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).