The Rankin Zoo 

Coral has a few fish (thanks for getting us started, Kirstin) and as everyone knows, fish aren’t always the hardiest of animals. She’s had the same brown fish for a fairly long time. We got an orange fish to go with it a while back and then more recently we got another orange fish and a yellow fish.

Anyway, all but the brown fish have died. The second orange fish died over the weekend. For a 2.5 year old I’m not sure death is something she can really understand. We try to explain things in pretty basic terms. This is the exchange I had at bed time tonight:

Coral: “Daddy, we don’t have any more orange fish. Their bodies stopped working and I think they’re sick.”

Me: “I know, mommy told me that. I think they both went to heaven.”

Coral: “Well, one of them did - the other one we flushed down the toilet.”

The other morning Coral and I were lying down on the couch watching some Blue’s Clues. She had her head on my chest. After a few minutes she sat up and exclaimed, “I can hear your heartbeep!”

Feel free to ignore.

There’s a search engine, Blingo, that seems to be entirely driven by Google search. The catch is that every once in a while they give our prizes when you search. So, if you’re not partial to your existing search engine then you could use Blingo and potentially win something every once in a while. Not bad.

If you sign up using my link then I think I win everything you win. That sounds cool to me!

I’ve been using it for a while and they don’t seem to spam or anything bad like that so it’s probably safe to use.

Finally, our counter tops have been installed. We’ve been waiting so long and this is the big moment we’ve been looking forward to! Yes! Uh… wait… hmmmm.

I thought we were getting more than that.

That’s right, we have about 1/15th of our counters. We have a stove, but no microwave. We have a dishwasher, not hooked up. We have 2/3rds of our under cabinet lighting. We have one pendant light, but not the other.

Anyway, they brought the counters today but they weren’t the right size (long story). The good news is that they plan to come back on Tuesday so hopefully we’ll get this thing wrapped up soon.

We have been loosely encouraging Coral to use the potty for a while now. Our standing offer is that she gets one M&M each time she uses the potty. First of all, it’s amazing to see how she can savor one single M&M. Second of all, it’s equally amazing how much chocolate she can get on her face from one M&M.

It used to be that getting an M&M was the highlight of her day. We kept them in a jar up on a high shelf and handed them out one at a time as she used the potty. Now, half the time she uses the potty and we talk about getting the M&M but it’s not around so we say we’ll get it later and then we forget. She doesn’t seem to care.

She now gets the M&Ms herself. We keep them in a tupperware container on a shelf she can reach. One side effect of this is that anyone who visits our house and uses the potty is likely to get an M&M from Coral (whether you want one or not). The really interesting thing is that she never takes an M&M when she doesn’t “deserve” one. When she uses the potty she takes only one - she never takes two. I’m assuming this will change at some point. She’ll realize that she can sneak an M&M here or there, or take two instead of one when she uses the potty - but so far this hasn’t occurred to her. I wonder if it will be a gradual change - she takes one here or there - or if one day we’ll come upstairs to find her polishing off her 50th M&M. We will see…