It has been a long time, I think twitter is bad for my blogging schedule.

Well, lets recap the last lots of weeks.

Leah went to Texas with her grandma, and returned with a strong command of family relationships. We can ask her questions like who is your Mommy’s Grandma or who is Grandma’s Mommy and she will nail them. I don’t think I had that good of an understanding until I was 12. She has explained in great detail about how she went on the black airplane in the sky with <whisper> grandma </whisper>.

Shortly after that, or was it before that, Kelly went to Boston for work. I think she was gone 3 days, but it felt like weeks. I had to reconfigure the morning routine so that I could handle it. I cannot deal with the complexities of getting the kids dressed, fed and in the car first thing in the morning.

Before things settled down from the first couple trips I ran of to RailsConf in Vegas. The fun part of this trip was convincing Kelly to come join me. Vegas is a much different place when you decidedly pace your self and try to relax. I am really glad that my coworker, Scott, and his wife were able to hang out with us for the weekend. That town is just too weird to be with out friends. It was a good trip, from the sad story of Monorail Pidgin to the joy that was Bouchon.

We’ve only been back a week now but I am going to be scooting off to San Francisco for WWDC in a week — poor wife. All this travel has Leah a little out of wack and I saved my longest trip for last. You know, to rub it in.

Since last time I posted we have passed a few milestones here in the Sexton household. Laurence has gone from scooting to crawling and standing. Recently he has been starting to cruse around furniture while holding on. Started to get the controlled fall thing down. Baby break falling is pretty simple, if you are starting to topple — sit! His diaper helps pad the landing. Works out pretty well most of the time.

The other huge milestone was Leah’s. We officially have a potty trained toddler. We followed the book Potty Training Boot Camp which I think was a solid success. But it was not easy. There was plenty of crying, throwing tantrums, running naked and protesting — and that was just me. Leah had similar behavior. Now that the battle is over, we are better for it. Leah still stresses about it, but is getting better. We have been able to venture on longer car rides and walks with nary an accident.

We have persisted the bribe for peeing or pooping in the potty — and I am willing to continue it until her twenties if I have to — candy. that goes for anyone at Ft. Truxion: if you pee in the potty, all you have to do is 1) put your underwear back on and 2) do that “I did it dance” and you will receive candy.

Sweet deal.

HALP, he’s learned tools!

Lars loves the outside as long as he doesn’t have to touch it.

Tackle!

Taking care of our pretty flowers.

Leah and panda going on a short walk.

Playing with her little buddy.

Too tired for food.

See more in the album.

Look Max, I can scoot too!

I lost my keys. I really couldn’t find them. I looked everywhere they could be, everywhere that is within reach of a two and a half year old. The really crappy part is they have my hard token on them. I did not want to call IT and have to get a new one, with “director level” approval. Ugh.

Retraced my steps. Last time I saw them was when I had Kelly read me the secret numbers so I could send an email. On a side note: sending email takes way too much effort. I remember that she did this very clearly because she read the numbers upside down to start with. She claims that she then physically handed me the keys. But I firmly but disagreed. Oh, another side note: don’t disagree with your wife when it just doesn’t matter.

After going through the desk and my bag, we both agreed that little miss must have taken them. I seem to remember the ‘fixing’ of my tower with keys. And I think that occurred after the upside down number incident.

We pulled up the couch. Went through the fridge and cabinets. Litter box. Trash cans. Toy boxes.

Nothing.

I was in the kitchen going through the shoe pile when kelly announce that she ‘though she just heard them.’ Understanding that left to their own devices my keys do not make any sound I could only figure she was mocking me in some way. But nope, she had ninja like hearing and heard a little jingle when standing up from our desk chair.

Well that desk chair is a fancy feux Areon from Office Max, and happens to have an elabrate truss system for the lumbar support, that, from the point of view of a two year old, makes a hand place to store some fixin’ keys.

Had Kelly not heard them I don’t think I would have found them until the next time I disasemmebled my office chair. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t disassemble my office chair very often at all. Maybe I should start, who knows what I might find.

“I wanna be nakin”

“Nakin with the boys”

“I’m dancing nakin!”

“We are looking for the panda bear”

Some of those things make me, as the father of a daughter, very sad on the inside.

We have decided that we can’t take our commute any more. Kelly has the chance to listen to 2 kids scream for a commute that can take upwards of an hour we’ve decided that this is simply not good lifestyle. And if she gets home and decides she wants some help — she gives me a call and it might be more than an hour and a half for me to walk in the door.

Yeah, not really working for me.

So we are looking for a new place. We started looking near Dunn Lorring or one of the Falls Church Metro stops. But I think we decided we really prefer West Fall Church/McLean. The more I think about it, the better my wife’s commute the happier I am gonna be. Weird how that works.

We did find one house that was, well, ideal. Unfortunately by the time we got to go see it it was already under contract. It was a bit on the pricy side (all the ‘ideal’ ones are), but totally worth it.

While we considered buying before selling, I think we’ve deiced don’t like that idea, so have stepped up the ‘getting the house ready’ tasks. The sad thing is now that we are replacing all the light fixtures, painting, building circuit breaker doors, installing range hoods — well, it really makes the current place nice. Man, all these little things add up. Hopefully it will help when people come look at it.

I know people do it all the time, but I don’t know what we are going to do once it is listed and we get calls that someone wants to come see our place and we are waist deep in dirty diapers and kids toys. You can’t keep the house clean with a toddler AND a baby.

So, anyone want to buy a townhouse in Burke? It’s got new light fixtures!

If there is one thing I like it is setting up ssh to use my public key so that I don’t have to type a password when login to a server. This wasn’t too hard, but since OSX does not have ssh-copy-id by default I would have to pull up the instructions every time to make sure I remembered the file names and permissions just right.

So last night I made a ruby gem to remember how to do it for me, ssh-keyput

Now all I’s got to do to copy my public key is:

$ ssh-keyput chris@server.com

To install all you need is a simple gem install:

$ gem install csexton-ssh-keyput -s http://gems.github.com

It is nothign bu a gloafied wrapper for a few shell commands, but it is much easier to remember

A little email exchange I had yesterday: