Life Right Now

Things have been very busy for me at work. I am primarily responsible for reviewing federal projects for their impacts to cultural resources. That means projects funded or permitted by federal agencies. The bulk of the work that we do in my office is state level -permits from the Department of Environmental Protection or one of Florida's multiple Water Management Districts. The federal projects are less in number but tend to be more involved. With the impending arrival of the oil spill, the Corps of Engineers has issued emergency permits to most of Florida's panhandle counties. I know archaeological resources might not be on the top of everyone's priority list in this situation, but it is my job to care about such things and part of the Corps's review process for issuing a permit is to obtain our comments. But, they have been giving us a matter of hours to issue said comments (a normal permit will usually have a 15 or 30 day turn around time). So it's been crazy to try to locate every single place in which they are going to be installing booms and/or building sand berms and the like to make sure they won't be disturbing known significant archaeological remains or shipwrecks. And I don't even want to think about the level of correspondence that's going to have to take place when it comes time to clean up all the oil and all the archaeological sites along the coast. Anyway. Work is busy. Oh. And we are moving. The legendary cages (yes, my office is a cage) are coming down to be replaced by actual cubicles. (The cages were where the artifact collections used to be kept many years ago and were later converted into offices.)

Home life is busy with moving, or planning to move, or hoping to plan to move anyway. But, it's still good. I've been working with Penny on putting herself to sleep at night. We realized pretty much immediately that Penny is one of the kids for whom cry it out doesn't work, so we abandoned that as a project, but now that she's older I can talk to her and explain things and she's been falling asleep on her own. She's still in the bed next to me, but I'm not rocking her or singing to her or nursing her to sleep or anything like that. She's just falling asleep by herself and then I put her in her crib. It is a pretty cool milestone for her to have reached I think. We both still value our cuddle time though, so falling asleep by herself in the crib with me in another room is not something I intend to attempt. It's one of the best times of my day when she takes my arm and pulls it around her for me to hug her close as she lays there. Nothing better in the world.

A couple evenings ago as we were eating supper (a bit late, at 7 pm) she announced that she was ready for her bath. I got her out of her chair and she laid down on the floor behind her chair and said, "night-night." I asked her if she wanted to sleep on the floor and she said no (of course- that is the only answer to any question after all). I then started trying to be funny and running through a list of places that she could sleep (do you want to sleep on the table? do you want to sleep in a tree? etc). I asked her if she'd like to sleep on the couch and she jumped up and ran to the couch and laid down.



This is her exact falling asleep pose when she falls asleep in the bed. Doesn't seem comfortable to me, but she evidently finds it so. Anyway, she was super tired. I've been trying to have dinner at 6 now instead of 630 and getting her on into bed with lights out at 7 or shortly after. So far (two days in), it seems to be working for falling asleep a bit earlier.