The weather in Albuquerque is cold right now, but sunny, and in the middle of the day, it's really quite nice outside. So Kate and I have been taking walks, and finally visited a little park near our house that I had noticed had baby swings. And wow, we should have done that a long time ago. She loved it. And, even better, was worn out when it was nap time. Thank you, park swings.

Kate loves her bath at night, so much that I suspect she is now intentionally smearing food in her hair during dinner to ensure that I don't decide she is clean enough to skip it for a night. Part of the reason she loves it is because she has made a game out of making me chase her down once I start getting the tub ready. As soon as the water turns on, the game starts. I grab her, usually get one piece of her clothing half-way off, and then she wriggles free and runs away laughing. Then I grab her again and get maybe one sock off her body before she's off again. It's actually really fun, but not the most convenient thing. So I take don't feel so bad about shaping her hair into soapy devil horns and then posting naked baby photos of her on the Internet.

In preparation for decorating our Christmas tree, I made a big pan of cornbread in my cast-iron skillet and some black-eyed peas, cooked with Rotel and bacon for flavoring. There may be better food in the world than this, but I don't want to know what it is.

Editor Alert: Check your spelling, people, because my former editor, David Stevens, has decided to join the December Photo Project via his blog with the Clovis News Journal, Falling With Style. David has already taken some excellent photos that make me feel all nostalgic for Eastern New Mexico, or maybe just small towns in general. Welcome, David!

This is not the greatest photo, and I was somewhat hesitant to start the December Photo Project with it, but it's funny when you understand what is happening. On Saturday, we took Kate to the aquarium. There is a part in the Albuquerque Aquarium where there is a big walk-through tunnel devoted to the habitat of eels. Big, slimy, creepy eels. I was worried Kate would be freaked out by them. I mean, I am sort of scared of them. All they do is sit there and and open and close their mouths and never ever blink. And she loved them. After watching them for a few minutes, she turned to us and started opening and closing her mouth in perfect imitation of the eels. I managed to get one picture of her with her mouth open, and as you can see, that eel on the left is helpfully opening his (Her? Beats me.) mouth so you can see what Kate was going for.

I am not sure if this is cheating, but I am going to post a couple of other photos of Kate with her new BFFs, the eels. I have a feeling a year-long pass to the aquarium is going to be on her Christmas list.

So after several years of talking myself out of it, I am going to participate in this year's December Photo Project, hosted by my dear friend and blogging mentor Rebecca Tredway. I invite anyone who reads here and also has a blog to participate, too! To read about the project, head on over to Rebecca's and read this and this. But the basic idea is that you post one photo every day from December 1 to December 25. I am sure I will flake out on more than a few days, but just anticipating doing this has already got me carrying around my camera and paying more attention to the visually interesting things I see.

Breaking News: Daniel Meigs, boyfriend of my lovely sister, has started a blog (finally!) and is going to participate in the December Photo Project. Daniel takes better pictures with one hand tied behind his back, in his sleep, with a blindfold on, than I can take on my very best day. I already knew I was going to look bad before this was over, but now it is official. Welcome, Wetsuit Waffle. Be nice and don't laugh at my bad photos or I will have Hannah beat you up.

In other blog-related trivia, I have finally updated all the broken links in my blogroll after about 20 of you changed your locations. And I have newly linked a few people who I have read for a long time or have recently started reading, and in doing so, I am effectively de-lurking (yet again) in at least one place. Thus, a big hello to Moriah of Please Pass the Salt!. Moriah is not only the cousin of my good friend Bryonie from Delights and Shadows, but was also one of my cabin-mates at summer camp circa 1997 or so. None of that makes me any less rude for lurking on her blog all this time, but I'm just putting it out there so you know that sometimes I lurk on the blogs of people I have actually met in real life, and do not just exclusively stalk strangers. Yes. I am so normal.

I also want to welcome to the world of blogging to my college friend Katharine, who has started making me laugh over at The Life of Savages. It's a good thing Katharine and Brian live so far away, or I would have a hard time not stealing their little girl Lily away and trying to pass her off as my own daughter in spite of the blue eyes and the fact that she is the spitting image of ... well, both of them, somehow. It's hard to describe.

So stay tuned for a photo a day starting on Monday. And don't laugh when I fall off the wagon on about December 3.

We've been a little busy the last week, since my mom has been in town. But here are a few pictures to give you an idea of what we've been doing.

Kate has discovered a new favorite accessory: sunglasses. First she wanted to wear my sunglasses, but they were way too big, and then she broke them. That's too bad for me, but not surprising since every pair of sunglasses I have ever owned has met some unfortunate end. I will never buy sunglasses that cost more than about ten dollars because they have the life span of the common housefly in my possession. Still, the greater crisis in this case was Kate's burning need to accessorize. So it's a good thing I remembered that a friend gave us a pair of little kid sunglasses for a gift. Since then, Kate has been even more impressed with her own reflection.

Of course, it's even better when you add the hat she already loves so much. And a Tupperware lid.

This is a funny picture I took of Kate's buddy Lily at our church's annual Pie and Praise get-together Sunday night. I'm not sure what Lily was doing, but she looks like a little frog getting ready to jump, and this picture makes me laugh. Church right now is pretty much a high-traffic zone for toddlers, which provides some quality entertainment and at least one spectacular collision per Sunday.

