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Cate’s four-month pediatrician appointment was yesterday. Our girl is now in the 95th percentile for weight at 16 pounds, 11 ounces. Holy mother of god, no wonder my back hurts all the time! It’s hard to believe that when she was born, she was in the 5th-10th percentile for weight. I think it’s safe to say that she caught up with a vengeance.

For anyone who cares about the other statistics: She’s in the 50-75% range for height (24 1/2 inches), and her head circumference is at a whopping 97th percentile - not surprising, considering the noggin size of both of her parents.

I was starting to worry that my pediatrician thinks I’m obnoxious, because every time she tells me Cate’s weight, I always get this sort of worried look on my face and I’m like, “um… is that ok?” So finally yesterday I told her that my concerns are not really about Cate, it’s about my own history, and I told her about my gastric bypass, and how I worry that there might be some kind of “fat gene” that I could pass on to her.

The pediatrician now quite possibly thinks I’m insane for babbling away about my personal issues like that, but she handled it well. She said she was glad that I told her, since of course we want to make sure that Cate is healthy, so that’s something we want to keep an eye on. But she said that for now it’s nothing to worry about, and she’ll probably burn off most of her pudge when she’s a toddler and starts getting more active.

In the meantime, I’m trying really hard not to worry about it, because the last thing I want to do is project my own neuroses onto my daughter. I think about how when I was little, my mom always complained about how fat she was, and was always on a diet (and I think she was probably a size 8 at the time, so seriously: she was not fat) and that definitely had an impact on how I think about my body. I don’t want Cate to pick up any of that from me. I know it’s practically impossible for a female to grow up in this society with no body image issues whatsoever, but I’d like to be as positive an influence on her as possible. I’m working on that now, so it hopefully won’t be an issue when she’s older.

P.S. I don’t want to get too obnoxious with the video links, but I upload lots of them for the grandparents. If you want to see yet another video of Cate in the jumperoo, or any of the videos posted so far, you can go here to check them out.

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Today is Cate’s four month birthday, so I thought it would be a good time to brag about some of our girl’s latest accomplishments:

* Just this past week, she’s figured out reaching and grabbing at things. It was so weird, it seemed to literally happen overnight. Her hand-eye coordination isn’t totally perfect yet, but it’s starting to make things pretty interesting. She now loves her baby gym since she can grab the rattles on it, so she’ll often have a parrot in one hand and a giraffe in the other (er, it’s a jungle-themed gym, obviously), and she’ll just yank and yank on them like there’s no tomorrow. Sadly, this new skill means that it’s the end of me being able to wear my hair down, and all dangly earrings have been banished for the foreseeable future.

* She’s figuring how to squirm around on her back - the other day I put her on the baby gym and walked away for a minute, and when I came back, she had done a total 180. Her head was at the opposite end of the gym from where I had originally placed her. Another time this happened, she wiggled off the gym completely and I found her halfway under the coffee table. Hmm. Seems that it’s time to get rid of our rectangular metal-and-glass coffee table and trade it in for something less hazardous.

* A few days ago, we gave her her first taste of rice cereal. The books all say to introduce solids in the “four to six months” range, and I figured that since it was only a few days before her four-month birthday, we were close enough. It was… not a huge hit. In fact, she sort of hated it and freaked out. We’ve tried it a couple of times since then, and she’ll get maybe a drop or two down her throat, but I stop the second that she starts to cry. I don’t want her to develop some kind of aversion to spoons, and there’s plenty of time to work on solids. God knows it isn’t like she’s wasting away.

* One thing that I absolutely love is that she no longer screams when she wakes up. I’m not sure when that happened - I think it started last week when we were staying at the hotel in California. Now I’ll hear her making little babbly talky noises on the baby monitor, and I have time to toss a bottle in the warmer and pee before I go fetch her. And when she sees me or Dave in her room, she starts laughing and kicking, which is awesome.

* She’s now able to hold her head up completely. She used to get tired after only a minute or two in the Bumbo, but now she can sit there for ages and be totally content. This morning I put the Bumbo on the kitchen counter while I emptied and reloaded the dishwasher, and cooked myself breakfast (providing a running narration on everything I was doing along the way), and she was totally happy the whole time because she was up high where she could see everything. She usually gets fussy if she’s on the bouncer on the floor, because the view from there is pretty dull.

