Parks - While we love Milford's Keyes field for its park and swimming pool, Michelle has been on a kick to find other parks in the area. She often takes the kids to the creepily named Amherst Cemetery fields (no, it's not). Yesterday we took a little longer excursion and went to the park in Bedford (Riley Park?). It had your usual monster wood playground but it also had an excellent swimming pool with fountains, slides, a kiddie pool. A family day pass for non-residents is $12. We'll keep that one in mind, especially once school lets out. Soon Michelle wants to check out the park in Peterborough (about 20 minutes west of us).
Michael - We were a bit frustrated with Michael this weekend on the BM front. He hadn't gone in about a day and a half. Yesterday, he went three times, but never on a toilet. I'll leave out the details, but we were getting grossed out.
Claire - This week is Claire's last bit of school before summer vacation. I'm not sure what Michelle will do once she has Claire home all day. Luckily there are plenty of other girls in the neighborhood that are Claire and Abby's ages. Hopefully they'll link up and keep each other busy. (Trendy name alert!) There's Madison, Alexandra, Brianna, Jessica, Britany, Katrina, and Anastasia. Once next fall comes, Abby will also be in school leaving Michelle home alone with just the boys. Sometimes it's hard to remember that we once thought all we would have are daughters...
Congress - I learned an interesting expression for talking about a rather delicate subject that obfuscates it, especially in front of children. "Marital congress". Look it up. Given the scandalous acts of some of our elected representatives, perhaps 'congress' wasn't such a bad thing to call them. :-) You might wonder where I found the term. It was a discussion of female monogamy at Jimmy Akin's weblog.
Online bookmarking - We tend to think of web bookmarks as something you keep on your own computer. What if you want to keep bookmarks online so that you can reach them from anywhere or if you want to share them with others? If so, look into the services of del.icio.us, spurl, and furl. They're all slightly different in what they do. I've had the most familiarity with del.icio.us but plan at looking at the other two as well. The thing I find interesting about del.icio.us is that you can see what's just been bookmarked, the most popular bookmarks of the day, or look at bookmarks by subscriber or categories. The popular bookmarks of the day provides a service similar to what is provided by blogdex, which indexes the links which are most written about today, usually in weblogs. There are a bit of biases in the systems: del.icio.us popular links tend to be geeky in nature because of their subscriber base so far, blogdex tends to be news junkie/political in nature (although it didn't used to be...) . It's always interesting to see the niches these little online web services carve out for themselves.