Daley Ponderings

5/4 - Jonathan read Hop On Pop to us.  It took two sessions because it is a pretty long book.  It was fun for me because I know that was one of the first books I read out loud to my parents.

5/8 - Kids only know what they're exposed to.  When Noah saw the TV in our hotel room, he said, "Little movie screen!"

That was fun for them, staying in a hotel room.  We were there two nights for the homeschool conference.  We got a lot of info that we're still processing.  I'm not sure how much I'll be posting on that, since I try to post minimally anyway.

5/10 - Noah can count to seven.

Faith is starting to pull up to standing on furniture.  This now makes most of the coffee table no longer safe for lego bases, so we'll have to figure out something else.

4/23 and following - Noah sings a little song, waving his arms around and concludes with, "Amen."  He then says, "Me get mine Bible."  He has loved reading the Bible even from such a young age as I was not sure if he could distinguish it from other books, except that he was often drawn to a Bible.  He'll remind me to read it, ask me to read it to him, ask me to sing it to him.  "His" Bible is a little green Gideon Bible that I got in college.

Noah is now firmly over the hesitation to say things before he knows he can say it perfectly.  However, it does bring a different kind of frustration.  I can now hear the struggle that used to go on in his head.  He will know what he wants to say, but what comes out of his mouth is not quite right.  He can hear that, so stops and works on correcting it.  Often the trouble is switching adjectives and nouns "bird red" vs. "red bird".  He used to be very patient with us as we tried to figure out what he said, repeating until we got it.  Now he gets upset and repeats in a sort of raspy loud voice, getting louder and raspier with each repetition.

On the other hand, we can understand more and more of what he says.  And he even told someone his name yesterday!

With the advent of spring, I brought out the red potty - the idea being that we have it outside where he can go diaperless and use it whenever without worry of accidents.  This worked very nicely the first few days, even though he doesn't like going diaperless.  In this most recent adventure, I have discovered that if he goes right before bed, he will be dry all night.  HOORAY!  He didn't get the bad genes!  Now he just needs the motivation to go all the time in the potty/toilet.

He just learned how to respond to the question, "How old are you?" and soon he will have to change his answer!  I know I'll blink and the answer will be  "23."

So, I know you can't believe anything you read in a newspaper, but if the newspaper calls you and tells you something, then can you believe it?  How about if both Pittsburgh newspapers call?

We've heard that Judy was acquitted of two of the three charges brought against her, but she was fined the maximum for the third charge, which comes to a grand total of $100.

It'd be nice if the county would notice that the prosecution wasted seven years trying to get a verdict, and failed so future folks don't have to go through all of this.

Would you send your nine-year-old on a New York City subway by himself?  Would you send him on a horse from Oklahoma to New Mexico and back by way of the deserts of Texas - taking his five-year-old brother along? (More)

4/10 - Noah comes up to me, winking, and says, "Mommy, me one eye!"  It was hilarious.  (I couldn't wink until first grade.)

4/11 - Guess which story this is, by Noah: "Let me in.  No, no, no.  Blow up house!"

4/20 - What does Noah say when the smoke detector goes off?  "Timer!"

Faith has a neat pincer grasp and feeds herself finger food easily.

4/14 - Faith is starting to pull herself up onto furniture.  The problem is, she can't get back down without falling.

I have moved her on to 12-month size clothes, and her legs still stick out.  She's going to be tall!

Jonathan has been reading more and more.  He's gotten some Step Into Reading: Step 1 books from Grandma and borrowed some from a friend, and he loves it!  4/17 - He called to me from the other room, "What's that crazy word again?  The one with the 'k'? Right. 'Now he knows...'."  I hadn't realized before watching Jonathan read this that a "silent k" turns the present into information.

We borrowed WALL-E from a friend a few weeks ago, and the boys love playing "WALL-E and Eva".  Today, Jonathan made a WALL-E costume out of a cardboard box without any help.  He made a cube of trash out of Duplos, and asked me to make a little paper cockroach for him. He can fold himself all up in it, but then his arms and head come out of the sides and top when he's ready to work again.  There's a little flap in the front for his trash compactor.  He labeled it with his warning light and power meter, and a nice WALL-E on the flap.  Look for pictures and video on the pictures page later.

