Daley Ponderings

1/20 - Jonathan, as usual, singing while he plays and works.  This time it was, "Come, Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadil.  Come, Tom Bombadil..." 1/22 - When boys have a tea party:  Noah, Faith and I were playing with Faith's tea set.  Noah said he couldn't eat his soup because... (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)

We bought a "new" minivan last year, and it had the lowest mileage, and highest cost of any car we've owned so far.  It is a 1997 Oldsmobile Silhouette, and it had 107,000 miles on it.  We did a lot of driving (I hit 135,000 today, after a year and a half).  Heather and I both... (More)

12/16 - Headed up in the snow for another midwife appointment.  I gained more weight this time, but Thanksgiving was in between visits...  My iron was low again, despite diligently eating that horrible molasses, but she was suspicious that her hemoglobin tester is off... (More)

11/6 - Noah and I were making rice krispie treats and Noah was stirring.  He asked for a marshmallow, but I said no, they had to go in the recipe and he could have one of the finished products.  Well, he decided to snitch and got a natural lesson.  I, only a few feet away in the... (More)

Inspired by an article in Family Fun magazine, I developed a fun motivator for bedtime cleanup that really works.  Before, there would be lots of complaining, dilly-dallying and nagging.  Now the house is clean every night before bed and the job is done quickly!  Here's how it... (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)

As I looked at the maps for the third day, we were going to be biking near various battlefields and other tourist-type places to visit, and so in the interest of resting a little, I decided we should drive for a ways and then maybe bike in the afternoon. We drove from Williamsport... (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)

This is going to be woefully brief.  The bike trip was adventure after adventure, lots of fun, but lots of work.  Among the things you'd normally expect on a bike trip, it included four tire blowouts on the triple-tandem, a torrential downpour, a tent with no stakes, Jonathan riding... (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)

We generally try to avoid corn syrup of all kinds (but we only "try", meaning it isn't banned or anything like that). But, when I'm looking for cereal or granola bars or whatever, I check the ingredients and particularly try to gauge if sugar (in whatever form) would be the first... (More)

So, after thinking about it for a while, we decided to go ahead and purchase a new bike.  The reason it took some thinking is that it isn't a regular old bike with one seat, but has three seats, with room for three adults, or with the added child conversion kits, Noah and Jonathan can fit... (More)

As we've mentioned, our water is pretty hard, and dishwashers in particular don't like hard water, and the manual with our dishwasher says specifically that it won't work with our water.  But, it has worked pretty well for around ten months or so, as long as we kept the rinse aid... (More)

I didn't really feel like writing this, but then I thought it weird not to post it.  So I'll mostly just copy the emails I wrote to our parents. This is happening at five weeks of pregnancy, pretty much just two days after being sure I was pregnant (though we did not take a... (More)