Hannah from her brother’s perspective. I think he gets some great expressions out of her. Perhaps we have a model/photographer team on our hands? LOL

The scene: mom and dad sitting on the sofa tapping away on our laptops while Colin plays with his trains in the train room. Colin comes over and sits down between us.

“Mommy, can I play alphabet on your computer?”

“No, honey.”

“Daddy, can I play alphabet on your computer?”

“Sorry Colin, I’m trying to find a sofa for the basement.”

…Pause…

“Oh. Where’s MY computer?”

He busily told us for a couple of minutes about how he needs a computer and wants one when he gets older. He wants a Colin Computer.

He’s not even three years old. And he has a iPod Touch. C’mon Colin, that has more computing power than the first 10 computers your dad every had…

Here are some various shots.

Colin, Hannah and Grandma enjoying a meal on the new porch. The weather quickly turned too cold for this, so we haven’t done it since.

Colin’s brand new sneakers. We went in one day to get measured and were told that his size 9’s would be fine for a bit longer. We went back a few days later because we decided to go ahead and get the new shoes and discovered that there must have been a full moon because there was no question that Colin is now a size 10…

Hannah will be a flower for Halloween this year. This is just her trying the costume out. We will have more pictures for the event itself later.

My mother knitted Hannah a beautiful pink flower hat that was a bit too big for her right after she was born, but now it fits perfectly. The crying in the picture is not because of the hat which she wore happily for some time prior to the picture. She was upset for some other unknown reason at the time I decided to snap some photos.

To keep Colin happy one of the very first things I did after we moved into the new house was turn the den into a train play area using all of his tracks, which we were never really able to do at the condo. That room now has his train table in it and is our main play area. At some point downstairs will become our main area and we will get a piano in there.

After the choir or chimes or bells would finish everyone would clap and Colin really enjoyed joining in on the clapping. So much so he decided one of the performances deserved a loud “Woo hooooo.”

After the children’s time we decided to go ahead and bring him down to child care. Before we headed there we wanted to let dad know at the back of the church what we were doing so we walked back to him and he said quite loudly “Dad, we are going to go”. He amused several members of the congregation and made his parents blush.

[Thanks, Joe, for shooting it over to me!]

Colin is definitely potty trained, albeit a bit of a slave to his little potty, but we can work on that. It’s actually impressive that we only started a few weeks ago and he’s already able to stay dry through the night! I’m told night time dryness can take a year or more. And before anyone says it, I am well aware he can regress.

Yesterday while an adult (I will keep his identity anonymous) was sitting on his throne and Colin was hovering around. At one point Colin says “What’s that sound?” I don’t recall if there was a reply, but Colin then said “it’s crap sounds”. Matt and I were in shock because neither of us know where he learned to say that.

This morning while changing Colin I happened to use the word crap, like “oh crap I forgot to start breakfast” so we figured out where the word came from, but that doesn’t explain how Colin used the word to refer to poop since neither of us use it that way (as in I have to go take a crap, etc).

Today Colin went into the bathroom to go number 2. He finished and then proclaimed “Holy Crap!” He repeated this proclamation after his second trip to the potty for number 2.

If anyone would like to take credit for telling Colin that crap means poop, please let us know. And if you have any tips on how to stop him from using that and the word stupid, we would appreciate it.

It is a story about this woman:

It was the beginning of 2003 and Matt and I were still in our first blissful year of marriage. Matt’s parents were in town for a visit. Judy is a lover of lighthouses so we were visiting the Point Bonita Lighthouse just over the Golden Gate bridge. It is well known for its cool suspension bridge that is a bit scary due to the limit of people that can be on it at once.

After enjoying the lighthouse we walked the trail back to our car and I ran ahead to use the porta potty that was along the road. Matt and Judy, I believe, strolled slowly probably taking in the calla lillies I remember we were all impressed with along the way.  Matt came upon the porta potty and decided he would play a trick on me. He proceeded to whisper into the potty “I can hear you peeing…” And then decided he would lie in wait to snap a picture of me as I exited since he was certain I would have some silly reaction to his comment.

To his chagrin, I had already left the toilet and the lovely lady in the picture above was the recipient of his little jokes. She doesn’t look too thrilled, does she?

And to add to the humor, Dan watched the whole thing go down knowing that it wasn’t me in the bathroom and didn’t say anything! LOL

Ah memories!

Colin is in his pajamas outside because it was pajama day at school. Sophia’s mom, Joana, had managed to change her into a swimsuit prior to her getting wet, but since he was already wet I didn’t bother…

As a reward for filling up a potty chart with stickers by going pee and poo in the potty Colin got as his reward a battery operated thomas. It’s pretty cool, by far his favorite toy at the moment. It’s got a pretty strong engine, can pull several cars up the hills we have. It can also do some serious damage on mom’s hair.

For the record, I don’t ever recommend allowing a child “chug” his/her battery operated train under your head if you have long hair.

Here’s Thomas right after I ripped him out of my hair:

And this is the rats nest that was my hair after he was gone:

We have gone to sleep 3 times since the binkies were gone and only a casual mention has been made by Colin. He did get up this am at like 5:30 and his afternoon nap was only 1.5 hours, as opposed to 2-3 hours, which I think may be a side effect to the loss of the binky.

Hopefully we won’t hear mention of them again, although I have read that cold turkey like this works for a few days and then the child starts to miss them again, so we could be in for a rough weekend.

But the binkies are actually at Matt’s office, so there is no turning back! Hooray for growing up!

Thanks to our friend Katie for sharing her story.

This video is the answer to the question: “What is Colin’s current favorite game.” That’s right… Who hasn’t played a good game of Fall Over in their day.

