Potty Training is Oh Such Fun
So we’ve been working on potty training for Piers lately. I never thought I’d talk this much about waste elimination in my life. Now when we potty trained his sister she picked it up pretty quickly. It didn’t take too long for here to get the idea of what we wanted her to do and she did her best. I remember being slightly frustrated by it but also that it was not too many weeks of working on it. Now Piers, on the other hand, likes to go to great lengths (it seems) to show us how different he is from Hope. People say boys are more difficult to potty train and based on a study of two toddlers, I can agree. Read more »
Posted: September 8th, 2008 under Decisions.
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I mentioned earlier that last year I finished my first novel. It was a pretty big accomplishment for me. Although I’d written books before, this was the first time I created a long fictional piece. Overall the story is solid, the characters are good, and I’m very pleased with it. Recently I’ve let a group of writers’ critique it and astonishingly they all have positive things to say about it. There are little things I need to fix but overall the response has been very positive. Unfortunately, one place where the response has not been positive is in my quest to find an agent. It’s been about 8 months since I started and I’ve not moved forward an inch. 
Growing up I was always interested in magic. My Grandfather always had a trick or two with them and would entertain anyone within earshot with it. I collected magic tricks of all sorts and practices fairly regularly on them. I even did a children’s birthday party complete with levitating woman at the end of the show. Eventually I got interested in other things, but I always kept a trick or two in my memory in case the opportunity ever arose. Periodically I check out books from the library on magic tricks and practice a few of them. I still have my old case of magic tricks and the kids become thrilled when I pull it out. There isn’t anything really special in there, just your garden variety tricks, but it still holds wonder for the kids. 
One of the more interesting aspects of Economics that I learned in my masters program was the obvious point that people generally make economic decisions that benefit them the most based on the constraints faced. This concept was the main focus of the best selling Freakonomics book a few years back. In it, the authors examined various behavior and using statistics tried to determine why two seemingly disparate pieces of information were actually related. It seems fairly common sense; after all you would expect people to take actions they perceive are in their best interest. Still, why are we surprised when it happens? 
I recounted the loss of my daughter’s tooth on an earlier post. Well she has more loose teeth now and recently another one started to give way. Hope had been pushing it with her tongue for days, but as loose as it was, it just refused to come out. I’d try to give it a good hard wiggle, but she would wince and I did not want to hurt her. The worst part is that Amy’s parents had harvested corn on the cob from their garden but Hope did not want to eat any because of her tooth. Everything she ate was soft.