The final day of DaddyCon was extended because Julie's flight from San Jose was cancelled due to mechanical problems. All the air travel our family has done in the last week and a half has been on Alaska, and I have to say that I'm unimpressed. I usually fly United when I visit OSAF, and they've been super reliable.

We had another lazy day of just hanging out together, playing silly tickling games, and cuddling in various combinations (most of which involved at least one child sitting on top of me -- but such is the joy of small children). The girls also treated me to an impromptu puppet show, an affair filled with puppet introductions in the midst of gales of laughter.

Abigail continued to diligently work on her turtle graphics. She seems to building up good intuition on the direction of the turtle, so perhaps we'll be ready to sit down and talk about angles soon. Right now she's at that awkward stage of wanting to express more than she can actually instruct the computer, so I want to help her expand her vocabulary lest she lose interest.

Meanwhile Michaela succeeded in tying a shoe by herself! It took three days of coaching, broken down into two parts. First, she just needed to be encouraged to keep on trying. Second, I needed to learn how to explain the various finger movements needed to actually tie the knot. With something like tying a shoe, there's so much that has become unconscious that you really need to dig in and force yourself to remember all the things that need to happen. For me, it took a bit of observation of Michaela's errors before I could come up with a explanation/recipe for how to get the shoe tied. She's tied it a few times, and now it's all practice.

Julie was due to get in just a little after the kids would go to bed, so I decided that we could keep them up, and that the girls and I would drive down to the ferry and pick Julie up. So after dinner, we cleaned up all over the house, did as much of the bedtime routine as possible, and laid out pajamas so that getting into bed would be fast. Then we piled into the van, and made the pickup. The girls were eager to tell their Mom about all the things they've done during the weekend, and we had a nice albeit short reunion in the car before the girls went off to bed.