pooped

Yesterday was a bit of an all-round crappy day. Phoebe woke up on the wrong side of the crib, waking early and starting off our day with 15 minutes of crying without telling me what was wrong. After I’d wrangled Phoebe off to daycare, I spent some of the morning somewhat relaxed, feeling a great weight lifted from me after having passed off the completed poster to go to the printer the night before. I still had work to do, but I had the whole day ahead of me to get it done, right? So, I’ll admit that I puttered and lounged for over an hour, and even wrote a post (the one I published last night). Then I talked to my professor about what he needed from me for the handout for the talk at the conference, and I blithely said I could get all the soundfiles and screenshots together by evening.

What I hadn’t taken into account was how mind-numbing sifting through the files would be to find the clearest illustrations.. And then there’s the fact that I’m a perfectionist, and wanted the screenshots to be as pretty as possible. Uniform in size, with target portions of the soundfiles consistently aligned in the window, with a lightened spectrogram to make the f0 track more visible. In the end, I devised a process that was also mind-numbing, but led to some pretty pictures. See?

Screenshot of of a .wav file and corresponding segment-aligned TextGrid in Praat, made using SnapzPro, and converted to grayscale in Illustrator, where arrows and f0 scale numbers were added.

Somehow, my day evaporated, and when 4:00 rolled around, time for me to pick up Phoebe at daycare, I still found myself with a large chunk of the work ahead of me. Then Phoebe was cranky, having continued to have a cranky day. And John came home after a crappy day, too. The brief hours between arrival at home and the beginning of bathtime were artificially elongated by mutual feelings of crappiness, filled with lots of whining and crying, and occasional mini-tantrums on the floor. And Phoebe wasn’t in a great mood, either.

But then around bathtime, an amazing thing happened. Phoebe not only peed in the potty in quantities vastly more copious than the usual token drops, but she pooped in the potty! For the first time! (Phoebe had mixed feelings about the experience, though. And there was a bit more crying. But John and I did a happy dance, and hopefully convinced her that it was a good thing.) I tell you, it was the high point of my day, that poop.

A most fitting end to a craptastic day.

Of course, the day didn’t really end then for me. Because I had to finish my work. It took me from 8:30 to 1:30 to get all the files together. Leaving me feeling pretty pooped.

Today, on the other hand, I’m feeling pretty festive. I’m still pretty tired, but once again, feel the lightness of having finished a task. Plus the weather is beautiful, sunny with temperatures actually in the 60s. I’m heading in to Boston by train, and later this afternoon, will have a 7-hour car trip to the conference with the three professors I work with. There is a good chance I will be pretty damn tired tomorrow.

I’m also trying not to think too much about the fact that this will be the first time in Phoebe’s whole lifetime when we have not been staying under the same roof. I have this little nagging worry that she might somehow associate last night’s potty extravaganza with my departure, and we might see our progress go down the toilet, as it were. “I poop in the potty and Mommy go away!”