No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth.

My last post was written the day that I went back to work and I haven't felt like I've had any spare time since. I have, of course, but I've likely spent it trying to read the last of the morning paper at 10 p.m.

Things are just fine. Julia has been sleeping through the night like a trooper. She even made the adjustment for daylight savings time without too much trouble. I think one of the greatest gifts an infant of this age can give it's parents is to sleep through the night. It makes parents feel human again to have uninterrupted sleep.

Julia started smiling a few weeks ago and we now consider it official--she's laughing too. Not a lot yet, but that makes it all the more precious when she does it.

The other day, I was sitting in the chair in our bedroom and holding Julia while Allie was jumping on our bed. Allie was jumping and jumping and then crossing her legs and sitting down from a jumping position and I guess Julia thought she looked silly, because suddenly she started laughing. Then Allie and I spent the next five minutes trying to get her to do it again, with only the result that Allie got winded and I got mildly frustrated.

She loves her baths now and her eyes get really wide when you first put her in and when you wet her head. She's not so happy generally when you're dressing her afterwards--I think she gets a little cold despite my best efforts.

Julia is also getting better with her fussy periods in the evening, at least for the last four or five nights. It's wonderful to have a happy baby in the house. She's outgrowing her newborn clothes and getting some wear out of her warmer outfits since it's been so cold.

Allie threw up on me when I left her at daycare yesterday. Gosh, she hasn't done that in at least a couple of years. I can wait another couple of years, personally. We think orange juice is too hard on her stomach in the morning, since she's fine afterwards. This isn't the first time she's thrown up that way.

That's the quick update on my kids. Who knows when I'll write again, but Halloween is tomorrow, so maybe I'll give an update on that soon.

Julia is 10 weeks old today and I went back to work. It was OK. I had enough to do that the morning went really quickly and the afternoon was fine too.

I really wanted a nap at about 2:30, but I got some sugar in my system and I was all right. Julia only got me up once last night, but I had a lot of trouble getting back to sleep afterwards--that old anticipation-of-the-alarm thing. I'll go to bed early tonight and Greg will get up with Julia when she wants to be fed.

I was all right with leaving Julia at daycare for the first time, too. She's been going with me to drop off Allie for weeks, of course, but this time I left her there with her sister. It was definitely easier than when Allie started daycare, for a couple of reasons.

For one, I feel a lot better about Karina, our current provider, than Sherry, who had Allie as an infant. Allie's been going to Karina for months already, so my trust in having Julia with her is obviously unlike that first day leaving Allie with Sherry, who we really didn't know from Adam.

For another, Karina didn't ask me, with a sympathetic voice, how I was doing or if I was OK. That's enough to get me teary-eyed, right there, especially since I think my hormones are still a little screwed up.

I got teary in the car and then I was OK. And I saw both girls at lunch, though Julia was sound asleep in a swing. I'll be visiting them at lunch at least twice a week, for my benefit much more than theirs.

And so we move on to the next stage in our lives, I guess. This is how things will be until Allie starts kindergarten, in two short years.

Last night at about 9:00, Greg was in the basement working on the computer and I was in the living room, feeding Julia and watching TV. Allie had been in bed for 1/2 hour and was supposed to be asleep. She called me and said she couldn't find her dolly. Dolly is a necessity at bedtime. I suspected Dolly had fallen under the bed, so I called Greg to go upstairs and help her (Julia screams if you take her bottle away before she's ready).

Absorbed in my show, I didn't even realize that Greg never came back downstairs. At 9:30, I was going to take a sleeping Julia to her crib when I realized the cat was acting out that no one had remembered to feed her. Her dish is downstairs, so I called down to Greg to feed Pig. No answer. I thought he might have headphones on, so I went downstairs and discovered he wasn't there.

Heading upstairs, I found Greg sound asleep on our bed, with both his bedside light on and the overhead light on. The overhead light is bright! I don't know how he managed to fall asleep. I turned out the overhead light and carried Julia to her crib. She's out--making that little snoring/snurgling noise that babies make when they're happy (full tummy in this case).

I went down to the basement to turn off the computer and noticed when I came back up that Allie was snoring too, which she does occasionally, especially when she's really out of it sleeping.

And then I went back to our room, where my husband was blissfully snoring.

All was at peace in the Lee household.

You've all heard of Corelle dishes, right? When I was in my early teens, my family got their first Corelle and my sisters and I would sometimes amuse ourselves by intentionally dropping it on the floor as we did the dishes. Corelle isn't supposed to break.

Yeah, right.

At some point in time, someone gave Greg and I something on a medium-size, white Corelle plate and we never gave the plate back. On Friday night, I tried to pull two of our everyday stoneware plates out of the cupboard and I didn't realize the Corelle plate was on top of the stack. It, and a small stoneware plate, fell on the counter and broke.

The stoneware plate broke in half. The Corelle plate shattered into thousands of pieces, shards and chunks and glass dust. It took me two seconds to clean up the broken stoneware plate and it took Greg and I a good half hour to clean up the Corelle.

If we owned any more of the stuff, it would be gone from this household. Damn that Corelle. Damn it all.

