When I woke up this morning, I thought it was Sunday. When I realized that I would, indeed, have to go to work and the gym today, I thought very seriously about burrowing back under the covers and not coming out.

Which is not to say that we didn't have a good weekend. It was a perfectly fine weekend. We went out to eat with friends, and visited my parents, and watched Penny's walking skills improve, and got invitations for her birthday party, and went out to eat with just ourselves, and...

It was a good, busy weekend.

It's just that time had compressed, or something, and when you wake up thinking that it's Sunday, and you're going to get to spend the day with the people you love most in all the world, and reading, and playing games, and laughing - it's awfully disappointing to learn that it's actually Monday, and you'll have to spend the day going to meetings, and the doctor, and the gym, and doing work.

Nothing mysterious about that, for sure.

Friday evening, we met the Brandts and the Hickses for dinner at Second Street. A good time was had by all, except that dinner nudged into Penny's bedtime, and she got slightly grouchy about it. She insisted on walking around the restaurant a lot.

Which was actually fine, except that the bottoms of her feet immediately turned black.

And I don't mean just dirty. I mean black. Like she had been walking on fresh-laid asphalt.

This is not the first time this has happened, either.

And Penny likes to play with her feet.

So Matt and I decided it was time to get Penny her first pair of shoes.

(An aside: Technically, this is Penny's second pair of shoes, because a friend gave us a pair of baby sneakers when she was newborn. But she never wore them.)

I'd just wanted some sandals - something to protect the bottoms of her feet while she's tromping around. But Target didn't have any sandals that fit her; they were all either far too tiny, or grossly overlarge.

So we wound up instead with this very cute pair of... I'm not sure what to call them. Baby shoes.

Penny hates them.

Well, she doesn't break out screaming when we put them on her, or anything like that. But the weight of the shoes is so alien to her - she hasn't even worn socks since May - that she refuses to move her feet.

The day we bought them, we put them on her after we got home, and she just stood there and looked at us helplessly. Then she sat down, and started whining. I gave in and took them off.

Sunday, we put them on her before we went to the grocery store - she doesn't get to walk or crawl at the store anyway, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to get her used to them, a bit.

She was fine at the store, and after we got home, she even did some crawling around and attempted some walking. The weight of the shoes kind of messed up her stride - her left foot kept swinging around in front of her right foot - but she managed a few steps.

I took them off after a while, though - I want her to get used to wearing the shoes, but it's actually better for her feet if she goes barefoot a lot while she's learning to walk. We put the shoes back on her to go down and visit my parents, so they could see them.

When we got there, we stood her up in their den. Penny once again refused to walk, or even crawl. She just sat down and looked at me until I took the shoes off her.

So she's still working on it. It's a good thing we're starting to acclimate her to them now; she'll really need to be in shoes by the time we go to Chicago in September, and it seems this is going to take a while.

--Liz