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Powered by LifeTypeJoy has two hair swirls at the back of her head. One goes clockwise and one counter-clockwise. Each of my other children only have one.
5/3 - Joy's two month appointment. 12 lb, 3 oz. She is developing a birthmark in the upper right of her forehead (can't remember the very long medical term, and interestingly enough, "birth"marks can appear within a few months of birth and not only at birth.) It's likely to grow to about a nickel size and then recede to be gone when she's about five or six. When her hair grows out, it should completely cover it. Her bellybutton finally finished its healing and got the ok. (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 wood stand to sell from. Jon and I encouraged him to start small.
We also believe in starting where you can afford. He only had a few dollars in capital. So, even though the cheapest cost per lemon is to buy a bag of 14 lemons at Restaurant Depot for $5, he bought a single lemon for 79 cents. I offered him a deal on half a bag of sugar for $1. We also had some paper cups lying around that he got for free. (More)
4/15 - Faith and Noah are playing house. They are married, and are parents to Faith's "purple baby doll". Noah says to Faith, about their baby, "When she is happy, I hold her. When she is sad, you milk her."
4/18 - We were talking about heaven (I don't remember the beginning of the conversation) and the boys were discussing what it might be like. Noah said something about being able to do amazing things to the bad guys. Then both Jonathan and I said there won't be any bad guys in heaven. Noah was taken aback by this and the look on his face was priceless. He just couldn't comprehend how heaven could possibly be fun if there were no bad guys to fight.
Faith still asks me to tell her "Moses and the little boat" every night at bedtime. She has asked for this since at least December. I got tired of saying it in my own paraphrase, so I have been reading Exodus 1:7-2:10. One night recently, when I had finished, she rolled over and sleepily said, "That's a good story."
4/20 - Random dinnertime discussion. How much salsa can you fit in a minivan? We calculated about 2 tons.
On Easter Sunday, we were singing some resurrection hymns. When we had finished, Jonathan was still looking through the hymnal, and he said, "Here's one that has parts about the cross and rising again, this would be a good one." Which one was this? St.Patrick's Breastplate. Honey to a mother's heart. (And a grandmother's, too I'm guessing, as soon as she reads this.)
4/27 - Joy found her thumb. She has also been grabbing at any fabric that is near her hands, mostly her clothes and sometimes the spitup rag.
And now I leave you with the funniest quote of the week:
4/26 - Another dinnertime discussion, talking about recent holidays. Noah asked, "What's Lent, Mom?" I explained a little bit. Then he responded, "Oh. I thought it was that stuff in between your toes."
Noah (while we started the woodstove): Can fire do anything to metal?
Dad: It can melt it, if it is hot enough.
Noah (wide-eyed): So, you could melt the metal into a sword?
Noah then relays the conversation to Jonathan, who is taking a bath.
After some discussion about where one might get metal to melt, and Jonathan thinking that maybe the combination of our woodstove and the MAPP gas torch would get the metal hot enough, Noah comes back. After each question below, Noah consulted with Jonathan and then came back with a new question.
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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".
3/30 - In the morning, I woke to the sound of the floorboards squeaking in my bedroom. I opened my eyes and there was Jonathan with a tray of toast and juice! What a sweetheart. (More)
3/11 - Faith can count to six.
3/12 - Faith counted to ten. She isn't consistent with this. She'll get stuck after six, but if someone says seven, she can do the rest on her own. I don't think she has quantity recognition past five, though. And she sometimes likes to start counting with nine.
3/21 - We've been listening to CDs and tapes a lot on my old stereo. Noah comments, "Mom, tapes are really cool. But CDs you can skip to the next one. But tapes you can stop it and then it starts right where you were."
Jonathan has been reading Greek myths and has made himself a Zeus costume, complete with eagle-topped staff and thunderbolts. Then he discovered an old tape of mine with Holst's The Planets on it. He was very excited to recognize the personalities of the gods in their respective movements. He and Noah were marching around with invisible guns to Mars before I even told them what it was. Holst sure did a good job! It is fun for me to see me kids enjoying a piece of music that I enjoyed so much (well, I still do!)
