24

4AM – that’s when I got up yesterday. I then spent a very effective few hours working on my lab meeting, which I hadn’t had a chance to do yet because of other demands on my time (also known as “my baby” and “sleep”). Got it done, went to work, presented, and all was well.

Except now I’m EXHAUSTED.

So let’s try to distract your attention away from the black circles under my eyes with a picture of my adorable daughter:

(Photo taken by a friend at our story hour play-date yesterday…)

Tangentially related story: the play date was held in Barnes and Noble (home of Sunday morning Story Hour!). The container Meeka is holding is cheerios. She was very good at reaching in and getting the cheerios out … and then dumping them on the floor. Let me remind you, this is the floor of a public Barnes and Noble (granted, a little used corner of it. But still). Then, she would grab her floor-cheerios- and eat them. Eventually (OK, after like 3 times), I just gave up trying to stop her. She was too fast and squiggly for my efforts to be at all successful… So I just shrugged and chalked it up to “building up her immune system.” Mother of the Year? Yes, indeed 😉

And on a totally different topic – I read 24 books in March! I may have accomplished very little else, but that, that I did! (I guess its not totally unrelated, if you take the jump from a play date in a bookstore to talking about books in stride)

My “good” aka “thinking” books for the month were –

• Naughty Secrets by Joan Elizabeth Lloyd: meh. I picked this one out thinking it would be something of an anthropological/sociological review of why people act the way they do (the topic was sex, btw). Instead, it was just the verbatim transcription of what people wrote in response to a survey. Which, yeah, somewhat interesting… But not totally what I was expecting or hoping for.
• Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World by Dario Maestripieri: similar experience. Guess I wasn’t on my A-game for book-picking this month. Once again, this book took a look at the nitty-gritty details of monkey life and behavior – which was interesting. But I was hoping for a good anthropological wrap-up of monkey vs. human behavior, and nope. This was not it. (Can you tell I’m a closet soc/anth geek?)
• How to get your kid to eat – but not too much by Ellyn Satter: a nutritionists take on feeding your child from infancy through teenagerhood. Granted, it’s a bit old (um, 1980s anyone?) but still a good- and useful! – read.

The rest of my monthly reading consisted of a lot of YA Fiction, for the most part (Meg Cabot and Tamora Pierce are two favorite authors, in case you were wondering) … and let’s not even discuss how the rest of my 2012 goals went, mmmmkay?

Now I’m off to mainline the rest of my coffee in the hopes of feeling slightly less bleary this morning…