And in honor of this new ability to hold her head up consistently, today we put together her jumperoo and let her try it out. It was a huge hit:

Check out those purple mary jane socks. They were a gift from a friend in Mississippi - they come in a whole bunch of different colors, and I love them. They’re called Trumpette’s - here’s the link, if any of you are interested.

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Behold!

Isn’t it cute how they put those little score marks on the cheesecake to indicate how big one slice should be? I find those hilarious. Two slices then? Yes, please.

I also decided to go ahead and fire up the Dyson for the first time today. And oh my god, y’all:

Is that not the grossest thing you’ve ever seen? I was kind of expecting the cat hair. And I knew that lots of my hair would be in there, since I’m in that fun post-partum hair-falling-out stage. (Lucky me!) I tend to forget that living in the country means that there is always dirt in your house. But that was only the first floor and the stairs - I haven’t even gotten to all the bedrooms yet. I’m terrified.

Catie says: “You people expect me to learn to crawl on that filth? Are you insane?”

The one thing I don’t have a photo for: earlier tonight, the teenager across the street (the one who kitty-sat for us last week) called to let us know that she had just seen a coyote heading up our driveway. I promptly freaked, and ran outside to call the cats inside. I never saw the coyote myself, and all of the cats are present and accounted for, so it all ended well. But that was quite a little moment of panic that I had there.

And it reinforced the thing I’ve been nagging Dave about for ages: I hate the country and I want to move. You know, just in case he didn’t hear me the first ten thousand times I said it.

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A couple of years ago, Dave and I refinanced our house to consolidate some debts, pay for our wedding, and oh yeah, invest a whoooole lotta money in fixing this place up. I wouldn’t say that Dave and I are exactly financial experts, although we’ve learned quite a bit since we got married. (Mostly lessons we learned the hard way, unfortunately.) One thing we learned was that our interest rate was only fixed for two years. So now we’re faced with having to refinance again, or else our mortgage payment will go up close to $700 a month. Fun!

A tip, if you’re ever looking to refinance or buy a house for the first time: avoid AmeriQuest. Seriously. Just stay away from them. Take my word for it.

Part of the deal when you go to refinance your house is that you have to get an appraisal, so the mortgage people know what your house is worth. They sent a guy out to do the appraisal last month when I was in Mississippi, which was nice for me, in sort of a “well, nothing I can do about it from here, so I might as well not worry about it” way.

Turns out, the company sent out an apprentice to do the appraisal, so the mortgage company won’t recognize it as valid. Um? I don’t know. Whatever. The point is, the week before we left for California, they told us they were going to have to send out another guy to do yet another appraisal. This one was free since the last one was their goof. Ok, fine. But this time I was home to worry about it, so I spent two days in Frantic Cleaning Mode. We haven’t been able to afford our housekeeper since I stopped working, and with the baby and everything, housework just hasn’t registered all that high on my “must-do” list.

And of course, it was fine. The house was in great shape by the time the guy got here, and I felt pretty good about it. We’re not sure what the status of our refinancing is yet, since we sort of forgot to check our home voicemail while we were out of town. Oops.

But the cleaning frenzy just reinforced something that I’d been thinking for a while, which is that we desperately need a new vacuum cleaner. Ours weighs a ton, it’s hard to maneuver, it’s impossible to clean the stairs, and it really just moves the dirt around rather than sucking it up.

So, I told Dave that for my very first Mother’s Day, I wanted two things:
1. A cheesecake from Costco (have you ever had their cheesecake? It’s the next best thing after my grandmother’s. Honest.)
2. A new vacuum cleaner.

I know it’s a totally trite, 1950’s housewifey kind of a gift, but that’s what I want. And behold, my wish was granted:

I haven’t used it yet. I feel like it needs some sort of special inauguration ceremony. But I will try it out soon. The cat fur is starting to get out of control now that it’s shedding season, and this is the model that’s designed for removing pet hair.

Oh, and I’m still waiting on that cheesecake.