If you start a pot boiling at 9:55PM (knowing that you will be up for a while) to hard boil eggs for the following day and don't set a timer, how long will it take before you go back to the kitchen to turn off the stove? (More)

3/29 - Jonathan was upstairs quietly playing for a very long time.  When he finally came down, he showed us what he had been working on the whole time.  It was a completely filled in color-by-number page.  He read the colors all by himself to see which one went with which number.  Sometimes he helped himself with a clue like "I figured b-l-u-e had to say blue, because 1 was the sky."  He also did a very neat job of coloring within the lines.  He had not been very good at it in the past, but I had never pushed the issue.  I think it was because he didn't really care, and that was one reason I hadn't pushed it. (More)

I was adding more materials to our garden beds, and wanted to mix it in by hand.  It doesn't work so well to lean over with Faith in the backpack, so I set her down on the ground behind me.  Well, that ground was not so level.  She went tumbling over, and the worst part was that her forehead landed right on the wooden corner of an adjacent box.  I nearly panicked, telling myself not to panic.  It looked to me like her skull was dented in. I'm so thankful that Jon was home.  I picked her up, not noticing the dirt on my hands, held her close and ran into the house, calling for Jon to come quickly and look at her forehead.  He took her so I could wash up and get some ice.  She cried a lot, nursing off and on.  Jon held on the ice (frozen peas, really) and eventually the swelling went down enough to tell that her skull truly was fine - PRAISE GOD!  All physical functions are at the same stage they were before the accident and she's her usual happy self now.  She has quite a scrape and bruise that I can hardly look at without getting a sick feeling in my heart, but she's fine and already on the mend.

3/6 - Jonathan beat Heather in chess, fair and square!

3/18 - Noah said, "I love you" for the first time.  It was to Faith.  Later that day, he said it again to Daddy as he was leaving to go shopping.  He has yet to say it to me, but I know it will come. (More)

Our printer finally died.  Or actually, it didn't really die, but required more money, so I decided (somewhat hesitantly, since the HP Laserjet 6L is the best printer ever made, according to most sources) to replace it.  The 6L lasted 13 years, so the longest lasting printer I've had since the Epson dot-matrix we had while growing up, which of course, still works.  We've only been able to have one page in the input feeder for years, and when I replaced the fuser a year or two ago, I didn't realize that I could have gotten some new gears to fix the feed issue at the same time.  I bought two toners the last time I bought toner, and it turns out that was a bad idea, as the "wiper" in the toner cartridge rotted out, since we use ink so slowly. (More)

I had gotten some rather blank emails in my spam folder recently (and some not in the spam folder), so I thought I'd check into it further.  I couldn't figure out why they were wasting their time, as it just contained a bunch of fairly blank HTML, with some tables, and background colors.  When I opened the email in an email client that understands HTML, it all became clear.

 (More)

I haven't looked at how much time it took us to do taxes this year - I thought we were doing pretty well, time-wise, until we blew 8 hours or so today finishing them off (or is it them finishing us off, I'm not sure which...)

I noticed a number of places where the strange, complicated math formulas to figure out different values seem to be kind of odd (ie. not just complicated, but don't calculate in the intuitive way for people at different incomes, etc.)  The child credit is biased against self-employed people for some reason, where you can hit a cap relatively quickly, where if you work at a regular company, the cap is much higher (and at least for one guy (with a relatively low salary as a teacher with lots of kids) I asked, impossible to hit - he actually didn't know there was a cap).  (More)

We finished our taxes today, and the kids were around while we were doing it, and then we went out to the Olive Garden, since we didn't feel like cooking at 8PM when we finished the taxes.  On the way home, we were talking about how much the meal cost (Jonathan has various data points on how much things cost, so trying to fill that in some more - so the dinner was $26 for the five of us (all you can eat breadsticks and salad) and Jonathan thought that was a lot for not very much food. (More)

 I've been mentioning my garden doings on Serina's blog and in private emails with her, and I thought I'd compile and post the relevant info here.  (More)

Speaking of news, I forgot to post here that the closing arguments for Judy's trial are scheduled for tomorrow, and I'll be heading to Pittsburgh to hang out with folks who will be there in her support.  Of course, this might be the first time a scheduled meeting actually happened when it was supposed to (or did it already get postponed once?  It's hard to keep it straight) so I wouldn't be too surprised if Lisa is on vacation and forgot to tell anyone. (More)