Losing my mind...

I had a dream last night... I was helping Miles go to the bathroom on the toilet and got super excited that he actually went poop. As I was looking at the poop I noticed that it looked like the distal end of a femur and part of a mandible (jaw). I was, understandably, confused. Did Miles actually manage to eat these large bones or is it just a remarkable coincidence that my son is now pooping bone shaped number 2? I was moving in for a closer look when, thankfully, I woke up.

This dream sums up my life perfectly. Bones and toddler poop. I am losing my mind. Speaking of 'minds', I officially have a 'least favorite' bone. Ok, I'll go a head and say it, I hate it. The cranium/skull. It's kind of funny, I mean the skull is probably the most 'loved' bone. Think about all of the images of skeletons we see, it is always the cranium. Maybe its because without a head we can't really relate to a person or animal. The cranium helps it become more 'life like'. Well, I hate it.

In case you didn't know, it isn't actually just one bone, but there are actually around 22 bones that fuse together at various stages of life (why an infant's head is so soft because the different bones have not yet fused). Furthermore, these bones are very thin and, particularly if they are part of the 'brain case', are very hard to tell apart. So, what I get is 22 different bones each shattering in several pieces and it looks like this:

Trying to reconstruct the number of individuals is miserable. Granted, there are a few key bones that are good estimators, I have to at least sort through them to log cut marks, burning, etc.

Such is life. Pretty hard dissertation in the making... On the plus side (or maybe not) I'm am well over 20,000 bones now. If I were doing a 'normal' assemblage I would have probably been done 14,000 bones ago. As it stands, I think I'm somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way through. Keep on trucking!

So ends our first month here! Two more to go. On top of everything else, I'm officially solo parenting for the month and trying to get reports written up for a company I work for in Portland. I think I'll need a vacation when this is all over with!