It's snowing outside. I want to think about how pretty it is, perhaps speculate that we'll have a little accumulation before it all melts away.

But I've got bigger, more important, scarier things on my mind.

Matt was feeling under the weather yesterday. Last night when he woke up for his turn with Penny, he was burning with fever. So he's probably got something viral, and there's a fairly good chance that he'll pass it on to Penny, and a fair-to-middling chance that I'll pick it up, too.

I don't want to be sick again (well, sicker, as I've already got a fever-less cold) but I'm not too worried about Matt or I. Matt looks and sounds pretty miserable, but not flattened, and he's going to call his doctor this morning and see if he can get an appointment. He and I may be in for a miserable few weeks, but we'll be fine.

But Penny - she hasn't got an immune system yet to speak of, and she's already got a little fever-less virus that's been making her next to impossible to live with for stretches at a time. How she's going to be if she catches another virus, I don't know. Worse, Matt and I will have to nurse her through her illness while we're fighting our own.

And all that is just a cover on the scariest part of it, which is that this year's flu has already killed people. I don't even want to think about that.

So I'm a little distracted this morning. On top of that, Penny didn't want to sleep last night - or more precisely, she was perfectly happy to sleep in my arms or in Matt's, but as soon as we tried to put her down in her crib, she would wake up and start crying. We initially put her to bed at about 8:30, and she was up again from midnight to nearly 1, and then from 2 to 3:30, and then she slept (thanks mostly, I suspect, to a dose of baby Tylenol) until about 6.

And because Matt was sick, I wanted him to get as much rest as he could. So I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. And I suspect there are more sleepless nights in store for me this weekend.

We may go back to the "sleep when the baby sleeps" schedule. If she won't let us sleep at night, I'm going to need some daytime naps nearly as much as her.

Just in time for Christmas. Whee...

--Liz