Daley Ponderings

Having a dad in the fire department is educational in more than just fire safety:

5/17 - Jon is called to an accident "involving motor vehicle vs. moose"
5/18 - Jonathan reads about moose and siberian tigers on wikipedia

~5 - Joy says "owee here" = outta here

5/20 - jpd 17 lb on our scale
5/20 - After bikinh home from his ipiano lesson: Noah: "Mom, I fell.  The chain got off all the gears. So I put it back on. The handlebars got crooked from the wheel, too."

5/21 - We have a game on the Kindle that involves both a princess and a knight. Faith was talking about it and called it the princess game.  After listening to her description, Jonathan said, "Oh, you mean the knight game?"

5/22 - I have more to say about attention spans a little later, but here is one example.  Joy peeled garlic for 20 minutes while I was making dinner.

6/1 - Playing hide and seek: Joy, "5,2,3,2,5,2,5...come!"

6/8 - Joy recognized and said "circle"

And now the brief chronicling of our full full summer.

6/16-6/21 - Our dear friends the Kuhns came to visit for a week.  It was fun and crazy and loud and beautiful.  During that week, I had both a dentist and a doctor appoinment.  On Friday, our friends the Weavers also visited, bringing the total number of kids in the house to 18!

6/21 - Miss Independent makes even her free-range Mom nervous: Joy decided it was bathtime without telling anyone.  She undressed, started the water (with the right combination of hot and cold), got in, and turned off the water when the level was right.  She truly did it perfectly, but she still is only two and I would like her to be supervised in the water!

6/22-6/27 - The day after we said goodbye to the Kuhns, my parents arrived.  They had to wait a bit for us since we had two activities after church that day.  It was a very short and full visit, as I had two more appointments, including a three hour physical therapy visit the day before we had to leave town!  We celebrated Noah's birthday with Grandma and Dad-o, but it was rather rushed and not as fun as it should have been.  But the highlight of that visit was Noah and Grandma exploring the violin together and Grandma teaching him some real songs.

6/27-7/7 - Then we drove to Pittsburgh, and that drive was not too bad.  But the week was pretty hard.  We were in Pittsburgh for so many years, we know people all over and around the city.  We did a whole lot of driving and Jeremiah was not happy with that.  Jon worked about 60 hours that week, much of it away from the rest of us (though Noah went with him a lot and earned over $200 helping him out!)  It was good to see people, though.  Sunday was our anniversary and Jon's lovely idea was to go to church where we had been married twelve years before!  In addition to seeing many people we had not seen in a very long time, we got to meet the new baby of our friends who had been struggling to conceive for many many years.  So precious!  At the end of our visit was the wedding for which we had scheduled the trip in the first place. That was nice, too, but I was so worn out by then it was hard to fully enjoy it.

6/28 - JPD transfer toy hand to hand

6/28 - For Noah's actual birthday, we went to the Children's Museum.  That was really a blast, though I did catch myself wonderinng what on earth I was thinking to bring five kids to a museum by myself.  But the part that saved my sanity was that I let the boys play in the waterplay area by themselves for a couple of hours while the girls, Jeremiah, and I went to the baby area.  (I even managed to snag a catnap there.) I really enjoyed just sitting nearby and watching my kids and the other kids explore the exhibits.

One was a table with a kind of puzzle pieces that you put together in various configurations, and moved around, to control what was happening on a screen on the wall.  It was pretty clever, and took some time to explore enough to figure out.  The funniest part to me was how many people, both kids and adults, thought that the screen on the wall was a touchscreen.  It was not immediately obvious where the control table was, so it was a logical guess - until you actually touched it. The screen was simply a white sheet hung on the wall. But many kids continued to tap at the creatures, because other kids were playing with the table and the creatures were doing things! One girl even tried that two finger "make it bigger" swipe.  But she figured out after that that it didn't work.

This is where I was reminded and reinforced that it's not kids who have short attention spans.  The real truth is: People of any age have short attention spans for things they are not interested in. All over the museum, parents encouraged their kids to leave one area so they could move on to the next.  The thing about a children's museum is that it has interesting things for kids to explore, that kids like.  There was even a sign on the wall encouraging the adults to let their kids explore for as long as they wanted.  I even heard one adult exclaim, "You've been here for an hour!"

There is a new generation. The Mister Rogers exhibit has been replaced. But some pieces are to be found in other parts of the museum.  Upstairs is the Henrietta Cat tree with lots of cat puppets.  Joy played with that for a long time, lining them all up for bed, and then putting them in chairs to eat, then all lined up for bed again.  One girl, about ten I'd guess, stopped for a moment in front of it and said, with a tone of interest and trying to recall, "What's this called? From Jolly Rogers..."

We ate lunch there, and we got to see the clock pendulum knock down several pins.  There was a robot that served ice cream and Noah wanted some, so I gave him a choice: two small $5 robot cones,  or three tubs of ice cream from the store for dessert that night.  He chose the latter, and we still got to watch the robot do its thing because other people paid the $5!

I'm glad that visit was at the beginning of our trip, because I did enjoy it.

Random: Joy says "pasteteeth" for toothpaste.

7/12 - JPD crawl/scoot >1' on bed

Joy says "Thaith" now.

7/13-7/20 - We had a week to recover from the Pittsburgh trip and get ready for the Daley vacation in Maine.  We determined to try to make it as much of a real vacation as possible, and I think that was a success.  Jon did minimal Lime Daley work, and we focussed on enjoying our time with the family.  Many games of Monopoly and Candyland were played, and there was a 1000 piece puzzle, too. We saw Bar Harbor, and drove up Cadillac Mountain, and went on hikes.  It happened to be an unusually hot and humid week, which was a bit tough, but Auntie E bought the kids a play pool, and we ate about a half gallon of ice cream every night.  I made a batch every day, and Ben kept us supplied with flavors from the store. Faith and Noah each got a turn hiking with Uncle Ben, Aunt Cinnamon, and Coleman.

7/15 - Mommy: "Did you have fun outside with Uncle Ben?" Joy: "Yup." Mommy: "What did you see?" Joy: "Rock." Mommy: "Lots of rocks! What else?" Joy: "Nudder rock.  Nudder rock.  Nudder rock."

7/20 - JPD rolled front to back at naptime.

7/21 - Faith said, "When I'm bigger, and Jeremiah is grown up, I want to marry him."

7/21 - We arrived home after dinner on Saturday, and slept late Sunday (except for Jon who went to the first service) so we could get ready for the Hillsboro Balloon Festival Parade.  Faith and Noah had bells to ring this year, and Jonathan threw candy.

7/22 - Joy went to the doctor for this huge wart on her palm, where her pinky finger joins. She did a  great job during the freeze treatment, and the bulk of it fell off on Thursday.

This week has been "recovery from everything" week.  And I got the boys school portfolios done.  Yesterday, we unpacked our pictures and started hanging them up!  It's so nice to see them again.  And the new one from Grandma Landeen matches our kitchen wall paint perfectly.

7/27 - Also yesterday, we sent Faith off for a week of adventure with Grammy, Papa, and Ryan on Star Island.  She has been excited for months and counting down the days.  Then yesterday morning it finally hit her that she'd be leaving us.  But I told her it was ok to miss us and to be sad for a little as long as it didn't ruin the fun of being there. We had a nice long cuddle in the rocking chair, and then she was ready to go.  What a sweetheart. She was all smiles as we waved to each other as Papa drove out of our driveway.