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Obviously we survived the flight home from San Jose. It was pretty uneventful, except for the stupid satellite lot where we parked our car, which promised to have vans every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day. And we waited 45 minutes for a van. With the baby. Who had been good all day, and was starting to get very cranky. I was enraged.

To be fair, it wasn’t entirely the parking lot people’s fault. There had been one van that came by earlier, but the other people who were waiting saw us with all our baby gear and bolted for it, so by the time we got to the van, there was no room left and we had to wait for the next one. Jerks. I hope they all got speeding tickets on their way home.

The trip did, however, accomplish one goal, as far as deciding whether or not we could move to the Bay area someday. The conclusion that Dave and I came to? Probably not. The minute we got back to Seattle, we were both like, “Ah, trees! And clouds! We’re home!”

It’s not the weather, which was honestly fine the whole time we were there. The lack of trees was sort of unnerving (no shade! anywhere!), although I could deal with that if I had to. Really, it’s just the idea of dropping over a million dollars on some teeny-tiny house that doesn’t seem very realistic. Our financial stability is already iffy with me not working. I know that people somehow do manage the cost of living down there, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how they do it.

Also, a lot of the people seem kind of tense. You’d think there would be sort of a laid-back, west coast, surfer dude vibe happening, but there isn’t. Especially not on the freeways. I complain about Seattle drivers, but man, they’ve got nothing on the Bay area. I could see myself developing a major case of road rage if I had to battle that traffic on a daily basis.

That’s not to say we won’t relocate someday. Dave and I are kicking around some ideas on that topic, although I don’t know if they’ll turn into anything. I do love the Pacific Northwest, so no matter where we go, I’d be sad to leave. But we’ll do what’s best for our family, and in the immortal words of Tim Gunn, we’ll make it work.

Anyway, now we’re in trip recovery mode: tons of laundry needs to be done, the fridge needs to be restocked (you’d be surprised how much stuff can go bad in a week), and the litter boxes… man, y’all don’t even want to know about them. We paid the teenager across the street to feed the cats while we were gone, but I didn’t ask her to tend to the litter boxes, and hoo boy, they are scary now. So there’s tons o’ fun to be had for me!

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Today, an internet rock star held my baby:

Amanda is a total sweetheart, just super-nice and easy to talk to. And her kids are gorgeous. Genoa is so cute, and constantly on the move - she wants to walk, walk, walk everywhere. Alex is really funny, and way chattier than I expected. Most kids I know don’t really talk to adults, but he has no problem with that. And I learned quickly that I don’t speak Little Boy - he mentioned something about a crane, and I thought he meant a bird. Um, no. Construction equipment, duh. I suppose that if I ever have a little boy, I’m going to have to learn that stuff pretty quickly.

Oh, and I now have a major case of Camera Envy. And Christmas is a loooong way off. Rats.

There’s not much else to report. Monday, Cate and I lounged around the hotel and did nothing while Dave was at work. Yesterday, mommy & baby drove around to explore some more neighborhoods, and that night we all went to dinner with my aunt. It’s always fun to catch up with people in my family, so that was a good time.

Oh, the story I forgot to tell. So, we’re staying at an Embassy Suites. If you’ve ever been inside one, you know they’re all the same: a big center atrium with rooms all around the perimeter, and 4 elevators - two in front and two in back. After we first checked in and got our luggage to our room, Dave and Cate went to lie down for a nap, and I went back to the car to haul in our stash of groceries (the perk of having a mini-fridge in the room).

I noticed that there were about a dozen or so kids on various floors, running around the perimeter hallway. I didn’t think anything of it until I was trying to get on an elevator to go downstairs. It took well over five minutes to get an elevator, and when it finally stopped on my floor, it was going up instead of down. Fine, whatever. We’re on the fifth floor. A girl who was probably about twelve years old got on the elevator at the 6th floor, pressed the buttons for both 7 and 9, then jumped off at the 7th floor. Since she had also pushed the button for 9, I was confused and said, “um, what?” as she was getting off, and she kind of giggled and ran off. Little brat.

