Spring (or Late Winter) Cleaning

We need our house cleaned. Badly. I feel guilty complaining about stuff like this with everything else that is going on in the world, but man I'm burning the candle at both ends these days. Working full time and teaching too, plus trying to spend time with Penny and Tray leaves little time for house cleaning (and I hate cleaning anyway). And I'm exhausted because Penny's sleep has been erratic the last two days. Tray and I do our best, but it just keeps piling up. Tonight I tried cooking supper and ended up, as I usually do, frustrated that it took so dang long to cook when what I really wanted to do was play with Penny. I wouldn't mind it if it only took ten minutes to cook something, but with her pulling on my pants legs all the time it takes that long just to chop an onion much less do the whole recipe. (To be clear, the issue is not her pulling on my pants legs, but the fact that I only have a few hours with her everyday and I hate having to spend even one moment of it doing something mundane like cooking dinner.) But I digress. We are thinking of having a maid service come out. I was online today looking at Merry Maids. They would even clean our appliances! Yes, please. I hate to spend the money, but good lawd our house could use the investment. I probably wouldn't do it monthly, but if they could come and really clean it (appliances and everything!) I'd probably be fine doing that once a year or maybe once every six months.

18 months update

This morning I went back and read through the last few months of my blog entries, and was sad to realize that I hadn't updated it as often as I would like. I know this is a public place and that there are those of you who read it, but I also love writing here because it is a record of things for me too. Having it be public adds a level of accountability, because if you think I don't update my blog often enough, believe me when I say I would never write in a paper journal. It helps me to know that my mom, for instance, is waiting for updates and checks my blog often to see if there are any. And, like today, I occasionally like to go back and re-read what I've written over time. There are videos and pictures and stories posted here from a year or more ago that I love going back to. They are things I might have forgotten if I hadn't written them down - and I never could have embedded videos in a paper journal. With that said, there is a lot that I haven't written down over the last month. Penny changes so rapidly, and I really want to keep a more complete record of it so that in another six months or a year, I can come back here and read about what she was like at 18 months.

Using Christmas as a jumping off point, her ability then to do shape sorting toys was good but not great. She could do the shape one that is at Tray's mom and dad's house - triangle, circle, and square, but the others she had with numbers and letters were a lot harder for her. She'd maybe eventually get it, but would often get frustrated and hand it to me and say, "Mommy do it." I started telling her to "turn it around" when she was putting a letter in the wrong way and she seemed to immediately know what that meant. Now, she will even tell herself to "turn it around" if she needs to. (On a side note, over the weekend she was kissing her stuffed animals and picked up one backwards and told it to "turn around" as she turned it around to kiss it. Ha!) She has this farm shape sorter with A, B, C, and D. She'll pick up each letter and name it saying, "A," "B," or whatever, but when my mom was visiting the weekend before last she started picking up the letters and identifying them by color too. She'd say, "orange B" before putting it in. This week she pointed to a B on a bottle and correctly identified it as a B.

In terms of books, Tray and I have both noticed that she rarely asks to read her board books anymore, but usually wants to read the paper picture books. She loooooves If You Give a Pig a Party.

At Christmas, Tray's mom and dad gave her a 20 piece Chunky World farm puzzle. I thought it would be too advanced for her because it is not a knob puzzle and the pieces can be turned over backwards so that they are the mirror image of the place they are supposed to go. Penny loves it, though, and does the puzzle 10 - 20 times a day. She puts every piece in (naming all the animals and people) and then takes them all back out (again naming everything) and puts them in a box and then starts over again. The other day she came to get me saying, "turn it around. Cow. Turn 'round." I thought maybe she had one of the cows backwards or something. She'd put in about half of the puzzle pieces (the other half were still in the box), but she'd put every one of them in backwards in exactly the same way. She did that on purpose which just blows me away. I think she did it too so that I'd come and play with her.

Also with colors, she loves her crayons and asks to "colors the paper" (which sounds very French: color zee paper. ha!) at least once a day. Also around the time of my mom's visit she started correctly identifying her crayon colors. Now she likes to tell me what color diaper I am about to put on her. I think she likes the green ones the most.

