uses an AAC (alternative augmentative communication) device to communicate, was recently at a conference that some guys from my company (DynaVox) also went to. He has ALS , which is a degenerative disease of the brain. A number of our customers have ALS; I am not... (More)

I wrote it out formally about a year ago but it never got onto the blog. So below is the story. I'll post a comment on Jonathan's first post with a link to this one. Jonathan's Gentle Birth by Heather Daley This is Jonathan's birth story, but to really appreciate it, the... (More)

A woman I know has been having breastfeeding troubles with her three month old. She firmly believes in the superiority of breastmilk and nursing, and so has persisted through the discouragement (implicit and from other people, including pediatrician) and is using a lactation supplementer instead... (More)

Jon made Jonathan a lightswitch stick so that he (Jonathan) can turn on and off the lights himself. It is a dowel with a loop of wire fastened to the end. When Grammy and Auntie E were here, Jonathan demonstrated the first observed completion of the USA puzzle all by himself. Before, I had... (More)

"Sally the camel had no humps. 'Cause Sally was a . . . alligator!" (More)

That statement by Jonathan is what I woke up to from my nap this afternoon. It has worked before - to let him play quietly by himself while I take my nap. But today, well, he just tried to be a little more independent than he's truly capable of. He crawled up onto the bed and stood up next to... (More)

One reason Jonathan talks so well is because we talk to him like a real person. Children learn by hearing and by imitating. It is sometimes amusing to hear the things that he says. For example, he got a valentine's day card from Aunt Ellie, and as he saw the stickers on the back and was... (More)

It has been many moons since a fish update. The last blog entry about it was October 2004, but there might be a newsletter that has a more recent update. If not this poor catfish of ours was lonely for a longer time than I thought. The little three-line cory catfish named Laura has hung on and... (More)

He's thinning out and looking older and doing and saying all sorts of extraordinary things. Here's the catch-up. 1/23 - Told a clerk at the grocery store that his favorite movie is my prenatal excercise video! 1/25 - He found a nametag lanyard and uses it as his stethoscope, to measure the... (More)

Jonathan can really have a conversation on the phone now. He even has good one-sided ones when he is just pretending. For example, "Hello, Mrs. Grover! How are you? You're feeling good. Good!" "Hello, Grandma. I love you, too. Bye." On Tuesday, Jonathan asked me to get the lotion for him,... (More)

Christmas Eve, we went to a church family's party and then had a candlelight service at church. Christmas Day, there was no service (we meet in a school and they didn't want to make the janitor work on Christmas) so we had the day at home. We woke up and opened stockings (sample toothpaste for... (More)

Well, I followed the directions on one of those "speed up firefox" pages, and found a setting that broke stuff, at least minimally, and it was hard to diagnose. The symptom was a red line through the padlock icon when viewing an ssl page that I wrote in PHP. If I reloaded the page, it would go... (More)

I have proved it to myself. Eating too much sugar drains my energy, making me tired and lethargic. On the positive side, cutting down on my sugar consumption gives me energy to last through the day! I have heard and read many things about refined sugars, eating raw foods, eating whole foods,... (More)

As mentioned on the GirlTalk blog , there are a what I think is a disproportionate number of men in the Sovereign Grace churches that believe the best way to show affection to other men is to make fun of them, particularly in public. (I suppose I am continuing the stereotype published by the... (More)

Like so many other articles on this subject, I will start by saying that I looked at various documents, but none of them worked perfectly for me, so I will write up my own steps. Most of the regular readers of this blog will not care at all about SMTP authentication, TLS, SSL, port 25, 465, 587,... (More)