So that’s why the elevators were taking forever. The kids were jumping into an elevator, pressing a whole bunch of buttons, then jumping off at the next floor to run around to the other end of the atrium and do it all over again. Meanwhile, the elevator has to keep stopping at every floor. Either that or they’d hit the elevator call button and dash away, so it would stop at a floor and there would be no one there.

Another five minutes later, I’d had to stop on every. single. damn. floor. And I lost it. It had already been a long day, flying with the baby and everything, and I had just had enough. Finally, these two little boys got on the elevator. They were maybe 9 or 10 years old. As one of the kids reached for the buttons, I said in my best stern mother tone, “Don’t you dare touch a single button on that elevator.”

They both stopped dead and stared at me. I went on: “It has taken forever for me to get downstairs on this elevator, I am sick of this stupid little game you guys are playing. Where on earth are your parents? I’m telling the manager because this is bullsh*t.” Sometimes cursing in front of kids seems to be a pretty good way to get their attention. It worked, I’m pretty sure I scared the crap out of them.

And I wasn’t bluffing, I really did tell the manager. As I was coming back in with the groceries, I saw a couple of hotel security guards at one of the rooms. Since the kids were all around the same age and of various races (and because there were so many of them), I’m guessing that it was some sort of school or church trip, and the chaperones weren’t staying on top of things. Who knows. But I was kind of proud of myself for the fact that I was able to get children to listen to me. Whaddya know, apparently I’m really an adult. I’m also proud of myself for not hauling off and smacking them upside the head, because believe me, I was tempted.

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We flew in to San Jose on Saturday, which was one of those nightmare “everything you do only makes you an hour later than you should be” experiences. But we finally got here, settled into the hotel, and both Dave and Cate took naps. (I had consumed way too much Diet Coke, there were no naps in sight for me.) That night, we got to meet up with Cat, Tony & e-baby for dinner, which was great. I almost never get to see them more than once a year, so twice in less than three months is a real treat.

Yesterday, Dave and I went house-hunting. It’s an idea we’re kicking around - if he wants to stay at his new job long-term, it may require us to relocate to the Bay area. It’s not necessarily my preference. I love Washington, and I have friends there, so moving isn’t something I’d be terribly excited about. But if it’s important for Dave’s career, then that’s what we’ll do.

The problem is, the housing market here is so insane - we tend to think that the Seattle area is expensive until we come down here, and then it’s like, “wait, a 2 bedroom, one bath bungalow for $850K? Are you KIDDING me???” For what our nice big four-bedroom house on two acres is worth, we could maybe get a 2-bedroom condo in a sketchy neighborhood here. It’s unbelievable.

So we drove all over the place yesterday, and definitely found some places where we know we absolutely don’t want to live, but we found a couple of places that we could stand and which we might possibly be able to afford without selling any of our internal organs or our future children.

We ended up in Santa Cruz, which is one of the places where I would absolutely love to live - it’s a beautiful town, and there are parts of it that we could possibly afford, although the commute wouldn’t be very practical for Dave. While we were there, we went to the beach to dip Cate’s toes in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

As you can see, she was not fan of the beach at all. Hopefully we didn’t traumatize her too badly, but we thought it was pretty hilarious.

Oh, and I surprised myself at the beach with my maternal instincts. There were dogs running around all over the place, playing frisbee and whatnot. After we filmed that video and Cate was still screaming, I lay her on a towel on the sand to try to calm her down. This little Boston terrier came over, probably just to check out the small screaming creature on the beach. I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm, but without even thinking about it, I yelled “no!” and shoved him away. Um, what? I normally wouldn’t touch a stranger’s dog, but I didn’t know the dog, I wasn’t sure if he was gentle or not, and my Big Ol’ Mama Bear instinct kicked in and told me to get him the hell away from my baby. His owners - two guys who were several yards away - saw me and called the dog back, and I thought about apologizing to them for pushing their dog. I know I didn’t hurt him, I just felt kind of rude. But then I decided that maybe they should have been more vigilant about making sure their dog wasn’t around any little kids, so whatever.

Oh, and remind me to tell y’all about how I scared the bejeezus out of some punk kids at our hotel. I’m pretty proud of myself for that one.

P.S. Pics from the trip so far are here. I’ll keep adding to that set as we take more photos.

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