Starting at Christmas time or so, Penny began liking Cookie Monster. For a little while she attempted to call most any cartoon character in the Sesame Street and Disney genres Cookie Monster, but I think she has since more or less figured out that Cookie Monster is a specific character. She also inquires about him at least once a day.

She is continually gaining new words and making sentences of two and usually three words. At least once a day she tosses one out there with four or five and occasionally even six words, and a lot of her old "baby" ways of saying things are being replaced by the correct way of saying things. She no longer calls her bear "boo" and calls him "Misser Bear" instead. Cows no longer say "boo", but say "moo." She still calls herself Penty though. I have to admit, it's kind of growing on us. ;) She is such a parrot; she'll repeat words we say and you think she's just repeating things, but then later that day or the next day she'll use the word appropriately in context. Language acquisition is just beyond amazing. How do babies do that?

In terms of potty training, not much new on that front. Just about every night after her bath, she'll try to wriggle out of my arms saying, "need to pee-pee, need to pee-pee" and run for the "little potty" or the "big potty." Mostly though, she will pee-pee next to the potty rather than in it. Oh well, at least she knows to go in the general vicinity right? I think too that it will be better when it warms up and I won't have to worry about her being cold when she's naked and sitting on the potty.

So that's pretty much what happened between 17 and 18 months - a lot. Now that she has turned 18 months old, I can't wait to see what happens next. I am continually amazed at how babies develop into grown human beings. It is just fascinating.

Love

Penny said love for the first time today. I was kneeling down to get a pot out of the cabinet next to our stove and she came up and hugged me from behind and said, "love Mommy." Oh, I just melted. She has hundreds of words and can say just about anything she wants to say, but never "love." I'm so excited! I can't wait to hear it again.

Bathing

Tonight for the first time Penny tried to bathe herself. She took the "wash-cough" from me and said "washaknee" while doing just that. She then washed her other knee, her face, both sets of toes, both elbows, her legs, her arms, and her tummy while listing said parts as she did so. I'm not saying that she did a really good job of washing any one part, but I was impressed.

She has definitely started having more fun in the bathtub. We have a little seashell thingy that is perforated on the bottom so that it lightly rains water down when you hold it up. She likes for me to hold it up relatively high so that she can stick her face and head under it. She always closes her eyes just before contact like she's a little bit scared of it but doesn't falter, and she keeps coming back for more.

Also, tonight in the bathtub she did something or other and said, "whoops." I started laughing at her and she just kept on saying "whoops" over and over for no other reason than to make me laugh. I got so tickled and she got tickled and we both just had a really good laugh at her joke. She's a mess.

18 Month Old Visit

Penny had her 18 month check-up today. She did beautifully. She is 31.5 inches tall (50th percentile) and 20 lbs 6 oz (5th percentile). She is on the same growth curve she's always been on. She does have eczema. We are to stop using baby wash and swap to a moisturizing bar (he recommended Dove) and moisturizing cream (like Eucerin) instead of lotion (I didn't realize there was a difference). The moisturizing cream should be applied twice a day - and within no more than three minutes of her exiting the bath water. We are to apply 1% hydrocordisone cream (and not the .5% baby stuff) to the flair ups twice daily. So. I will be journeying to the store tomorrow for supplies.

In other news of the visit, Penny threw a royal fit while the doctor was trying to examine her. He'd taken her and laid her down on the table, and she just lost it. She was crying big old boo-hoo tears and calling out to me, "No, Mommy. Noooo," over and over. She kept reaching out to me and I think she might have said "pick up" or "get me" or some such - things she routinely says at home. I'm not sure. She was crying so hard and making such a racket (and my hearing isn't that great anyways), and I was all embarrassed (even though I know it happens all the time), but doubly so because the doctor just stopped what he was doing and was looking at me. I thought it was astonishment that she was throwing such a fit, but he was amazed at how advanced her speech is. Not the vocabulary, I don't think, but the way she used the words. I'm not sure exactly; it seemed like a perfectly normal fit to me.

