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First I must tell you we are potty training. Despite some frustration it’s going quite well. Today Colin sat on the potty twice and just went and then continued on his day. As opposed to him sitting forever waiting for the pee to come…

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:

It has happened. We have been talking to Colin about how binkies are for babies and that some day very soon, before he turned 3, we would collect all of his binkies and send them to the binky tree in Copenhagen. Yesterday Colin decided was the day. Despite several warnings that it would mean no more binkies he was quite adamant that we send them off to the binky tree “today”. Today being yesterday, he just has a very cute way of saying today.

We collected all of the binkies we could find into a box, wrapped it, colored it, put “stamps” on it and then left it out for daddy to mail.

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!

A couple of articles worth reading, methinks. One makes me laugh and one makes me happy.

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

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

When Colin was born I remember hearing a mother say that she tried to teach her child to say Da Da for their first words figuring that that meant when the baby woke up in the middle of the night he/she would call for Da Da since that was the word they knew and mom could get more sleep… I sort of tried with Colin. I really tried with Hannah and am happy to say my work has paid off!

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!!!

A few selections from our time so far in Michigan.

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…