Penny sat down to dinner last night and I put in front of her a miniature copy of what Matt and I were having for dinner -- homemade chicken nuggets and lima beans.

"Yogurt?" she begged.

"You need to eat a little bit of beans and a bite of chicken," I told her, "and if you don't like it then you can have some yogurt." I don't know if that will be our final rule about food, but I think it's fairly reasonable for a small child.

"No! Don' wannit!"

"Okay. You don't have to eat if you don't want to." Penny is hardly on the verge of starvation, and I've noticed lately that she tends to eat big lunches and light dinners anyway.

"Yogurt?"

"No, you can't have any yogurt until you've tried your beans and chicken."

In a fit of pique, she smacked the table and then swung at Matt, pretending to hit him.

We put her in a time-out.

When the three minutes were up, Matt went to get her off the stairs, and talked to her about being nice and how pretend-hitting wasn't nice, and he extracted a "Sowwy," and then he said, "Do you want to come and eat dinner?"

"No." Not belligerent or whiny. Calm, actually. "No dinner."

"Are you sure? That means no more food tonight."

"No dinner."

Well, missing one meal isn't going to hurt her. She ran around and played until we were done eating, and then begged Matt to take her outside yesterday evening to blow bubbles.

They were out for maybe ten minutes when the neighbor-kid, Ray, heard her and begged his mom to let him go outside and play with her.

So Penny and Ray had a good old time running around and riding Ray's rider toys and playing with Penny's necklaces and generally being kids. Emma from two doors down came over for a while, too.

Hunger and tiredness, I think, combined at the end and contributed to a very Two-ish blowup of jealousy over Matt blowing some bubbles for Ray. Since it was time for pyjamas anyway, we said good night to Ray and Emma and went in. By the time she'd brushed her teeth and gotten into her PJs, she was feeling much more chipper, and the rest of the bedtime routine went without incident.

We were kind of expecting her to demand food as soon as she woke up this morning, but she didn't. Guess she'll just eat a hearty breakfast at school.

I spent most of last night having weird, kind of gross dreams. There was a public restroom stall with a wall that had an oozing scar and a toilet that literally touched the stall door. And then there was the man who I beheaded because he was insinuating he'd slept with my wife (I was a man, in the dream); but after he was dead I put him on the bed to see how she would react, and I turned around to pick up the blanket, and when I turned back, he was sitting up, blood seeping out of the scar around his throat, grinning at me.

"Do you know what this means?" he asked me.

"It means that XXXXX loves you." (XXXXX was the name of a god. I can't remember it now.)

"Yes. XXXXX and I are very close."

I wish I knew what it meant; even after I woke up and went to the bathroom and went back to bed, he came back. But it was almost disturbingly undisturbing. He didn't frighten or startle me; mostly what I was thinking about when I woke up each time was whether I could work that into something I'm writing.

But the end result is the same -- I'm a little braindead today, and it's a good thing I don't have any especially complicated tasks on the old to-do list.

I do, however, have quite a few uncomplicated tasks on it, so I'd best be off.

--Liz