I got on a writing roll yesterday! I finished a chapter while I was at work - over 2000 words, easily - and then I wrote for another half hour before I went to bed, and got in almost another thousand words.

Whoo, did that feel good!

Of course, all that writing was on The Willow Bough and not Silver and Green. Another few weeks so K.T. can get caught up, and I'll have to put Willow Bough away for a while so I can hold up my end of Silver and Green.

Yeah, I know; no one except K.T. knows what the hell I'm talking about. Silver and Green is the novel we're working on together. The Willow Bough is something I'm doing by myself, a short story that changed direction and expanded on me - it's now either a novella or a short novel, I'm not sure which, and probably won't be until my final word-count is done.

Anyway, my point is that I'm excited about having a writing-day that rivalled some of my best pre-baby writing days.

Penny and sleep. I may never understand.

I've been trying not to talk too much about the continuing sleep-training, because I'm well aware of the fact that it's a subject that bores everyone (with the possible exception of other sleep-deprived parents) silly.

But everything is so weird.

Penny has dropped back to taking maybe an hour of naps a day, at daycare - half an hour in the morning, half an hour in the afternoon. Sometimes she gets an hour and a half, total. But not often.

As a result, she's so tired in the evenings that her bedtime is being pushed back. Remember how the schedule is supposed to be Very Important in teaching a child to go to bed?

Not so much, at least with Penny. Over the weekend, she was going to bed at 8. (She gets better naps at home. Daycare is noisy.) But Monday she went to bed at 7:30. Tuesday - after only getting one half-hour nap all day - she conked out at 7.

Last night, after I'd read her two stories and Matt had read one, and was trying to start in on the second, she started crying and twisting and thrashing in his lap, until he finally gave up and took her upstairs. The instant he put her in the crib, she calmed down. Grabbed her blanket and rolled over to sleep. That was 7:30.

I've been saying for days that I wouldn't have a problem with pushing her bedtime back to 7:30 if she would sleep a little later in the mornings. But noooo, she's been getting up at 5:15.

Matt thinks it's a light thing - that she's waking up when the sun starts to come up. It could be; her window faces east. If so, there's hope that she'll start sleeping later after the solstice next week, as the nights start getting longer again.

But last night, Matt and I agreed that we would start taking turns getting up with her in the morning. His turn, this morning.

And she slept until 5:45. (And actually, she probably would've slept later, but Matt went in to check on her and woke her up.)

Goofy baby.

--Liz