Long Post about Many Things

Potty training update: the good, the bad, and the ugly.... The good: Justine is practically potty trained! Hurrah! Clearly, when both kids were still diaper-clad, a clear interpretation of the failure to launch toilet use success would be that we are indeed clueless parents. Now that we have brought 1 of our 2 dear children to the wonderful world of toilet use, it is clear that we do at least half of something right, half of the time. Maybe. Yeah for the parents!!! The bad: Vasco has completely regressed and now just pees in his pants, 1 inch/2.5 cm away from the toilet. The ugly... well, that was just there as part of the expression, but for starters, ugly will describe the carpets in our house if this potty war continues much longer...

On fauna in our nation's capital: no, not rats, my friends (although that would have been an excellent guess, given the many sightings of such lovely creatures in this city). Justine and I were walking out of the front door when a tiny cute little baby deer jumped up from behind the little bed he had made for himself behind our bush, and started running around the house. He made one complete circle, attempted to settle back into his bed, realized that we were not going away, and decided to run across the street back into the park. Mike and I were crossing fingers/ squeezing thumbs, hoping that no cars would zoom through as the kids are happily watching little Bambi trot across the street. Here he is:

On genetics: aka "A Scientific Treatise Proving that All of the Bulgarian Genes Have Gone to Justine", or, in layman's terms, "The Battle of Peanut Butter and Jelly versus Sirene (Bulgarian Feta) and Kyufteta". After several contained expreriments we decided that the kids were not allergic to peanuts, and today THE FIRST PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY sandwich was made for the kids by Mike. Result: Vasco devours the sandwich, which Justine wanted nothing to do with it. At a bare minimum, I am now not the ONLY person on earth that finds said sandwich unpalatable (I digress to note that in a perfect test case--stranded in the desert for a number of hours with just a boxed lunch with pb&j sandwich--I refused to eat it!). At dinnertime, as we grilled kyufteta accompanied with salad and potatoes copiously seasoned with the grated feta cheese, Justine had a plateful of both meat and cheese, which she could not stop eating. From Vasco's perspective, on the other hand, the feta cheese was a culinary adventure he did not want to take. And thus, it is proven: we had twins, because the Bulgarian genes could not be convinced to mingle with the US genes...

And, finally, a really cool action picture, just because...