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Dear Catie,

Today, you are five years old.

Actually, you informed me this morning that today is not your birthday, because you said that it’s stupid that your party is not on the same day as your actual birthday. I can’t really argue with that logic, but today is your real birthday. Get used to the fact that your birthday will not always fall on a weekend. Just because you were born on a Saturday afternoon doesn’t mean that’s when your birthday will always be.

This was probably the hardest year of your life so far, and my hope is that it’s the hardest one you’ll ever have to face in your life. You became a big sister, your dad and I separated, and we moved to a new house – all in the span of six months. The experience almost broke me, so I cannot imagine how hard it was for you. I am so sorry for that. I don’t even know how I’ll begin to explain it all to you when you’re older and start to ask questions.

Overall, though, I have to say that you’ve handled everything phenomenally well.

Sometimes I worry that I put too much on you. Since it’s just the three of us now, I ask you to help out with a lot of things. Sometimes I’ll catch myself starting to ask you to do something, and I’ll hold back. I don’t want you to grow up feeling like you didn’t get to have a childhood because you had to be Mommy’s Helper all the time. I want you to be a kid.

When you get upset with me, you sometimes yell that you don’t want to be a big sister anymore. My response to that is always the same: “You don’t have to be a big sister. You just have to be Catie.” Because, baby girl? Let me tell you, Catie is freaking awesome.

I have to say that watching your relationship develop with Lucy has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I was worried before she was born, because you were never interested in babies before we had one of our own. But you are so sweet and nurturing with her, it’s amazing to witness.

Look, you even make the same facial expressions. Freaky, right?

And oh, babe, the way your sister loves you. She lights up every time you walk in the room. You are hands-down her favorite person ever.

(I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to get away with calling her “Boopy” forever, though. It’s cute now when she’s a baby, but I’m warning you now, she’s going to get mad about that nickname someday.)

You are an absolute joy, and I cannot begin to tell you how thankful I am that I get to be your mama.

Happy birthday, my sweet Catie-bug. I love you to the moon and back.

Love,
Mommy

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We’re mostly all better here now, thankfully. I still have a little bit of a cough and Lucy still has a chronic case of Drippy Nose, but I think that’s more just because she’s a baby who goes to daycare. Sort of goes with the territory, right?

I don’t know, what do you think? She looks pretty healthy to me.

This week is chaotic in both good and bad ways. The good is that Catie’s birthday is tomorrow, and my big girl is turning FIVE. YEARS. OLD. A fact which she gleefully tells anyone who’ll listen. So we’re having a party at one of those bounce house places, because I really don’t need her entire daycare class plus all of their parents in my house. She is ecstatic.

[Aside: Can I rant about parents who don't RSVP to birthday parties? I have 5 confirmed guests and about 11 others that have been given invitations, but I have no idea if they're coming or not. And the party is Saturday. Rudeness!]

The not-so-good chaos is that Dave is coming for a visit, which means working out details about visitation and dealing with lawyers (because that’s the only way we communicate these days), and all kinds of things that I’d rather not have to worry about.

So, yeah. That stuff. Boo on that.

I also started this new diet thing this week because I decided that my jeans were getting too tight and I’ve had quite enough of that, thankyouverymuch. I don’t really want to talk about it too much because it seems like every time I do, I jinx myself. But that’s another added layer of chaos to my life, just because it’s something new and different, and changes are difficult, yadda yadda.

Lots of ups and downs, clearly. But overall, things are good, I think. Even though I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I’m about to be the mother of a five year-old child. How the hell did that happen?

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First, Catie got sick.

Then, on Saturday night, when we had our girls’ night out, some internal instinct told me not to drink anything with alcohol in it. I felt tired, headache-y, and run-down, and I knew that drinking would make me feel a lot worse, so I didn’t. Not a big deal, I figured I was just tired.

Sunday, I woke up full-on sick. (Side note to all of the ladies who were with me on Saturday night: I apologize if you caught my germs!)

This virus has now taken out both me and Lucy. (And let me tell you, taking care of a sick baby when you feel like death yourself? Not fun.) We’re both coughing and congested. Lucy decided to throw in some fever and diarrhea just for good measure, which was enough to get me to haul her off to the pediatrician’s office.

She’s trying her best to still be a sweet and happy baby in spite of it all. “Miserable” is not this child’s baseline personality, to say the least.

Lucy was deemed fine – no ear infection (my main concern), just a really nasty virus.

Today, my dad woke up sick. And my mom said she feels like she’s coming down with something, too. And so it continues.

2012 is not getting off to the best start. I know it’s just winter and the stupid dry air in the furnace and the germs at daycare and all of that. But I will be really happy when The Plague has left our house.

Until then, I need to go buy some more DayQuil. I’m chugging that stuff like there’s no tomorrow.

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Today is my 36th birthday. Which is not much of a milestone, since it isn’t one of those numbers that ends in a 5 or 0. But there you have it.

