Had a pretty good evening, and a pretty good morning.

I had my dentist appointment (everything thumbs-up, yay, so no more dentist appointments until August) and then picked Penny up a little bit late.

We got home, watched Sesame Street, ate dinner, and Penny ate slow enough that I left her sitting in her highchair while I got some chores done, like unloading the dishwasher (and re-loading it) and paying most of the bills.

(It's been a couple of years since I last touched the household bills. Seriously, almost $60 for a single phone line that we use mostly to avoid telemarketers, and for maybe three actual phone calls a week? Maybe we should think more seriously about cancelling our landline service entirely.)

Anyway, Penny finally decided she was done eating around 7:15 (she didn't actually eat more than usual, she just did it slowly) and while she was playing with her pet rock--

Haven't I mentioned the pet rock? Saturday, when Penny came back froms playing at the duck pond with the Brandts, Emma brought me a small river rock that she said she'd picked out especially for me. I thanked her and stuck it in my pocket, and it wound up on the table at home. Penny found it, and started playing with it. I mean, really. She's spending more time with this rock than she does with any of her other toys.

She calls it Rocko, which is copying straight from Zoe on Sesame Street, who also has a pet rock named Rocko. (I really dislike Zoe, but I think the bits with Rocko are kind of funny. Mostly because Zoe's insistence on treating Rocko as if it's alive exasperates the heck out of Elmo, and it's kind of nice to see Elmo have an emotion that isn't perky and cheerful.) Anyway, Penny plays with her Rocko a lot, and I'm happy to let her, because it's one of the few toys she'll play with and not insist that I play, too.

So anyway, she was playing with her pet rock when I detected what Matt and I refer to as "a certain scent." Time for a diaper change. Since it was close to time for PJs anyway, I went ahead and got her dressed for bed.

But I'd forgotten what a creature of routine Penny is. Lacking the skills to look at a clock and tell how close to bedtime it is, she uses schedule cues. Fair enough.

...So when we came downstairs, instead of going back to playing with Rocko, she asked if I'd read her favorite Curious George book.

There was a good half-hour left before bedtime, and while I wouldn't normally argue with her if she wanted to go to bed early, she's been waking up a smidge before six for the last few days, and I really don't want to encourage that.

I managed to put her off another five or ten minutes, and then I read the book very slowly, and managed to stretch it all the way to eight. (Curious George books are long, for kids' books -- even reading at normal speeds, it takes us about fifteen minutes to get through one.)

Then she picked out a couple of stuffed animals ("Puppy coming! Blue bear coming!") and I put her to bed.

She slept until after 6:15 this morning, which was nice, because I had a very restless night. And since she slept so late, I was able to put off giving her anything to eat. Instead, I promised that if she was very good, she could have some raisins in the car.

And it was as if a light went off in her little brain. A dim one, but...

"Okay, Penny, go get your shoes."

"NO!" She ran away from me to the opposite side of the room. This has been, for the last few days, what I assume is an act-out in response to the confusion of her father having rather suddenly disappeared. She's happy and good and cute and adorable, except any time we need to go somewhere, she digs in her heels and refuses. Doesn't matter where we are or where we're going. She doesn't want to leave wherever she is at the moment. She didn't even want to leave the doctor's office yesterday morning.

I looked at her and said, "I thought you were being good this morning, so you could have some raisins in the car. Being good means doing what Mommy tells you to do."

She looked at me for about two seconds, then ran into the living room. She didn't actually fetch her shoes like I'd told her to do, but she did sit on the couch and let me put them on her. And she let me put on her coat. And when I opened the door, she went outside. And she didn't run away from me when I tried to put her in the car.

We had a Moment on the way to school, where she managed to unfasten the buckle that goes across her chest. But she wasn't defiant about it. "Uh-oh!" she told me. I asked her to do the buckle back up, and she tried, but couldn't get the pieces to line up in the moving car. So I had to pull over and help her out. But she was otherwise good and happy, laughing at the trees going by and the other cars.

We got to daycare, and she held my hand while we walked across the parking lot and into her room, and ran into the room to show off her dress to her teacher. She came back and gave me a big hug and a kiss, and begged me to do the Princess Dance with her before I left (which takes all of about thirty seconds, and is unspeakably cute, so I obliged), and then she spotted her friend T.J. on the slide, so she wasn't even at the window to wave goodbye to me when I left.

And I don't have any doctor's appointments today, for what seems the first time in a month, so I'm hoping to actually get some work done. If only all mornings would go so smoothly.

--Liz