It was an unusually productive Sunday around the Lee residence today. Not so much for me--I just bathed and fed Julia, kept Allie occupied, and made my way through a stack of filing/paid bills/statements/artwork from Allie/receipts/photographs that dated back to November.

It was my husband who was productive. He scraped the wood trim around our garage door, where the paint had started peeling probably last year. Our house was only built six years or so ago, but this trim was looking bad, and it turns out some of it was actually rotten. He dug out the bad stuff, put in wood filler, sanded, and painted. Then he tackled our front porch, where our lower rail has something growing in it that's rotting it for sure. Same remedy.

He also replaced the peeling house numbers on our mailbox (something Pizza Hut drivers will thank him for) and painted the board where our deck attaches to the house. That last project has been waiting to be done since 1999, when we built the deck.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I certainly could have taken care of these projects if I was a little more motivated. I'm just really glad they're done. Good for Gregory.

On another subject, Julia is really growing fast now. She is so alert and good at following movement. She coos whole phrases in babytalk instead of just brief sounds. And she even feels different in my arms, like a baby instead of a newborn--parents and grandparents would know what I mean by that. She's not so floppy, not so light, different. Growing up already.

I know, I know. She's two months old and I've got another 22 years (if we're lucky) before she's out of the house. I'm just conscious that this is the last time I'm going to get to go through this process. And no, I've never, ever considered having a third baby. I just want to appreciate every one of these moments with her (and continuing moments with Allie), and yet I know that's not even remotely possible.

I really hate going to the dentist. You probably wouldn't guess that, since I schedule appointments every six months and submit myself to the whole cleaning procedure, but I do.

I've had more than my fair share of lifetime procedures, I think. A good number of fillings as a kid, a root canal, bleaching, an implant, a crown, another root canal (this one emergency, while I was pregnant with Julia) and now another crown today.

My implant took two years of procedures. I had throbbing pain (on a tooth that had earlier been root canaled and bleached) and ended up getting the tooth pulled. So I had to wear a partial (you know, a retainer-like thing with a fake tooth on it) while I had a bone graft, threads carved into the bone of my upper jaw, the installation of a healing collar through the gum, a cover thing installed, and then a fake tooth put on. I know some people spend years with braces, but this sucked just as much as I understand those do.

Today, with this crown, I felt like the dentist was drilling right through to my brain. He did four impressions too; god, I hate that gunk. I gagged so badly on the third set that he had to start over and I ended up with little bits of hardened impression stuff all over my mouth, including stuck to the roof of my mouth (which I discovered in the parking lot). Gross, yuck, ick.

I have to go back in three weeks to get the final crown put on. Any volunteers to go in my place? Pretty please?

If you bother to read this thing regularly, you might remember me talking about cleaning our mudroom and how many coats we own. Well, I counted today and we own 31 (not including some of Allie's that are now packed away for Julia). That's ridiculous, since you really only wear one at a time. I tackled cleaning the closet in the mudroom today and got two bags ready for St. Vincent de Paul's of just coats. When I was a kid, I got some of my coats from St. Vinnie's, so that's where they're going and I hope they keep somebody appreciative warm (and dry; there's a rain slicker or two in there).

Cleaning the mudroom closet had a spillover effect--I got rid of a whole ton of vases from under the kitchen sink (when was the last time you cleaned under there?) and made some space in our pantry as well. My dear husband is a real sweetie about buying me flowers, so the vase situation had really gotten out of hand. Now we have room for all the Swiffer cloths we own. If you haven't tried Swiffer (or as Greg says for some strange reason, Swifter), you need to give it a go.

Julia has been sleeping all morning. She's starting to eat more at a time and I think that her new formula must have triptophan in it. Yet another consequence of being a second baby--she's not getting Enfamil anymore, she's drinking Parent's Choice (the Wal-Mart brand). Poor child doesn't get all Pampers diapers like her sister either, half the time she's in Huggies.

Well, at least she's been wearing some of the new outfits people were kind enough to give us now that it's cold. She looks adorable, of course, and not at all like her sister did at that age, if you ask me. Unlike Allie, who still doesn't look like either Greg or I, I think Julia looks like me as a baby. Aren't genetics weird? Repeating an appearance in a new person?

She did it!

Julia slept through the night last night for the first time. Yay! Yay! She was wiggling and making noises when we tried to put her in her crib at the end of our evening, so I fed her one more time starting at 10:15. She fell asleep about 10:30 and didn't wake up until 6:45 this morning. I am very happy.

My happiness is tempered somewhat by the fact that this could just be an aberration because of the doctor visit and shots yesterday wearing her out. We'll know soon, I guess. And you can't help but compare--Allie slept through the night for the first time at 3 weeks and was doing it very reliably by 3 months. Please keep your fingers crossed for me and Greg.

Speaking of Allie, just because Julia didn't get fed in the middle of the night doesn't mean I got to sleep peacefully. Allie had three instances last night where she woke up from a bad dream and kept calling my name until I went to her. I just hand her a tissue to wipe her eyes (she's always crying), tell her to lay down, and cover her up before going back to bed. Hey, I'll take that anytime over spending a good half hour feeding and burping a baby. It's a lot harder to get back to sleep yourself.

Congratulations on your anniversary, Dwayne and Raquel!