Jacob is becoming much more independent with getting himself cereal in the morning. The other day he wanted some instant oatmeal, so he got a chair from the table and moved it over to where the cereal cabinet is and got the box down. Then he asked me if the dishes in the dishwasher were clean, and since I didn't know, I just told him to get one out of the cupboard. So he moved another chair over to get his bowl. Next he moved another chair over to the sink so that he could put some water in the bowl.

Since the microwave is right under the cereal cabinet, he just used his first chair to put his cereal in the microwave. Ethan, always excited to watch things in the microwave, grabbed the last chair from the table and slid it over so that he could see.

When the cereal was done, Jacob walked over to the table and yelled "Dad! there's no chair for me to sit in!"

FYI: Google asked me for more availability, so it doesn't look like I'll have my interviews this week.

We've been trying (just a little) to potty train Ethan (the boy is almost three for crying out loud...). Anyway, I put him in some underwear and set a timer so that I'd remind him to go every 10 minutes (I really didn't want to deal with an accident). The first two times he went, but the third time Jacob informed me:

"Dad, somethings wrong with Ethan, nothings coming out of him!"

The rest of the night, out of the blue, Ethan would say:

"Dad, somethings wrong with me."

We had an awesome week up in Washington visiting friends and family. One funny story: Jacob was sitting next to one of his cousins while watching fireworks. The two had become good friends over the last couple of days. I said something to Rachel about her (Rachel) being cute and gave her (Rachel) a kiss (we were sitting right behind Jacob). Jacob's cousin then gave Jacob a kiss on the cheek!

A little while latter she called one of her friends over to watch the fireworks with them (he was a boy). When he came over, he just stared at her and Jacob (with his back to the fireworks). She offered him some pop corn, and without taking his eyes off of Jacob, he popped one in his mouth (in a very cute, intimidating way). For the remainder of the fireworks: she kept saying: "look at the fireworks"; he kept staring at Jacob; Jacob was oblivious to what was going on; Rachel and I were laughing our heads off.

Here is a picture of Jacob sharing the rocket launcher we built:

Hopefully we'll get some more images up on witski.com.

I wasn't telling anyone because I didn't want to crash and burn too badly, but I had a first round of phone interviews with Google (Seattle)! I think that they went really well. In 5-10 days I'll know if I made it to a second round, which consists of five interviews in person up in Seattle.

A couple of days ago I was getting Jacob up to go to preschool (while everyone else was sleeping) when I noticed a sippy cup of juice in his bed (which is a no-no). So I asked him about it and he gave me a pretty detailed story about Ethan coughing and Rachel giving Ethan a cough drop and Jacob his juice. I assumed that this happened the night before as I was taking a shower, but Rachel informed me that "you were the only person in this house that was sleeping at 3am." I guess Ethan's coughing woke everyone else up, and Rachel had to deal with them all (I blame the early morning basketball on my deep sleep). What a nice wife I have!

Last night, at 3am Ethan was again coughing, but I was the only one who was woken up by it. I gave him a blessing and asked him if he needed anything; he said "yeah... sleep."

Another day of basketball... about half-way through, when I had yet to make a basket, I reminded the guys that I had a wife and kids, and that they depended on me to score...

I did actually make one, but only one ;), luckily for my team I had a couple of rebounds.

After about a nine month break, I played basketball this morning. The good news: I'm not much worse than I was. The bad news: I wasn't very good to begin with, so it wasn't difficult to be not much worse.