Kix

Penny loves Crispix and all varieties of Chex Mix. She calls them all "kix," which is of course the name of a cereal in its own right (although she doesn't know that). Anyway, this evening we were eating wheat "kix" and looking at pictures of cows on the internet, and she started trying to feed them kix.

Fun Things

Here are some photos of fun and silliness around the house as we have been mostly housebound by the cold. These are actually over the last several days even though she's wearing the same jacket. It's a really warm jacket!

To start us off, over the weekend Penny did a funny hording thing. She took small items and wrapped them up in some tissue paper. Here's the closed packet:



And here it is when I opened it up to see what she had in there:



She didn't do anything with the stuff once she covered it up. It's the same if she puts it in a cabinet or drawer or something. Once it is where she wants it, it is no longer of interest.

In other news, Penny is most definitely in the sticker stage. She asks me for stickers at least once a day. Any old sticker will do. When I give her one, I always put it on her shirt. The other day she managed to fish out the page of stickers from the junk drawer in the kitchen where I keep them and got five or six stickers off before I realized what she was doing. She had them all stuck down her shirt. So cute!



This is a photo of her sweeping the living room. I had swept up after the Christmas tree was taken outside and she insisted, "I do it! I do it!" while trying to pry the broom from my hands. So, I let her "sweep." She mostly just swirled the pine needles around and made a big mess, but it was fun to let her do it.



And finally, today's thing was to get into the grocery bag (with her daddy's assistance). Doesn't she look so proud of herself?

Big Girl

Today Penny was helping me fold diapers and she sat down on the bed up against the headboard between our pillows and said, "SIt big girl." Roughly translated, I believe she meant, "look at me. I'm sitting like a big girl." Now, since Penny is not around other kids all that much, I doubt very seriously that she knows what a "big girl" is. I think that's a word (or, rather, words) without a referent for her. But, whatever a "big girl" is, I'm sure it must seem like something important to be since we say stuff like, "sit in your chair like a big girl."

Party Like a Rock Star

Oh I am sleepy. I stayed up way past my bedtime last night watching the BCS game (and yay for Texas rallying like that - at the half I thought it would be a blowout). I went to bed a bit past midnight. Not ten minutes later, Penny woke up. And did not go back to sleep until after 430 a.m. Nothing could convince the child to go to sleep. So of course 630 came very, very early for me. I decided to call in sick and handed her off to Tray like normal and went back to sleep for two more hours. I have to say though that even doing that I am still exhausted.
I think what happened was that Penny missed her normal nap time. She usually sleeps about an hour and a half to two hours at about 10 or 1030 in the morning and then she's good to go until she falls asleep about 8 or 830. Yesterday though Tray had to go meet the road grader at that time. He put her in the car seat and he said she was very sleepy, but of course she didn't fall asleep because she was in the car. He didn't want her to miss lunch, so after they got back to the house he didn't try putting her back down until after she ate lunch. She slept over two hours and in fact had just woken up not too long before I got home at my usual time. Just putting this out there: henceforth, Penny shall not take naps after lunch. EVER again. No way. No how. Nuh-uh. Unless anyone else would like to sit up with her all night.

10 Years

This may be a hokey thing to be commemorating, but bear with me. I didn’t do a year-end, or decade-end, “wrap-up” post because I was waiting for today. Today, January 7, is ten years to the day of my first date with Tray. But there’s more to it than just that.

As some of you know, I spent the waning months of the year 1999 very sick and was in the hospital for the better part of a week in December of that year. (Ultimate – and questionable – diagnosis: mono.) I first got sick in October and did not get “well” until taking mass doses of steroids (which I am now allergic to) during and after that hospitalization.

I tell you this because I first met Tray in mid-December in the middle office of the Anthropology Department at Troy State. You see, I had missed a lot of classes that semester, and missed all of my final exams when I was in the hospital. Additionally, I was in the process of applying to graduate schools which required getting letters of recommendation and the like. So, even though I was still recovering I was on campus taking care of things and was sitting in the middle office resting when he came in. And I looked, well, not well. He had just come back to Troy, and had been hired as an adjunct instructor to teach multiple sections of Introduction to Anthropology. We were briefly introduced that day, but I can tell you that I didn’t make much of an impression because when we later re-met he didn’t remember me – or barely remembered me, anyway.

