I had to go back to work today. Its harder than I thought for so many reasons. This was a truly wonderful vacation. I spent some really good time with my sister and Michael, ate some amazing food (I'm going to need to ride extra hard to burn that off), played and laughed with Ruby and Miles until my sides were sore, and got to be a bigger part of my kids lives for 12 days.

This week Miles used his first signs. We've been showing him the signs for nani (milk), potty, and poop. What do you think his first sign was? If you guessed poop, you're so right. That-a-boy Miles!!

You may have noticed (if you are one of my three loyal readers) that the server was down yesterday, and part of this morning. It suffered a rather nasty drive failure, which (luck y for me) did not render it totally useless. I decided that, rather than simply replace the drive, I would replace it and augment it. So now I ha ve a server which is running (hence your enjoyment of this article), and slightly more fault tolerant. Now back to your regularly scheduled content.

I've implemented my first bedtime rule. Its more of a guideline than a rule, but I'm trying to own up to my despotism, so humor me. The rule is that I will spend 30 minutes on bedtime, from teeth brushing until I leave the room. Ruby can choose how to allocate that time. She can spend 25 minutes on teeth, 4 on pajamas, and 1 on tucking in, if that's what she wants. Surprisingly, once she got the concept, she decided that fighting over every brush stroke wasn't a good use of her time. Neither was the violent pajama avoiding thrashing that has become common place.

When I was a child, my parents made up so many rules that I thought the ir sole purpose in life was to prevent me from having any fun. The pinnacle of the rule making crazyness was the "There will be no more laughing in this family rule". A rule so seemingly absurd, that I didn't even consider vowing to never to utter it. Now I'm a parent of a three year old, and I find myself wondering how my parents could possible have been so relaxed in their rule making. Here are a few of the rules we've had to implement in the last few weeks. No putting boogies on your brother No trading undies with your friends No putting friends or cats in the dryer (the funny thing here is my parents had a similar rule) Do either of my loyal readers have a funny or unique rule to share? Please comment so I don't feel like such a despot.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how I'm going to leave this world better than I found it. This is a bugaboo of a thing to spend any time worrying about because the scope is grossly un-bracketed. I could satisfy my sense of social responsibility by creating an organization that brings food or educational resources to third world countries, or by raising two fantastic children who carry forward the same desire to do good.

I was just playing a game with Ruby on the bed where she would hold my hands, stand on me, and then fall over. After the first time she said, "you are so silly daddy". Then after the second time she said, "you're the silly one, and I'm the laugher" and of course I laughed, and she said "NO laughing daddy, I'm the laugher".

I'm approaching the end of my three week vacation with my newly enlarged family. Over the past few weeks Ruby and I have had a great adventure together. We've been to several parks, made pretend cookies and cake (out of sand mostly). We went to a concert in SF, and have discovered more than a few ways to repurpose her building blocks. But the best game, by far, that we've played together is train tracks.

Today Ruby took V ick, Miles, and I  up to the city to see Keller Williams play back to back sets with Bela Fleck. This was fleet week (Blue Angeles today) an d the Castro Street fair, as well as the event we were attending (the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival) so parking was almost non-existent. We aimed to get there 2 hrs before Keller went on, but as it turned out, 10 minutes prior to the set, we were still stuck in a maze of traffic, ever yone waiting for a single spot to fight over.

As if by the grace of Apollo, we saw a sign for the Anglers pond and, since no cars were exiting, decided to give it a&nbs p;whirl.
There were easily 5 spots free so we took one. The most amazing part is that the stage we were heading for was only a 5 minute walk, and we could hear the music almost the whole way. We settled down to the left of the stage where it was a bit quieter, and where you could still get a decent view of the action on stage. After a bit, Bela came up on stage with Keller (which I had hoped would happen) and we were treated to a funny but great rendition of Lithium (Nirvana) followed by a rousing People Watching with additional guest Victor Wooten (also of the Flecktones). If you're interested in the footage, I caught this last song on my camera's video recorder. Ruby came up with me for the last set, and danced full throttle on my shoulders until she was beat.

Let me cut to the chase. milesbradford.com was taken. I could have changed his name to myles, or used his middle name, or some other bastardization, but I got to thinking, "Wouldn't it be so much better just to have one site for the whole family?" I mean, I'm updating all of our sites myself anyway, and the pictures, now that I've got three lights-of-my-life, do  I really want to spend all of my time parsing and posting pictures? Furthermore, we're going to have this grand adventure, shouldn't we chronicle it? The time was nigh. I went through several (hundred) possible (read: taken) domain names. My family and friends weighed in, but finally, the name came to me from my favorite nautical phrase book.