Guess I'm going to be back on the phone to the pediatrician today. Saturday night, Penny slept through the night, and she was doing great all day Sunday. And then Sunday night she didn't really get to sleep until 2am. Last night she didn't sleep until 1:30. And her sense of balance is all wonky again, and she's shuddering and punching herself in the head again.

Which means that the ear infection isn't clearing up with the antibiotics, or else it went away and then came back, or something else is wrong, and Matt and I are getting pretty damned sleep-deprived, here.

Last night was even worse than usual. Not only was she waking up frequently, but she wouldn't take a bottle for more than a couple of sucks, and she got very fussy if I stayed in the nursery with her - she had to be taken downstairs. And then Matt got up with her, and that was all wrong, too. Got to be Mom, in the middle of the night, apparently.

She stopped crying when I took her and sat her on my lap to watch me play on Neopets, but she wouldn't. Go. To. Sleep. She kept nodding off, but she couldn't seem to stay asleep - she'd fall asleep in my arms, and the instant I moved to try to take her upstairs, she'd wake up. The one time I thought, She's so tired, maybe she'll just go back to sleep in the crib, that turned out to be - of course - a colossal mistake.

So we were up until after 1:30, and then of course she was awake at 5:30 this morning. Coffee is going to be my Very Best Friend again today, I think. And I'm calling the pediatrician. This is so, so wrong. We're getting less sleep than we did when she was a newborn.

And I came in to work this morning to discover that my desk grass had dried up and wilted over the weekend. I watered it thoroughly and put it out in the lobby where it can get some actual sunlight, and I'm hoping it will recover, but that was just the icing on the cake for me today.

But, as Matt said last night, it's like we have two children. During the day, you couldn't ask for a cuter, funnier, happier, more adorable baby. During the day, we had a really great long weekend.

Friday we met the Brandts for ice cream at the new Cold Stone Creamery that's opened in town. They're kind of on the expensive side, but really, really good. Braz assured me that they had a lowfat, no-sugar-added ice cream, and I'd fully intended to get that, small, with maybe nuts and strawberries...

But I couldn't resist "just a taste" of an intriguing flavor in the case - Cake Batter - and ohmygod that was wonderful. So I fell off the diet wagon to have some of that.

After that, they came over to see the deck, and we went out for dinner. Emma, despite being very tired from a full day, was a walking advertisement for siblings. She hovered around Penny's highchair, patting her gently on the head and picking up her toys every time they fell.

Sunday we had my parents and brother and sister-in-law over for a cookout. It threatened to rain, and actually started sprinkling just as we put the food on the grill, of course, so we wound up eating inside instead, but everyone admired our deck immensely, and the food was just lovely.

(And I fell off the diet wagon again to have potato salad. Three helpings. I love my mom's potato salad. I tried to appease the gods of weight loss by skipping the hamburger buns, and also having three helpings of the marinated zucchini John and Sam brought, but, well, the gods of weight loss are not so easily put off.)

I got a bunch of pictures of John playing with Penny, which is nice, because I don't have very many of those, and the most recent goes all the way back to Christmas.

He was really cute with her, too. He grabbed this galvanized steel ice bucket set that they'd given us for our "deckwarming," and turned everything upside-down and held the bucket lid up, and - voila! - instant drum kit!

Monday, Jenn came down for a visit. I tried to take a movie of her reading to Penny from my South Beach Diet book, but it didn't work very well, so I deleted it. You'll just have to imagine it.

It was a really great weekend.

During the days.

--Liz