So, in the world of archaeology (particularly when you use students as the bulk of your work force), you do fieldwork over the holiday breaks – summers, mostly, but also Christmas and Spring Break. Because I’d been so sick, my mom was not very thrilled about the prospect of me working over Christmas break, but we were working on an industrial park in Greenville, Alabama. The Phase I survey of the park was my field school, and remains the most difficult survey I have ever worked on (thickness of the vegetation, the swamp crossings, the afternoon lightening storms). That Christmas, we were back doing some Phase II excavations at an old house site that we’d found during the survey. Actually, the house had still been standing at the time of the survey, but the landowner bulldozed it on the mistaken belief that if he had an historic house on his property he couldn’t sell it for the industrial park. (The maps and plans I drew of it during the survey are the only surviving records of it.) All this is my way of saying that I really, really wanted to work on the project.

However, after all that time being out of commission because of being sick, on that first day in the field, I forgot the first rule of working with Mac (our boss). Nobody shows up until 30 minutes after the official start time. We were supposed to be there at 8 I believe, and I actually got there 15 minutes early because I was driving down from Selma. So, of course, no one else got there until 830. Except for Tray. And his dog, Minx. I saw them up the hill when I pulled in and drove up to them. I got out and reintroduced myself. We spent the morning talking until everyone else got there and then spent the next two weeks getting to know each other, talking off and on during the day. At the end of the two weeks, he asked me out to dinner for Friday night (which was January 7). Well, classes weren’t supposed to start back until January 10 on Monday. As such, I was not intending to move back to my dorm until Sunday night, but because he asked me out, I drove home and got my stuff and moved back into the dorm three days early so that I could go out on a date with him Friday night.

Ten years later and here we are. We both rang in Y2K at home with our families that year. I was in Selma with my mom and grandmother, and he was on Spring Creek. After our first date though, we have spent almost every day of the subsequent decade together. The New Year 2010 didn’t just capstone the decade from 2000-2009, it also marks ten years of Us. It’s been a good decade.

Corrections

Penny is being very funny today about correcting Tray's pronunciation of "Mullet." Tray is been purposefully mispronouncing it just to mess with her. To show me, when I got home he said something or another about, "Munnen" and Penny looked up at him and said, "Mullet, Daddy." Or as close to "Mullet" as she can get since L's aren't really her strong suit. The way she said daddy just cracked me up, though - like, "you idiot."

In further language news she continues to amaze us with the sentences she comes up with seemingly out of nowhere. Yesterday morning when she and I were in the bedroom getting ready and Tray was in the kitchen getting coffee, she picked up her stuffed mouse and said, "want go show Daddy my mouse." It's so amazing how fast she picks stuff up -- but then when anyone else comes around she acts like she can't talk at all or goes all monosyllabic.

The Extended Holiday Season

For the New Year's weekend we went back up to Tray's parent's farm to visit and so that Tray could hunt some more before the season ends. Penny loves deer so much that Tray has decided we need at least two - if not three - deer in the freezer this year. Seriously, at lunch up there she kept asking, "piece of deer? piece of deer?" Unfortunately, no luck on that front, but we did have a nice visit. Penny warmed up to her Pa, and they bonded over legos. Here she is helping to feed Gunnar the horse. It might just be a trick of the perspective, but doesn't she look so tiny?



Playing with legos:



Then, yesterday, my dad and Patty came to visit. (And Xander too.) We opened presents and had dinner and I finally got to cook a lasagna recipe I've been wanting to try. Penny amazed us by warming up to Patty right away (she normally takes a long time to come out of her shell). Her dog shoe fell off and she handed it to Patty to put back on. Then, she went and got a book for Patty to read to her. It was one of those labelled pictures of animals deals with no plot or anything. Patty pointed out a few animals in between carrying on an adult conversation. Evidently, this was not enough for Penny because Penny glanced up at Patty, pointed at the page, and said, "read the book." We all had a good laugh at that one!







Then, this morning when Penny woke up, she leaned back and stretched and said, "ohhh. I sleepy." I hear ya kid. I hear ya.