The good thing about my birthday this year is that Greis was able to come visit for the long weekend, and it’s been a ton of fun having her here. Lucy is still in her all-mommy, all-the-time phase, but Catie only wants Greis to snuggle with her at bedtime, she doesn’t want me at all. Which, you know, is TOTALLY FINE with me. I don’t mind the rejection. Especially when it means I get the chance to do things like, oh, take a shower.

It’s been pretty mellow this weekend. We met up with my cousin Cat and took the kids bowling on Friday night, which was fun. And on Saturday, I got a baby-sitter and had a girls’ night out with Greis, Cat, Trish, Erin, and Amber. It was nice to have a night out with just adults. There were a couple of kids in the restaurant, and every time they acted up, I was just relieved that the shrieking voices didn’t belong to either of my kids, and I didn’t have to react or respond at all.

The one downside of the evening took place as we were leaving. I went to the ladies’ room, and a woman in front of me offered me her stall. I was like, “That’s ok, I’m just… waiting?” She gestured at my stomach and said, “Are you sure?” Realizing what she meant, I said, “Oh, I’m not pregnant.” She looked mortified, so to try to make her feel better (WHY do I feel the need to make HER feel better??), I said, “That’s ok, I just had a baby.” Which, uh, yeah. *cough*7monthsago*cough*

So. Perhaps it’s time to start working out again, methinks?

Anyway, here’s to 36. It’s going to be a year of first-time milestones (e.g., I am now the age I will be when I get divorced), and not all of them are happy ones, but hopefully the positive will far outweigh the negative. Here’s hoping.

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It’s generally a bad idea to talk about a particular parenting style on the Internet, because it always leads to disagreements – breast versus bottle, stay-at-home moms versus working moms, natural childbirth versus medicated… all of those arguments we’ve had a hundred times or more.

Which is why it’s probably a bad idea for me to write about this, but a couple of posts this week got me thinking about it, so here it is.

I’ve started sleep training Lucy.

Let me back up: for the past four months, my mom has been living with me, so the idea of letting Lucy cry it out simply wasn’t an option. My mom is respectful of my parenting decisions, but she’s also a grandma, and it goes against her instincts to let her grandbaby cry. Besides, I never would’ve let Lucy cry it out when she was younger than 6 months old anyway.

But lately, bedtime with her has turned into this ridiculously elaborate dance, and it basically feels like she’s training me, instead of the other way around, and I have to put a stop to it.

Lately, Lucy’s sleep routine has been:
* Bathtime.
* Bottle.
* She starts to fall asleep on the bottle, then wakes up and wants! to! play! (Which, WTF? Wasn’t the whole POINT of the bath to make you sleepy, kid?).
* She rolls around on the floor and plays for at least an hour, sometimes longer.
* She eats some solid food – because I figure what the hell, we’re awake, and maybe having a little extra in her tummy will make her sleep longer. (Tip: it doesn’t.)
* Play some more. I get increasingly desperate for sleep.
* Another bottle. This time, she falls asleep while drinking it.
* Burp.
* Caaaaarefully transfer sleeping baby to crib. If she wakes up, she screams bloody murder, then I have to pick baby up and rock her until she falls asleep again, then repeat transfer process. (This may take up to 5 times or more, before successful crib placement actually occurs.)
* I crawl to bed and collapse, and pray that she sleeps through the night. Which she’s done, like, maybe 4 times in her life. Normally she wakes me up after 3-4 hours.

So. That’s completely ridiculous, right? I mean, I know it is.

The thing is, when I’ve tried to let her cry it out, I end up caving in. She screams and screams, and eventually I just can’t take it anymore, so I go get her. (Of course, the message she receives from this is, “If I scream loud enough, Mommy will come back and get me.” So that’s completely useless.)

Last night, she woke me up at 4 a.m., as per usual. I gave her a bottle, burped her, and put her back in the crib. As soon as I set her down, she woke up and started shrieking. I sat down on the floor next to her crib, reached through the slats, and tried to pat her and comfort her, to get her to go to sleep on her own.

I did that for half an hour. She never stopped screaming.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I could feel myself starting to get angry – which is completely irrational, I know. She’s a baby, she can’t help it. But she had me up past midnight, then woke me up less than 4 hours later, and I was just exhausted and I couldn’t take it anymore. So I left.

I lay down in my bed and I stared at the clock. Lucy screamed for 22 minutes, then she finally fell asleep.

(For the record? Catie slept through the entire thing.)

I don’t feel that guilty about it – I mean, she wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t sick or in pain. She was just pissed off and didn’t want to sleep. Or she didn’t know how to get herself to sleep. Which is mostly my fault, because I haven’t made her figure out how to soothe herself yet.

I don’t know if this is something I’m going to do long-term. All I know is that I’m raising these 2 girls by myself, I don’t have a partner who I can tag-team for nighttime duty. And I have a full-time job, and I am useless during the day if I don’t get enough sleep. So I have to do something.

This is less about a particular parenting philosophy, and more about basic survival.

Besides, based on the smiles and laughs I got this morning when she woke up, I’m pretty sure no major long-term damage has been done. Yet.

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Catie is almost 100% recovered from the ear infection/pneumonia double whammy of last week. And thank God, because she was totally miserable, the poor kid.

