...to quote the Simpsons. Things have been going pretty well here. I'll start with some non-kid news/bragging. The past few weeks have been full of good news for me, career-wise. First, I got an e-mail saying that my first book review will be published in March. It's a small journal for librarians, to help them decide on books, but you have to start somewhere! So that was good. Then a few days later, I received news that I won a $2,000 grant through the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), which is the national organization for historians in my sub-field. I still can't believe I won. Those are really competitive grants and good for my CV. So that will help fund some of the last research trips I need to make, primarily to the Truman Library in Missouri. Finally, to top it off, I joined a panel proposal for the SHAFR national conference. We won't know if we're accepted for awhile yet, but it was great just to find a panel I could submit with. In addition, we got a prominent historian to agree to chair/commentate our panel should we be admitted. So all in all, I'm feeling pretty good about where things stand for my work. This summer, I hope to finish up the research part and then begin to work in earnest on writing by the fall.
Meanwhile, the semester is wrapping up. My students' final is Tuesday morning (bright and early), so that's the last thing I have to do there (plus grading). Overall, I've been pretty pleased with how this class went. I had good students, and I think they mostly enjoyed class too. I had several emails telling me they liked the class. Sure, that might just be a last-ditch attempt to boost their grade, but I'll take it. :)
In kids news, Tristan continues to cluster his milestones. He's now crawling, though not consistently. Sometimes he just gets up on all fours and sort of flops forward. But I have seen him actually crawl a couple times now, so I'm going with that. He's also begun taking tentative steps around the coffee table, so it's beginning to look like a race between whether he'll crawl or walk first. He's also started saying "ba ba ba." Ronan gets so excited when that happens, which cracks me up. On the downside, though, the mix of this and teething and the 9-month sleep regression and a couple of illnesses means that Tristan still has terrible sleep habits. We're up several times at night, which is really beginning to take its toll on me. I've been a lot more short-tempered than I'd like, and of course, Ronan really bears the brunt of that. I'm trying to be more aware of it and keep calm, but I can't wait till (if) he starts sleeping through the night.
Ronan is also doing well. He's excited for Christmas and keeps talking about this race car he wants. I already go t it for him, since I did not want to risk not being able to find it closer to Christmas. We got our tree a couple days after Thanksgiving and Ronan was a great help trying to get it decorated. He's recently become enamored with the color green, so he picked out all the green ornaments and clustered them all together on the tree.
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