We are currently stuck in purgatory. Hell is trying to get Lowe to sleep. The poor kid just won’t do it. He’ll fight sleeping all day long, maybe getting half an hour despite hours of attempts. Nighttime is slightly better, but Ali’s still not getting a lot of sleep on that end either.

But then there is heaven. Our little girl is moving out of diapers. Today was her first full day diaper-less and she did great. She’s been wanting to wear undies instead of diapers more and more and now she is pretty much shunning diapers completely. We’ve had a lot of accidents in the past week or so as we’ve slowly transitioned, but today we made it until five o’clock before the first missed toilet. Hell she even told me she had to go while we were running an errand in the car and then waited patiently for me to get her to a Pemex. She is extremely proud of herself and loves the clapping and cheering she is getting from us. It’s funny watching this huge smile curl up out of a very serious face at the first sound of tinkling. It’s even more funny that I’m writing about this with such enthusiasm. God the things that make us parents happy.

I had the starter battery tested today and it checked out just fine. Which leaves me kind of in the dark as to why it wasn’t able to start the engine the other day on its own. For now I’ve hooked it back up while I continue to troubleshoot this whole big mess.

The biggest mess being that the new alternator isn’t charging and I haven’t the foggiest idea why. I mean it’s only one wire, it’s not like I could mess that up. Nothing ever really gets finished on this boat.

Ouest and I were at Home Depot today. When we were leaving I put her in the car, turned around, and there was my welder standing three feet away. “I was going to go see you. Yadda, yadda…” He didn’t seem the least bit surprised to run into me in the HD parking lot at nine in the morning and just talked as if we had planned to meet there to discuss tubing diameters. He’s building the davits for a little under a thousand bucks but he was going to stop by to ask me today if it was all right to use a thicker tubing that would cost thirty dollars more. That’s only three percent over his quote. I already liked Salvadore, but now I trust him too.

At Walmart today we bought out their Skippy Natural Peanut Butter. Thirteen jars in total. And we feel like we totally scored.