One year ago today - one year ago this very hour, as I write this - I was checking into the hospital and answering questions and getting hooked up to an IV so that they could induce labor and I could have Penny.

One year ago today, I spent the day in labor.

This morning, Penny toddled out of the kitchen, and returned with her favorite book. She held it up with a wordless plea, and sat on my lap and helped me turn the pages as I read it to her.

What a difference a year makes, huhn?

Tomorrow's entry will be Penny's first year in review. Just so you're warned, in case you don't care for that sort of thing.

Penny slept until after 6 this morning. Not much after 6, mind you, but enough so that Matt and I were woken by our alarms and not her.

I didn't even get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Which means that for the first time in who knows how long, I got seven consecutive, uninterrupted hours of sleep.

Whoo!

We had a neat experience last night, too. What with one thing and another, Penny got her dinner early, around 5:30. And she hadn't had an afternoon nap, so she got tired early. Which meant that when Matt and I were ready to eat, she'd been up and playing for a bit, and had digested enough that she was willing to have a couple of graham crackers, and tired enough that she was willing to sit in her highchair at the table with Matt and I.

So Matt and I ate our dinner (hot! at the same time!) and Penny ate graham crackers and Cheerios (and one little bite of my chicken, but she didn't exactly clamor for more) and watched us eat.

Matt and I have been trying to eat at the same time more often, these days. It usually works out that we're eating just after Penny, so she's got no patience for staying in her high chair - which means we're up and down a dozen or more times over the meal to take her away from the DVD rack and the kitchen garbage can and...

Or else we're eating after she goes to bed, which makes for a peaceful dinner, but a bit on the late side.

They say that kids learn how to feed themselves by watching Mom and Dad eat, so the "family dinner" is an educational experience for babies. (K.T.'s pediatrician tried to tell her that it was time they started having family meals at the dinner table, and K.T. had to laugh at her, because they don't have a dinner table. I'm glad our pediatrician doesn't give us this kind of advice unless we ask for it...)

But at the same time, Jess is feeding herself pretty reliably anyway, whereas Penny is only just figuring out how to put food into her own mouth and leave it there. She does pretty well with the graham crackers, but Cheerios miss her mouth and roll onto the floor about four times in five. And she's utterly uninterested in holding her own spoon. (Well, feeding herself with it. She likes to use spoons to hit things with.)

And Matt and I kind of enjoyed our dinner. We got to talk about things, and interact with Penny without worrying about her deciding to climb some stairs or play in the toilet when our backs were turned.

So I may make a conscious effort to arrange things that way more often - slightly early dinner for Penny, and then a snack in the highchair an hour or so later while Matt and I eat our dinners. It won't happen every night. We'll be lucky if we can get it to work out that way two or three times a week. But it's something to work toward.

Grr. I wanted to e-mail myself a file to work on today, but the Exchange server for work doesn't accept .txt files. So I named it .zip, instead.

This morning, I logged in and checked my e-mail to find this message:

A message was received from the Internet destined to you with an attachment that is not allowed due to virus risks associated with this attachment type. If the attachment is required, it must be renamed by the sender and sent again.

GRR.

Maybe it would let it through if I renamed the file as a .exe, instead.

--Liz