Road Trip!

Tonight we leave for...St. Louis, Memphis, and Iowa! Woohoo! We've been aching for a road trip for months. We're really very excited. Danielle will hopefully sleep through most of the drive, and Isaac will hopefully be distracted from us not being around by multitudes of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. John, Jeremiah, and I will be just fine. :)

(Yesterday's) Quote of the Day

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."

--John Lehman

A Joke

What's brown and sticky?

John's Aligning

So, I like to help John with his work. We sit on the couch and cuddle and look through lists and lists of state standards and check the box for the ones that match the textbook question.

Kansas has the most ridiculous standards. The most ridiculous one, though, is the following.

Understands that when he or she is playing a sport outside that sun screen should be applied to the shin.

We were so confused. Why the shin? Not the face or neck or ears or knuckles?

I just figured it out--it's a typo.

"Sun screen should be applied to the...skin."

Bathtub Fizzies

Jeremiah's occupational therapist suggested randomly changing his routine. Like having a different color of plate at dinner or doing things in a different order. So he's forced to notice that things are different. He has "low registration" of his world, meaning partly that he stops noticing things.

Yesterday I bought "bathtub fizzies"--you put a couple in the bathwater to dissolve, and it changes the color of the water. This morning we did a blue one and a red one, and the water was a pretty (though grayish) lavender.

I left the boys to their own devices while I folded a quick load of laundry. And when I checked on them I noticed bubbles in the bathtub...which weren't there before. So I stepped closer. And the water was black, with bubbles. What else did I buy? Oh. I didn't buy anything else. It was just all of the fizzies, care of Jeremiah's brother. And all of the baby wash, care of Jeremiah's brother. I sternly said That's not okay. And turned into the kitchen to cover up my laughter.

So, 20 blue fizzies and 20 red fizzies and 20 yellow fizzies make black. Maybe really really dark brown.

Potty Training Complete?

Maybe it's one of those non-events, where I can't tell the difference between before and after, like day turning into night. But I'm pretty sure it's nighttime now. Isaac's potty trained! I still have him wear Pull-Ups to bed, but they've been dry in the morning. He always uses the toilet! No more diapers for Isaac! WooHoo!!!

Today I went to the library and checked out all of the picture books about potty training (hopefully nobody else wants any for a few weeks) in hopes that Isaac will be happy to not wear diapers, as opposed to able to and unhappy about it. We read 6 books straight through (and then he was finished reading "potty books"), and I think that he's convinced that children can be happy without diapers and that it's fun to be big.

Maybe we can allot $40 a month to ... Spiderman toys? magnetic marbles? books? and underwear every once in a while, I suppose.

Interesting Choice

A sequence of random factoids that culminate in a story:

On the playhouse Disney website, there is an incredible machine game where you place the correct body part on the animal. In keeping with the prevalence of relativism, placing a trunk on a tiger earns you an enthusiastic "Interesting choice!"

We have a warehouse-style grocery store in La Crosse (Woodman's) that sells Breyers Ice Cream for $2.99 regular price (It's typically $5.50 or more)

Alison made quesadillas for our boys last night, including a healthy portion of refried beans to dip them in.

So, we had a little ice cream party; Alison served everyone a bowl of Mint and Chip. By chance Jeremiah received his dessert and sat next to the bowl of bean dip. Without us noticing, after a few bites of ice cream he grabbed the beans and stabbed himself a spoonful. So we got a good laugh out of Jeremiah's meal planning. Not only did he eat that spoonful of beans, once he had a taste he ditched the ice cream and went whole hog on the refritos. Eventually he did settle into an every-other-spoonful routine, but we were more than a little surprised that cold refried beans were a little higher on the food-tasting-totem-pole than, of all things, Breyers mint and chip, (especially considering we're convinced it's harvested from the first snows of Christmas morning by chocolate sprinkling elves from Santa's workshop).

Crossword puzzles

John and I were in two different places at the same time. (I know it's not as hard as me being in two different places at the same time, but it was fun to write!) We did a crossword puzzle together. It was fun; they have a chat that we used at first, but it was really slow, so we used out google chat instead. The sad part was that the answers were sometimes too obvious--"able to be repaired" was "reparable." But it was fun. You can "invite" someone to do a crossword with you, and it sends them an email with a link to the site.

Installing an Alarm

Friday night the small window in our boys' room was opened from the outside while we were home, around 9:30 at night.

Today we had an alarm system installed.

I think I'll sleep better now. After two nights of sleeping for about four hours (and interrupted at that) I crashed last night for 11. It was nice. I do like my sleep, it's true.

