Ground to a halt

So I apparently forgot to knock on wood after that last post. I felt icky on Tuesday, and then had a migraine Wednesday and Thursday, so I've gotten virtually no work done this week. I'm finally feeling better today, but day care is closed so Baby Girl is home today, meaning very little is getting done. Prepare to resume previous levels of nausea-inducing stress...

I might actually pull this off..

I finished three units over the weekend, leaving me with five more (shallow) units to process. At two days per unit that means I should finish everything up next week Friday, leaving me with five days to organize and pack up all the artifacts for storage, get the house in order, and pack our selves up for a short stay in Guayaquil. Holy Toledo, Batman, this might actually happen!


Steve still has swollen tonsils and I haven't been feeling too hot either, but we got our water supply problem resolved, so at least we're clean sick people. I've started discussing with Baby Girl what's going to happen in the next few weeks. I'm not sure that she really gets it, but we are quite fortunate that she is such an easy going kid. She might ask for the "ninos" at daycare, but I think she'll enjoy the adventure, and in the end, just be so happy to spend some time with her Nana that she won't really miss it. There are a few favorites who I'm sure she'll ask for, like Fanny, who is pretty much the only person here that she'd choose to hold her instead of me. We're going to get a cake to have at daycare on her last day, turn it into a little bit of a party and take pictures. I hope she will remember some of her time here, and all the friends she made.

Pluses and Minuses

Plus: Last night I finished drawing the rim sherds for the deep pit that we dug. That's 20 levels of ceramics, done. Now I just have to tally the bone, shell, and lithic artifacts, and then I can move on to the trench units.


Minus: My husband is still sick with swollen tonsils (12 days and counting).


Plus: We've scheduled a going-away party for the village. I'll talk about archaeology and then we'll all eat cake (May 2, 4pm).


Minus: Last night the motor on the pump that gives us running water in the house died. That means no running water for dishes, for showers, for flushing the toilet. Someone has been called to try and fix the motor, but how quickly that will happen....no one knows. Apparently we can still get water from somewhere (need to clarify that we're not being told to get water from the river....ewwww), so it looks like we're going to be hauling buckets full of water up to the house. Couldn't this have waited another three weeks?!?!?! Oh, yeah, and wasn't this one of the things that our landlord said he was going to do maintenance on, but hasn't? Such is life here.

So, two to two, but I'm feeling like the scale's a little weighted right now.

Too Busy to Blog?

Well, that's obviously not entirely true, since here I am. But things have been very busy. Nail-bitting, ulcer-inducing, stressed-beyond-belief busy. But you wouldn't know it to look at me. Catch me at any random moment of the day and I'm likely to be sitting still, scribbling on paper. For the last week and a half (or about that) I've been working on drawing literally hundreds of rim profiles. What are those, the laypeople among you might ask? Well, basically I take a piece of pottery that's broken off from the rim of a vessel (a rim sherd) and turn it on its side and draw the contours of that piece. That gives me a pretty good idea of the shape of a vessel as a whole, and if the piece is large enough, the size of it too. So I'm drawing every rim sherd that we found in the deep pit and the trench. Right now I'm on level 14 of 20 for the deep pit. I hope to finish those, and all the other artifacts from the deep pit, by the end of this coming week. That will leave me roughly two weeks to do all the analysis from the trench, which had considerably fewer artifacts, so hopefully it's doable.


What's making this all go at a snail's pace? Well, first my husband had an academic deadline last week, so I was picking up a lot of baby and house slack, which meant that the analysis fell by the wayside. Then, this week, both he and I have been sick - him with strep and me with some type of respiratory infection - both of which seem to be impervious to the strongest antibiotics that we can throw at them. I can only hope that this will all get better soon, otherwise I'll have one of two choices: change our flight and push back our return to the States, or return at some point by myself to finish the analysis so that I can actually get my dissertation done. I'm hoping for neither, but thinking option two might have to happen anyway. Sigh. Such is life.

Baby Girl’s Two Yellow Seats

BG has two yellow seats, and she’s been spending a lot of time on both of them recently. The first is her yellow potty, only of those little plastic container affairs that sits on the floor. She’s gotten quite interested in going on the potty lately, but doesn’t quite gather the timing of the whole thing. A few times she’s sat down with her diaper still on and gone to the bathroom. Other times she’ll take her diaper off just after she’s filled it and then sit down. Or, she’ll sit down, and then wander off and pee somewhere before we can get a new diaper on her. The most important thing, I guess, is that she’s showing interest and trying. We bought some stickers for her last week (she picked them out and then handed over the money) and I told her she gets a sticker each time she goes to the bathroom on her potty. That really seemed to set a fire under her. I suppose I could have used these two weeks with her to get her fully trained, but I don’t think it would happen so quickly, or that her daycare would be able to keep it up when she goes back. I’m definitely going to talk to them when I drop her off tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath. I figure, I’ll really push it in June, when we’re settled in a place of our own.

Her other yellow chair is a plastic kids chair that she uses at her little craft table, and also sits on, facing the wall, for her time outs. It’s this latter sense that I’m talking about here. BG is rapidly approaching 28 months, and her two-ness is starting to kick in. She gets timeouts for the same two reasons, over and over again – throwing things (toys, food, or dishes, generally) and for hitting (she’s in a slapping stage lately). Even during her most trying behavior, I’m able to stay relatively calm, I think in part because I recognize that this is a developmental stage, so we redirect her, or give her timeout, and then we move on. This last week has been particularly hard because I’ve been dedicating a lot of time to the analysis, and not to her. If I’m in her sight, she wants me to hold her, or she wants to help me, or she just wants me, and unfortunately, ceramic analysis is not very toddler friendly. She’s acting up because she wants attention, and she’ll take it anyway she can get it, even if it’s in the form of mommy frowning at her because she’s just grabbed mommy’s camera off the table and tried to throw it off the deck. Daycare will start tomorrow, and I think a lot of the pressure will be let off. She’ll get to play all day with her friends, which she loves, and I’ll get a good 7 or 8 hours of lab work in. Then, when she comes home I’ll feel more able to devote all my attention to her, and give her all the love she deserves. There’s a lot of guilt bound up in the fact that I need full-day childcare in order to make life work, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do. And her smiles and laughter as we played peek-a-boo after a particularly hard day tells me it’s all worth it.