Task #1: Complete!

Whew! This past week was just one whirlwind of excitement. When I accepted my position at the museum, I was told that 50% of my time would be spent on a grant project. When I started, I learned that I needed to write the one year report for the grant, request a change in personnel (since I would be the new project manager), request a change in budget because we had to rework the deliverables and request an extension so that we could actually deliver those deliverables. Yeah, and it was all due last week. Once I got a handle on the project and worked with folks to figure out what realistically those new deliverables would be, everyone went on vacation. So I wrote up most of this action on my own, then had to wait until Monday to start requesting input, finalize numbers and really work out the kinks. It was a little nerve-wracking, but by 4:56pm on Thursday, everything was faxed and e-mailed to what I think were the correct parties. We'll see. Hopefully everything goes through ok...otherwise, I don't know what I'll be doing with that 50% of my time.

That freed me up for three days of weekend fun with Penny. No pictures, of course, because she just grabs the camera at this point. She's getting better at aiming, but still needs some work on composing her pieces. I think one of her funniest trends these days is taking care of us. She combs my hair after I give her a bath (I think it's a way to get the comb away so I stop yanking her knots). She has on occasion tucked me into her bed, given me a drink from her cup and left the room. This weekend when her cousins came to visit, she led them by the hand to the kitchen where she began to make croaking noises. This is Penny's cue to grab the froggy cup on the counter. Apparently, as a good hostess, she wanted to share the contents of the cup - a pile of gummy bears. We know she wasn't just using the girls to get bears (she's always asking for BEH-ahs) because she actually declined when the gummy bears were offered to her! She's so sweet sometimes.

Of course, she alternates such actions with some terrible two stuff so we don't get too gushy about her. When she doesn't get her way she'll throw a tantrum, fairly standard. Heaven help you if you're carrying her WHILE denying her something, though. She then uses her head as a club to bludgeon the poor soul carrying her. I've gone to bed with some serious headaches because of this habit! Dan asked if I watched a lot of Die Hard or other such movies while she was in utero. I think he forgets we didn't have a TV at the time. In any case, she's got an impressively violent streak. How long do the terrible twos last?

In any case, I'm looking forward to going to work tomorrow, having a few billion meetings, some of which promise to be productive, and generally getting a chance to really catch up on all the fun paperwork I've been missing out on for the past week because I've been caught up in report writing.