Joey had her physical today. I adore her pediatrician. She's really wonderful and very personal and never makes me feel like she has to hurry and get on to the next person. She gives me as much time as I need and that is rare these days. We talked about Jordyn's apparent bre*st development and she thought it would be a good idea to do an X-ray of her hands. She can compare her bone age to her chronological age and if it is more than 2 standard deviations above her chronological age, she will refer us to an endocrinologist for further testing. She said that since her growth pattern is on a smooth curve and there seems to be no other p*bertal development, that she isn't suffering from what is called precocious p*berty. I think that term is pretty funny.

I learned how to develop prints today and how to do test strips, enlargements and contact prints. It was all very exciting. My spider web pictures didn't turn out as great as I thought they would but there's one that's decent enough to try to enlarge. It's the one with the big, fat, hairy spider smack in the middle. One of my pictures of Joey sleeping looks good enough to print and the quick snap I took of Ed with his hand over his eyes (fist, actually) looks good. He looks as stressed as he is.

To get going on my photo essay Things We Do, I shot a roll of 24 exposures on Jaimie's hands while she was sewing. I got a few with her face in them, too. Then I put in a new roll of film and took some shots of Joey's pediatrician while she was doing her doctor thing today. It was fun. I have a whole list of other shots I want to get--my father shooting pool, Ed cutting wood on the table saw, Stacey taking pictures, Amy doing the firefighter/paramedic thing, Gwen doing a massage--stuff like that. I'm sorry--I know I'm writing a lot about fotography but I've wanted to take this class for decades and finally now it's happening and I'm so excited I can hardly stand it.

Ed was concerned that my taking fotography classes might be a problem for Stacey and I because she is studying to become a professional portrait fotographer. I don't want to do that. I want to do foto essays and art shots and personality pieces that are totally different than her style. I was writing down the types of things like to fotograph and one of my favorite things is to take intense closeups of a part of a whole, like photos of hands or wheels or things like that. Stacey takes photos of wholes. Almost always. I'd love to get a macro lens so I can do some neat macro fotography. That's what I was going for with my spiderweb but I didn't really have the tools I needed, namely an extension tube for closeup focusing. I can only focus about 18 inches away, no closer. But that's enough about fotography for now. But rest assured, it is a topic to which I will definitely return. ;-)

I made my veal piccata tonight. The sauce was very piquant but quite delicious. I served it with a simple accompaniment of spinach and crusty French bread. I also bought a corned beef that I plan to cook sometime in the next month. I will make bread, too, so that I can have delicious corned beef sandwiches on homemade bread. Ooh, that's actually making my mouth water! And I'm still full from dinner.

Ed and I have both been having some dizziness these past few days. I think it's inner ear stuff--my allergies are sort of bothering me and I've had post-nasal drip for awhile. My left ear feels kinda tickly and has a sort of tunnel-sounding thing going on. I hate it. I have some hearing loss in my left ear anyway, so with this thing going on in my ear, I feel like I have some cotton stuffed in my ear canal. Earlier today, the dizziness was enough to make me feel slightly nauseated. It reminded me of how I felt last spring when the earthquake hit. I had this strange feeling of dizziness and a wave of nausea washed over me before I realized what was happening.

Now it is time in Lobotomy Land when we watch The West Wing.

Nytol.

--L

* I had to change the spellings of certain words because I was getting a lot of google hits looking for pictures relating to p*berty and armp*t ha*r and p*bic ha*r and it was creeping me out. I'd prefer not to have thos kinds of pervs stumbling into Lobotomy Land, thankyewverymuch.