And here is Kate with my mom at the airport at the end of a great visit. In order to get this picture, we had to make Kate stop licking the public chairs we were sitting on. I can already see that I am going to need a jumbo roll of antibacterial wipes for our flights during the Christmas holidays. And maybe some Valium so it won't stress me out so much when she does go ahead and lick the floor of the bathroom in the Houston Hobby airport despite my best efforts.

Kate's buddy Heidi came over to our house on Saturday night so her parents could go out on a date. Kate was thrilled, because she thinks Heidi's every move is hilarious, and I think Heidi had a good time too. And I snagged this photo evidence that one day, unless their tech-inclined daddies intervene, these girls are going to be literature majors like their mamas.

So studious.

Kate recently started signing the word "hat." She learned it on her baby signing video, but we thought it was odd that she honed in on it, since she doesn't often wear a hat. But at any rate, after a few days of her incessantly signing "hat," Dan decided to get her a hat, which I was OK with as long as it was a warm winter hat. She needs one anyway. He did a pretty good job, and came home with what has to be the warmest and most comical hat Target had to offer, complete with a pom pom on the top. Kate is in love with it and laughs every time she catches a reflection of herself wearing it.

If you notice, the front of my oven has drool streaks on it. This is because Kate likes to give her hat-wearing reflection big slobbery kisses. And because I have given up cleaning them off more than once a week.

I like how her ensemble here includes a soup ladle. It's good to have one of those handy.

These photos are funny to me, not because of what meets the eye, but because of what you don't know if you just look at them. In the photos, it would appear that Kate, who is gazing tranquilly into the camera, is snuggling with me in a picture-perfect moment of mommy-baby bonding. But if you look closely, you will see that her little arms are jammed into my body like ramrods in the first picture, and that is where the truth lies: The whole time our friend Bob was taking these pictures, she was trying to get away from me. The only time she wants me to hold her is when I'm trying to make dinner. Then she wraps her body around my ankles as if starved for attention. Ah, the contradictions of mothering a toddler.

Thanks for the picture, Bob and Judi!

Well, after a year hiatus from molding the minds of the kids in our church, Dan and I are teaching a Sunday School class again, and this time, the stakes are a lot higher. Why? Because it's the junior high class, and I am scared they will make fun of me. Not because the kids are mean, but just because the mere phrase "junior high Sunday School" takes me back to my own junior high days. I had a pretty major lack of confidence at that point in my life, and for good reason, since I had glasses, braces and a crippling fear of speaking in public, even to answer questions in Sunday School.

The good news is that the kids in our class, all three of them, are really nice to me, and probably would even have been nice to my junior high self. The bad news is that the curriculum we have, while very easy to use and actually pretty insightful, has this laser-focus on making us discuss, to put it delicately, awkward concepts with the kids. I feel like they loaded the deck in favor of awkward by choosing to teach big portions of the early Old Testament. I never noticed it until I was required to explain it to impressionable youngsters, but some crazy stuff happens in the Old Testament, people. For example:

Abraham and Hagar: "Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian maidservant named Hagar; so she said to Abram, "The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my maidservant; perhaps I can build a family through her." Genesis 16: 1, 2

That one made me want to conduct a quick poll of our students' parents before we got started to determine what the kids do and do not know about the birds and the bees, so to speak. If that answer to that turned out to be "not much" then I was thinking I would, without warning Dan, just change the subject of the lesson on the spot. "Today, kids, we'll be talking about ... ponies." Dan would just have to go along with it. I think part of what makes it awkward is that our church is small, and so it is not surprising that we taught all of these kids when they were in the little kids class, where we mostly did crafts and sang songs and did most certainly not discuss family planning customs of the ancient world. And then while I wasn't looking, they started growing up, and gluing popsicle sticks together no longer holds their attention.

But the week about Hagar pales in comparison to the next lesson, where we got to talk about the seal of the covenant between Abraham and God ... circumcision. And I kid you not, the writers of the curriculum suggested that if we wanted to, we could split the group up into guys and girls so that we could explain to them in a non-embarrassing context just exactly what circumcision entails. No, thank you! I think we'll just gloss right over that and move on, as my good Southern upbringing dictates.

This week, we talked about the story of Isaac and Rebekah and the practical application had to do with dating. We made the mistake of telling the kids that's what we would be discussing ahead of time, and based on the looks on their faces when we started, I think they thought we were going to bring them into the room and make them practice asking people out. So overall, I think they were relieved when we just stuck with the story and what it tells us about how God takes care of his people's lives, even down to details like who they marry. And I kind of thought it went well. Until Eli pulled out his list and I realized that for the most part, these kids would still rather die than be seen in public with a member of the opposite gender.

So far, Edie, who talked us into this in the first place, has not intervened to fire us, so I am assuming we have met my main goal, which is to avoid saying anything that makes anyone's parents have to re-explain the aforementioned birds and bees. But on the way home from church yesterday it occurred to me that, as impossible as it seems, one day Kate is going to be old enough that I need to talk to her about stuff like dating and relationships, and it isn't like that's going to be any less awkward just because it's my own kid. Probably more so, really. So I am thankful that people in our church are letting me practice on their kids. That is community for you.

Not that I won't totally understand if someone fires us. Next week they want us to do a skit. My junior high self is really freaked out about that.