Wow, we got a late start this morning.

That's what happens when Penny decides to sleep in (or at least stay quiet for a while) and we forget who's supposed to take the first shower. Matt and I lounged in bed until almost 6:30 this morning.

Damn, but that felt good.

You know what else felt good?

Leaving work at 1 in the afternoon yesterday, that's what.

Not that I did much with my afternoon - I loafed on the couch, I opened mail and paid the bill that was almost late, and I watched The Incredibles.

But it wasn't work.

Penny almost scares me, lately, with how fast she's learning and growing.

Even though she hasn't quite caught on to using more than one word at a time (she's said, "More, please?" a few times, and exactly once she said, "Dada, up!" but that's about it) she communicates more and more clearly with every day.

She's learning her colors - she's got yellow, purple, blue, orange, and white down pat, and sometimes she gets pink and black. She can usually identify red and green, but won't say them.

More scary, she's learning letters. That's coming slower, but she knows B and O, and will gleefully point to every instance of either. (It made for a trick last night, reading Goodnight Moon, as the little 'o' looks just like the big 'O', and she insisted on pointing to every occurrence before I could turn each page.) This morning, she identified A, too. And she can't say C, but if I ask her to point to a C on the page, she'll do it, her finger tracing the curve with glee.

Last night in the bath, she wanted me to sing to her. She asked for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" by saying, "Star?" and then a tuneless "Da-da-da-da-da-" as if she was trying to sing it, herself. And then she wanted me to sing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," which she asked for by tapping her index fingers together, which is about as close as she can come to the correct hand-motions. She'd do a semblance of the hand motions with me, too - the spider climbing, the rain coming down, the sun coming up... She won't sing along, though. But she made me alternate between those two songs for almost twenty minutes straight.

And at dinner last night, we gave her an actual, honest-to-god cup, with no lid or straw. It was only filled about a third full, but Penny's such a huge fan of juice, and we give it to her so seldom, that we thought it would be a good way for her to work on learning to drink from a "big-girl" cup. She drained the cup without spilling a single drop, and then asked for more. The second cup (another third - we're willing to let her learn, but we're not entirely dumb) she spilled a little, but not nearly as much as we expected - maybe half a tablespoon, at the most, dripped down her chin to dampen her shirt.

The most telling of all, for me, though...

She had "school" pictures taken again, recently, and the package came back last week. I took a 5x7 to work, to put in my frame there. And I sat for a moment in shock, looking between the two most recent pictures.

The previous picture was taken at about 14 months; this one at 21. There really hadn't been an especially dramatic change between her 8-month picture and the 14-month one. She was obviously bigger, and slightly less pudgy, but this one... Holy cow. This is it. Sometime in the last six months, Penny transformed from a baby into a little girl.

--Liz