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!

Laugh: Large Families… (I’m all for being green, but c’mon!)

Happy: Mom “Shocked”… (And dad of baby girl relieved.)

Tonight, despite having spent what felt like half the day crying, Hannah just spent the last 10 or 15 minutes being adorable and saying Da da da da da da da over and over again!

You better watch out Da Da!!!

Jake and Colin’s sleepover:

Jake and Colin taking a bath:

Hannah eating Zack, or at least trying really hard to…:

My favorite picture of the whole trip so far:

Goodbye iTheme, hello WooTheme! What you’re looking at now is a brand new theme for ellsworthlink.net!

I’m sunsetting the long-time template of ellsworthlink.net—shown here, to the right—for a newer, slightly-more-fun(-for-me) theme called FreshNews. In that process I’m making a number of changes to the back end that will make it either easier for us to maintain, better for users, or just “different” because I wanted it to be different.

One of the big changes is subscriptions. The quick story is that I removed all the subscriptions so we could try a new subscription service. This new service is much (!) more reliable and I think we’ll see folks who stopped getting emails a long time ago start to reliably receive the emails if you recreate your subscription by following the link at the tippy-top of the page on the right-hand side. [Hmm, it is a link, Ellsworth, just give it to them: Subscribe to Alert Emails.] The biggest difference you’ll see here (well, aside from them working) is that you’ll only receive one email per day at the most, even if we post multiple times—they’ll all be included in the every-morning-at-5am email.

Lots of cosmetic changes, and lots of stuff will continue to change, but Deb keeps making fun of me that this isn’t up yet, so here it goes…

How’d ya hurt ya, | cut ya, burn ya, | scratch ya, dig ya, bite ya?

Lots of “dja” and “tcha” sounds end up getting mixed in there which always made it a pleasure to hear.