So we have an alarm, we had some extra devices installed on the windows in the children's rooms, and we have a sign for our yard, which I really wanted.

We're considering installing a motion activated spotlight on the corner of our house. I just heard about motion sensor sprinklers, which could be plain fun.

Potty Training Isaac

Throughout the day I hear little footsteps running to the bathroom and little tinkling noises in the bathroom. It took me a few days to adjust my thinking from "Don't play in the sink!" to "Oh, Isaac sure pees a lot."

Yesterday was a landmark day. Isaac ran to the bathroom about 5 minutes after he had peed. And then he came out and said, "Mom, wipe my bum please," so very sweetly. Yes! He understands.

Much better than "I NEED A WI-IPE!"

Writing a Letter to the Sun

Last night Isaac didn't want to go to bed. "The sun doesn't want to go down!!!!! The sun wants to stay up!!!!!" I suggested that since the sun was already down (as in, behind the trees and we couldn't see it anymore even though it was still light outside), we could write the sun a letter when it comes up again.

So this morning (way after the sun came up) we wrote the sun a letter. And we told the sun that Isaac gets sad when it goes down, etc, and put it in an envelope and stamped and addressed it, and took it to the mailbox and put the red flag up so the mailman knows there's a letter inside.

(Um, Grandpa...when you get the letter to the sun, could you write back and explain why you--the sun--need to go down and that it's okay for Isaac to go to sleep or something? Thanks. That would help a bit I think.)

Creating money (and lawnmowers)

So every once in a while you see some excitable talk about how banks are allowed to create money. Wikipedia has table in their fractional reserve entry demonstrating this:

Table 1: Private bank T-account
	Action	Assets	Liabilites	Reserves
1	Customer A deposits 100 paper dollars	None	$100 in interest-bearing deposits	100 paper dollars
2	Bank loans $70 to Customer B	IOUs worth $70	$100 in interest bearing deposits	30 paper dollars
3	Customer B deposits 70 paper dollars	IOUs worth $70	$170 in interest-bearing deposits	100 paper dollars
4	Bank loans $49 to Customer C	IOUs worth $119	$170 in interest-bearing deposits	51 paper dollars
5	Customer C deposits 49 paper dollars	IOUs worth $119	$219 in interest-bearing deposits	100 paper dollars

The bank's IOUs and deposits are increasing; there is more money with each step in the process to a maximum of 333 (100 the initial deposit/30% the reserve requirement).

What I realized today is that you can do the same thing with lawnmowers. Suppose Kelvin owns a lawnmower. He brings it to Larry and offers to give him the lawnmower in exchange for a note that says "Redeemable for (1) lawnmower -Larry" Does Kelvin own a lawnmower? Certainly, he bought it first and has a legally binding contract saying he's owed one. Does Larry own a lawnmower? You bet! He's cutting the grass right now.

In fact, Larry could show up to a casting of Oprah and present everyone a certificate good for one lawnmower in exchange for an IOU for one. It's Oprah, EVERYONE gets a lawnmower.

The fractional reserve system would insist that Larry keep one out of nine lawnmowers he accepts just in case Kelvin decides to mow; keeping one out of one lawnmowers like some suggest would pooper the Oprah party, and who wants that?

Isaac's Eating!

Isaac hasn't really eaten a whole lot for two years or so. This week he's been eating again, asking for more corn and carrots and shepherds pie. The only seeming difficulty with this is that he's running to the bathroom every half hour or so. Last night he was trying to get out of his room (after bedtime) and John caught him and was telling him he needed to go to sleep, etc, and Isaac started whimpering. John finally caught on to Isaac saying "...peepee in the toilet..." oh so whimperingly soft. Yes! He eats and uses the toilet! (So long as we don't diaper him. We'll see how long it takes to get him fully potty trained, regardless of his diaper situation.)

Danielle's Finger Trick

Yesterday John discovered a trick that Danielle does, and shared it with our entire branch one family at a time. To his credit, she did it faster for people than for the camera.

Isaac's Before Bedtime Craziness

Isaac's a ton of fun...especially when we want him to get settled down for bed. He's pretty good about keeping us all entertained, and we thought we'd get a little video of him singing (he has a really good ear and changes his pitch to match whatever he hears) but it turned out to be this.

Finances

So, I was just checking our bank account online, and I looked at the balance, and I thought...

"That's impossible!"

In a good way.

I saw a much bigger number there than I'm used to seeing.

Except, it was the available credit we have. Not the cash we have. Maybe next time.

Comments

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