I could tell the minute she started to feel better, too, because suddenly she was driving me crazy. She was running all over the house, “Mommy? Hey Mommy! Watch me do this! Hey, Mommy, can you turn on another ‘Pocoyo’ please? Hey mommy! Can I have some more juice? And some toast? Hey, Mommy, I’m gonna pretend that I’m a baby triceratops so you have to be the mommy triceratops, ok?” And on and on and OH MY SWEET MERCIFUL GOD, CHILD, BE QUIET.

At one point, when I was picking up Lucy from daycare, I ran into Catie’s daycare teacher and mentioned how Catie was driving me batty (but still coughing too much to go back to daycare). Her teacher gave me some worksheets to keep her busy. Catie was all excited to have “homework” from her beloved Miss Germaine. (Seriously, she cried daily about how much she missed her teacher and her friends last week. It was exhausting.)

Needless to say, she’s back at daycare today.

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Meanwhile, this one is still up to no good whatsoever.

She is working so hard on trying to crawl, and she’s almost got it down. She’s doing the same thing Catie did with scooting backwards, as well as rocking back and forth on all fours (occasionally she’ll pull a full-on yoga plank or downward-facing dog position, it’s pretty impressive). So, based on past experience, I’m pretty sure this means she’ll be full-on crawling in two weeks or less.

I guess that means I should probably work on, I don’t know, child-proofing? Maybe? I don’t even own any baby gates. Oh god.

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Last night, my mom officially moved out of my house. My dad’s been living in their new house for a while, but mom stayed to help out while Catie was sick. It felt so weird when she left. She’s been living with me for the past 4 months. And I knew that she was only going to be less than two miles away at her house, and that I was going to see her twelve hours later when I dropped off Lucy at their house, but it felt like the end of a big milestone. (For the record, Lucy is staying with my folks two days a week and going to daycare for the other three days – I’m so grateful that they’re willing to take it on, because it’s saving me a few hundred dollars per month to cut Lucy down to part-time daycare.)

It was weird to be the one who had to turn off all the lights when I went to bed (my mom is a night owl and usually up long after I go to bed). And it was weird to not have a constant MS-NBC soundtrack in the background (my mom loves her some liberal television programming). Everything about it just felt weird and alien and new.

But it’s a good thing. Before I went to bed I kind of looked around and thought to myself that, yeah, this is MY house. And it’s going to be just me and my girls here. And that’s ok. We need to settle into our new routine, but I think this is going to end up being a really good thing for us.

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Sometime in the couple of days after Christmas, Catie started coughing. She has asthma and gets these kinds of things a lot, but it usually passes after a day or two, so I didn’t worry too much.

Then one night she crawled into bed next to me, and she felt like she was on fire. MAJOR fever. I don’t even remember the last time she had a fever like this. I mean, yes she has asthma, but she’s generally a pretty healthy kid. She hasn’t been on antibiotics since she was in diapers.

The next couple of days, I tried to keep her comfortable. Motrin, lots of fluids, all of that. The cough was the worst – it would wake her up crying multiple times per night.

The Friday before New Year’s, I took her to the pediatrician. Our normal doctor was out, so they squeezed us in with the nurse practitioner. She listened to Catie’s chest & said her lungs sounded totally clear. She diagnosed her with a “classic virus,” and she sent us on our way.

New Year’s weekend, Catie got progressively worse. She’d cry every time she coughed. She was absolutely miserable. At one point, she yelled, “I’m tired of being sick, because being sick is stupid!!” Yes, baby girl, it IS stupid, and I’m sorry.

Something about it set off my Mommy Instinct. I knew something was really wrong with her. The doctor’s office was closed on Monday, but I spoke with the off-duty nurse, who gave me some tips for keeping her comfortable (i.e., albuterol every 4 hours even though she wasn’t wheezing – just to keep her airways open & fend off the coughing), and told us to see the doctor the next day.

This is not the face of my typically perky girl. She gets the same droopy puppy dog eyes that I get when I’m sick.

We were back at the doctor on Tuesday when they opened, and this time we saw our normal pediatrician, who I love. She immediately saw that Catie had a double ear infection. When she listened to her chest, she said, “Well, it sounds clear, but you can’t tell with asthmatic kids. I’m going to send her for a chest x-ray just to be safe.” So, uhh, slightly different than what the nurse practitioner had said?

We went downstairs to the radiology office, and I had to hand off Lucy to a random nurse so I could put on the lead apron and stay with Catie for her x-ray. Catie was a trooper, but I could hear Lucy screaming her damn head off in the hall the whole time, so it was not exactly a fun experience.

The verdict is that, besides the double ear infection (which explains why she cries every time she coughs – the pressure in her ears must make her head feel like it’s going to explode, poor kid), she also has a mild case of pneumonia. Luckily it isn’t so severe that we have to go to the hospital, we’re treating it at home with antibiotics and oral steroids.

My poor baby. Obviously, this was not exactly how we envisioned kicking off our new year.

The kicker is that Catie spends five days a week at daycare, and she almost never gets sick. Her one week off when daycare is closed for the holidays? This happens. Unbelievable.

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