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.