Joy has been smiling a lot this week, mostly for her siblings. I think her hair is growing. It never fell out as her siblings' birth hair did. Maybe her hair will start out brown?
Noah is learning simple addition and beginning to read. He is enthusiastic about this learning and schooltime is fun with him. It's so neat to watch them figure out things! School with Jonathan has not been as much fun, but I think we need to find something that challenges him more.
I bought 6 Seagate hard drives from Amazon and Newegg, and both companies sent me drives that already had half their warranty expired.
Amazon, after waiting for the customer support guy to handle 5 simultaneous chat sessions, and so was quite slow at responding, did send out a mailing label with no restocking fee.
Newegg took a half hour on hold before they answered, and initially said that there is a 3 year warranty. I pointed out that there was only two years left on the warranty, so even if it were true that Seagate only offered a three warranty (which they don't - they have 5 year warranties on their drives currently), this drive is still partially expired. She then said that she could not accept a return because, "Unfortunately, we are unable to make the changes since the warranty was provided by the manufacture directly." I asked if she was authorized to refuse a warranty claim and she said she would be sending an RMA form shortly. She did, after request, provide a return shipping label and removed the restocking fee.
While on hold with the online chat folks, I called Seagate on the phone, and after waiting maybe 5 minutes on hold, got an English speaking person who offered to send out an email where I can take a picture of my invoice, with the appropriate serial numbers, and said that "usually, not always" they would update the warranty date.
She said that often vendors keep the items on the shelf and sell them with expired warranties. So - now I know to always check the warranty right when I get it.
It's irritating that companies sell old devices without mentioning that on their product specifications page.
2/11 - Faith, looking at cousin Cole's cute pictures. "Me wikey 'at wittle Tole, Tole, Tole."
2/24 - Milk started coming in Thursday evening. Joy is a good nurser.
2/26 - Joy's cord fell off. Noah called it the "umbilicord" when talking with Faith about it. Faith is very excited about the bellybutton.
2/27 - Faith, talking about Joy's hiccups, "Baby 'Oy had hip-up twenty-teen long time."
Things are going well. Everybody has adjustments to make. Faith loves her new little sister and likes to hold her a lot. She is having a bit of a hard time with the reduced Mommy time. She gets weepy about things that weren't such a big deal before. Noah is more of a silent sufferer, but I can sense he is also adjusting. Jonathan seems to be doing great and he is very helpful. He loves to check in on Joy throughout the day.
Jon and Mom are wonderful about doing lots of work and letting me rest.
I'd been having these strange contractions for a few days. Not the simple Brackston-Hicks that I have throughout pregnancy that feel tight but do not hurt. Not crampy labor contractions, either. They were very tight and they hurt. They came usually when I was sitting – on the couch or in the dining room – and relief came rather quickly if I stood up. This baby didn't want me sitting down! I talked to my friend Mary on Sunday (2/20) who had had similar ones with her son – for 26 days! I figured I could deal with it for another week and a half or so.
Here is our Christmas letter - if you are reading this blog, you probably know most of it anyway, but I figure there are some people that we didn't mail this too, and who don't read every word of these posts... :)
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 the bad guys had poisoned it. It was such a deadly poison we couldn't even touch it and I had him call 911 to send a squad out to take it away. I never remember anything like this happening at other tea parties... (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 the visit was sick-free.
12/27 - Jonathan and Mommy were discussing dollar amounts of Christmas presents and what was even thinkable to ask about. I had said that a $200 set was out of the question. He then said, "[A particular lego set] is in the question."
12/30 - We went to the Boston Children's Museum with Grammy and I was with Faith at the bubbles section. She played a long time there and I got to observe other kids as well. This note is a quote from a young girl next to us, with obvious glee in her voice, "Science is messy!" (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 systems, servers and any time spent at our rental house
1.1 hours a week on LifeType
8.1 hours a week checking facebook and blogs and also email (lots of which is work related, but I don't differentiate between work and personal email, and I don't get paid for anyway)
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 take one trip to Pittsburgh each week, and we took a lot of vacation trips this year.