Reminder to self: No matter how tired I get because of Penny waking up at night, I have yet to spend even a single day of parenthood dragged down by the crushing exhaustion of early pregnancy. (See today's last-year link over there in the sidebar.)

But actually, she slept through the night again last night. I begin to hope - tentatively, of course - that it won't be too long before she's sleeping through on a more or less regular basis.

Matt says he slept through, as well. I wasn't so lucky. I woke up at 11, and 2, and 3:30, and 5, and 5:50, just before the alarms went off. But I got to turn over and go back to sleep after all those wakings. Maybe, if she sleeps through often enough, I'll stop waking up every time the house creaks.

In order to allow a baby's digestive system to keep up, and to watch for allergies, the doctor recommends waiting about two weeks between introducing food types, and about three days between introducing individual foods.

We started Penny on rice cereal a week and a half ago. By the end of the first session, she was opening her mouth for the spoon. For the third session, we decided to try feeding her in the swing instead of in the carseat, and that worked much better. (We've got a very lovely highchair for her, but when we put her in it, her butt slides forward on the wood and makes her slump down so her chin is below the level of the feeding tray. I'm looking for a chair pad with a non-sliding surface on the bottom, but in the meantime, she gets fed in her swing.)

By the end of the fourth session, she'd figured out that if she refrained from flailing her arms around and trying to grab at the spoon, she got more food faster. And by the seventh session - the end of the first week - she was eating the full amount recommended by the pediatrican for each baby "meal."

Next week, we'll introduce a new food category: Yellow vegetables. That is, carrots and squash. (The books all say, "carrots, squash, etc." but they have yet to suggest a single other vegetable to be covered under "etc." There's corn, I suppose, but I haven't seen a baby food offering of pureed corn yet.)

I am - as you can probably tell by this long ramble on the topic - unreasonably excited about the approach of new foods. I'm not entirely certain why.

Maybe it's that she seems more like a real person as she starts to do more "real person" things, like standing up and eating real food.

Or maybe I've just subconsciously chosen feeding her as a "bonding" moment to replace breastfeeding, now that she's weaned. (Yesterday was her first full day without nursing.) I'm actually having trouble remembering the last time Matt fed her even a bottle - and he hasn't yet spoon-fed her at all.

Or maybe it's just that my brain has completely melted since I gave birth, and I'm far too easily excited about anything having to do with my baby.

I've been writing again lately, and it feels good. I had worried for a while, between the months of editing and the rigors of parenting, that I'd forgotten how. But I seem to have gotten back on the bandwagon.

I wrote myself into a corner yesterday, though. I was chugging right along, feeling good about things, feeling good about the writing, and all of a sudden, I realized I didn't have the slightest idea how to wrap up the chapter. It's the final chapter of the book (we write out of order, don't get too excited) so I can't just leave it hanging. It needs to have some sort of finality.

The problem is that I know what happens after the end of the book. The book is supposed to end on a sort of happily-ever-after note with a couple being reunited after being separated by events beyond their control. But a few years later, they're going to split up again, and stay split up. And knowing that they're ultimately going to split up is making it difficult to write the reunion so it'll stick.

And yet, I really want to write it as if it will stick. K.T. and I are trying very hard to make these books individually readable, even though there's a longer story thread that flows through all of them. We want our readers to be able to read them out of order or even just read a single book and be satisfied with the experience. Which means no cliffhangers, no dangling plot threads, and a satisfying ending.

It's harder than it sounds.

--Liz