©2026 The Daleys
Happy Birthday, little guy!
Jonathan and I have been singing the birthday song to him all day, and Jonathan's version includes "dear my little brother Noah."
I started a new IT job recently, and the majority of the people there have Macs, so I have been bringing one home in order to learn more about them. They have come a long way in 20 years, when I used to play on a Macintosh SE (with three floppy drives, a nice bonus so you didn't have to switch floppies so much)
The Carnegie Science Center has a promotion that if you bring a snowball in on the first day of summer, they give you free admission. Although this was the first year I'd heard of it, everyone else in Pittsburgh
knew about it, too.
6/15 - Upper left canine begins to poke through.
6/18 - Two steps in the morning, three in the evening! He continues to try walking more often, usually one or two steps before deciding that crawling is better. But yesterday, he did start crawling to me, then stood up before he reached me and took one step towards me.
He is mostly using only one sign now, rather a "universal yes" - it's kind of like the real "yes" but kind of like a wave, and often done with both arms. Do you want to get down? Yes. Do you want milk? Yes. Do you want more granola? Yes. Etc.
We got new sidewalk chalk, since the box I bought when I was at CMU is finally used up. (: Jonathan likes to paint his tricycle tires, and he calls it "Never Proof Tire Chalk."
Yesterday, Noah poked a coat hanger into his eye. All is well now, but I wanted to post the adventure. My mom wrote up the story after my phone conversation with her, so I'm going to paste that here to save typing. I'll interject where I want to add details or comments. Mom's story will be in italics.
I am in the middle of a non-direct red-eye flight from Seattle to Pittsburgh. I was supposed to go to Charlotte, NC on the way, but USAir called(!) last night to tell me to come a half hour early to the airport (I was already there and had already checked in, and having a relaxing dinner watching the planes taxiing and taking off) because the Charlotte flight was delayed and I was going to be re-routed through Detroit on Northwest.
I went on a fairly long walk tonight (take a look at the topological map too, there were some decent hills) - I am in Seattle with one of my customers who is having their annual retreat, and invited me to come along.
We are staying at the Palisades Retreat Center, which is a lovely place to be - my bedroom faces Puget Sound (basically the same view as in the picture on the above link), and it gets dark at 10 or so, and light at 4 or 5.
This is the weekend for strawberry festivals and several local farms have pick-your-own fields. Last year, when I was about 39 weeks pregnant, Mom, Dad, Jon, Jonathan and I picked 14 lbs of strawberries at Trax Farms.
One is Jonathan at 9 months, one is Noah at (almost) 11 months. Can you tell who is who? There is at least one environmental clue in the pictures themselves, but don't look at the links until you've made your guess.
Our new church has a youth orchestra that Jon has become part of. They did a few concerts at local nursing homes last weekend and I got some pictures and videos. The main reason for this post is to explain the videos. Our camera isn't primarily a video camera, so it only takes 60 second clips. That's great for most of what we take, but doesn't work so well for concerts. (:
The other day, Jonathan pointed his hand like a gun at Noah and made the shooting noise (not going to try to spell that one!) Directly in response, Noah pointed at Jonathan and went, "pfff, pfff, pfff."
Noah can now unscrew and screw on lids. He is also turning out to be an adventurous climber. He wanted something on top of the changing table and he succeeded in getting both feet on the top of the bottom drawer. But then he was stuck. He also likes to step onto the stool in the bathroom to reach the water in the sink.