I had a good old-fashioned LOL when I read the take on Silicon Alley Insider take on the press release Dow Jones issued about some General Manager changes and my coming back to The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

In any case, it isn’t going to stay this way. There will hopefully be significantly more functionality once things settle down, but not so much more that you can’t find your way around.

You also probably noticed that you did not get an email alert about this post. That functionality also broke with the site migration from IMHosted to HostGator. I’ve still got a list of who was on the updates before and I will send you all a note about how to “re-up” your subscription. And if you were annoyed by the emails, this will be a good time to not bother renewing. Or, if you’re a bigger geek than me, you may be subscribed to the RSS feed and reading it from your newsreader. (I’ve only just subscribed to the RSS feed as a part of this whole migration/upgrade exercise.)

See the links below for pictures of our water-logged town:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sean123/

share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8EYuWzNuycuZA

kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=17mud8e3.7vhtbeuj&x=0&y=-qqyreo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisjur/460614929/

http://flickr.com/photos/67738072@N00/

These pictures were taken 1 or 2 blocks from our building: http://tinyurl.com/2gzprk

Here are some of the best pictures I’ve seen of the fire so far: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7267661@N02/sets/72157600081200694/

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0wuoHXzWNQ

Lots of video and pictures:

http://www.hoboken411.com

I will post more if I find em!

Deb

I decided to Yahoo my father, since it turns out he is actually on Wikipedia. Who knew my father was so active in the community, doing speaking engagements, etc.

For some reason I decided to Yahoo my maiden name and I came across this link. If you look at the bottom you will see a note about our wedding. I had no idea anything was ever printed into a newspaper, since I think I still have all the paperwork sitting around this condo somewhere (I’m a pack rat, I’m trying to get help).

I know I had previously Googled (in the pre yahoo days) Debra Ellsworth, but I don’t recall seeing that there were a couple other women named Debra Ellsworth. It’s very trippy to think there are other women with my exact same name.

I love that there are links to the real me as ad production contacts for both Dow Jones Online as well as SmartMoney, I wonder how long the SmartMoney link will stay up!

Today, though, I read an article that gave me pause because of its scale—not in a spiritual way, but in a the-implications-are-so-big and the-inequality-is-so-great kind of way. The columnist from Yahoo! Finance (yes, I read it even when I’m not working) is Ben Stein (yes, of Win Ben Stein’s Money and Ferris Bueller fame) and much of the article didn’t stick with me except for the section entitled “Disparity by the Numbers” section, excerpted in part below:

The top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners in the nation earn about as much as the bottom 40 percent. That is, about 130,000 high-income Americans earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.

I always knew there was income inequality in the world, and that it wasn’t a first-world vs. third-world kind of thing. And I even knew that there were some really rich dudes. But the (emphasis added) portion really puts a fine point on it in my mind. That is a very few elites (the same elites who subscribe to the notion of the Wisdom of Crowds) exerting economic control over a whole lot of “crowd” (who very likely haven’t even heard of the book, let alone read it).

Anyway, the scale on both sides of that equation boggles my mind.

Merry Christmas! Colin, Deb and I had a great trip back to Michigan, despite my playing the role of Patient Zero in a bad Dustin Hoffman movie and spreading the Norovirus to no fewer than 5 people on the trip.

In any event, Christmas morning was a dream. Colin was as wide awake as the rest of us when we got up extra early and—after he really woke up—enjoyed the electric guitar from his grandparents. He had been making a habit of strumming the heat registers in the apartment, so we thought he might like the guitar. I think he digs it even if he doesn’t quite “get” it…

We had another Christmas with David and his family at mom and dad’s house. That’s Colin making friends with Samantha who was really good with him and David with his son Andrew. Though you can’t see it, Andrew got a remote control snake to scare his new sisters with, but when I overheard them asking to play with it, I gathered it wasn’t going to have the intended effect.

I imagine the last pictures are “obvious”… Deb and I were pretty happy about John’s t-shirt, though because I was engaging in my own little epidemiology experiment and getting people sick we had to wait longer than we wanted to give it to him. Our last Christmas was with Uncle John, Aunt Amy and Cousin Jake. We’ve always known Colin to be a bit of ham for the camera, but I think Christmas #3 turned him into a monster…

In any case, we really did have a wonderful time visiting family in Michigan. We will probably be quarantined for the first 48 hours the next time we visit, but hopefully it will be soon!

So Debra’s consolation for hitting the little 3-0 was to receive a very cool and creative 30-for-30 parcel from her mom and sister. They spent quite a bit of time amassing a collection of 30 goodies to celebrate Deb’s 30th birthday. They went so far as to even put 30 candies in several of the breast-related (ask Deb) objects. And, no, neither Deb nor I were observant enough to notice that (I’ll say it is because it was breast-related, not sure what Deb’s excuse is)… they had to point it out for us.

In any event, I’m sure the pictures make it clear she got some cool stuff and she was very excited about it!

Thanks Mary Ann & Suzanne!

I am going to milk being in my twenties for as long as I can…

We were so happy to have been able to introduce Colin to his Great Grandpa earlier this year. We got some great pictures while we visited.

We took a four generation photo:

We went to the funeral this past weekend. It was a wonderful service, it was clear he had a lot of people who will miss him.

We were blessed to have my brother Dave fly in from Tunisia. It had been a long time since most of us had since many of us had seen him. Suzanne, David and I figured out that we hadn’t all been together since 1997! Here’s a picture of the three of us to commemorate the event.

Will and Joe dressed in their finest:

And Colin was as cute as ever:

This story is, ummmm, not one of those articles.

This one, on the other hand, is… Go NYC!