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This allergy-sinus-cold-whatever thing that’s been driving me bonkers for the past week and a half is getting worse, so I’m off to the doctor this afternoon to get some drugs. I usually try to avoid antibiotics when they aren’t absolutely necessary, but it’s been going on since last Sunday. That’s ten freaking snot-filled days. I can’t take it anymore, and I gots stuff to do, man.

Baby stuff: last night and this morning, Cate has been in a totally foul mood. Lots of tantrums, and (this is perhaps a bigger clue) she was gnawing on her hands a lot. Oh boy. Could this be the start of the molars that I’ve been dreading for so long? Last night she started screaming for no reason; she wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t tired, she was just angry. It wasn’t even crying-screaming, she was just pissed. I gave her some baby Motrin, and she cheered up after about a half hour or so. Same thing this morning: mean as a snake until she got some pain meds.

I’m scared, y’all. I’ve heard nightmare stories about molars, I’m sooo not looking forward to this.

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Although Cate’s 15-month birthday is today, her well-baby checkup was actually last week. We found out that she’s dropped from the 95th percentile for height and weight to the 75-90% range. Which makes sense, now that she’s walking, she’s not gaining weight at quite the same speed anymore. And it’s fine with me if her growth wants to slow down too, since she seems so tall to me all of a sudden. (Stop outgrowing your clothes, child! Mommy and Daddy are on a budget!)

As for her milestones this month:
* She’s trying so hard to talk. She’s got all of these babbly sounds, and she puts inflections on them that are obviously mimicking us. Sometimes her voice will go up at the end like she’s asking a question, sometimes she’ll start quietly and end on a SCREEEAM like I do when I’m being dramatic, and sometimes she just sort of quietly mumbles in a sing-songy way like Dave. She’s got a few words down, but I’m waiting for her to go from her little handful of words to full sentences at some point. Oh, and speaking of words…

* She knows “no”. I first learned this from Patsy - apparently Mason tried to hug Cate a couple of times, and when he got too close, she smacked him and said “NO!!” Which, wow. Girl knows how to ward off the unwanted advances, eh? But she says it all the time now, and she even shakes her head when she says it. A lot of times I’ll offer her something - a toy, a snack, whatever - and if she doesn’t want it, she’ll smack it away and yell, “no!” Kind of rude, but ok, point taken. She also says “yeah,” but I don’t think she really knows what it means.

* She’s trying to run. Mostly she’ll only attempt this upstairs, where it’s carpeted and a bit softer. But it’s so funny because she looks sort of like an iguana or a baby T-Rex or something. Her little arms flail in the air and she’s all bowlegged with her butt stuck out. It is HIGH-larious, but since she generally only does it during Naked Time, those are not videos that I’ll be putting online.

* At some point when we weren’t paying attention, she went ahead and sprouted two more teeth. I just noticed it yesterday - Dave was holding her in his lap and I was sitting on the floor, and when she laughed I saw the roof of her mouth. And what do you know, there were a couple of new nubbies up there! So that brings our grand total up to seven: four on top and three on the bottom. (I’m still wondering where that fourth bottom tooth is. It made a brief appearance, her gums swelled up, the tooth went back in, and it hasn’t returned since.)

* The big one… drumroll please… Girlfriend is weaned. No more bottles. At all. I was scared to write about this for fear of jinxing it, but it’s been going on for almost a week now, so I think we’re safe. This is huge because I was working on it for ages. But every time she got a cold, she would regress and only want the bottle, not a cup. (Which I understand - you’re sick, you don’t feel well, you want the thing that’s familiar & comforting.) And since she was getting sick about once a month, we were constantly in this endless loop of cutting down and then going back to the bottle almost exclusively.

This time, after the whole asthma/hospital episode, I got her down to just one bottle in the morning and one right before bed. During the day, if she wanted milk, she had to drink it from a cup. Then I switched the morning bottle to a sippy cup, but I didn’t change anything else - we still snuggled on the couch and watched cartoons, and she didn’t even really seem to notice the difference. After we did that for about a week, I did the same with her nighttime bottle. I am honestly amazed at how easily she took to it, and it makes me wonder if it was sort of like her sleeping through the night thing, where she was ready for the transition a long time ago, and it just took her boneheaded mommy a while to catch on.

I cannot tell you how happy I am about that one, because I hate washing baby bottles, and it is so much easier to just toss a sippy cup in the dishwasher. And yeah, ok, there is a little bit of a “wow, she really isn’t a baby anymore” twinge that goes with it, but mostly I’m just super-excited, because have I mentioned how much fun toddlers are? Oh my god, they are SO! MUCH! FUN!

I mean, yeah ok, there are the tantrums and the full-on screaming meltdowns, but the laughter and the game-playing and all of the fun stuff more than makes up for it. Sometime in the last couple of days, Dave and I learned that if we sit on the floor and hold our arms out toward her, she’ll run to us and collapse on our chest for a big bear hug. And oh my lord, it is so cute that I just want to eat her up with a spoon.

Seriously, can you blame me?

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Not much to report here, really. This cold is still kicking my butt, and I’m spending an awful lot of time in a Sudafed-induced haze. Which is unfortunate, since my work project suddenly started and I’m supposed to hit the ground running and start writing about a subject I’m totally unfamiliar with. And studying documentation while all fogged up on over-the-counter cold meds? Not so easy, as it turns out.

But this afternoon, for a couple of hours, the weather was beautiful, the fog on my brain briefly lifted, and the three of us sat in the driveway to revel in the joy that is playing with rocks.

I love how Cate is so serious about sorting her little pebbles, and how she’ll stick her hand out - not to give us one of her rocks, mind you, but just to show it to us briefly and then take it right back.

We also went for a walk, and found out that one of our neighbor’s horses is clearly familiar with toddlers, because he leaned his head over the fence and licked the snack tray on her stroller. Funny, yes, but also really gross. Surprisingly, Cate was not at all freaked out by the giant horse face looming only a few inches in front of her. She just laughed and laughed at him. Pretty awesome.

She was totally indifferent about the chickens, though. Can’t really blame her. They don’t do much of anything that’s super-interesting to watch.

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For a few days there, I was really kicking butt with the house stuff, and making so much progress. I spent more time in the garage than I have since I moved into this house. And now, it’s caught up with me. All the dust in the garage that I stirred up (and inadvertently inhaled) brought on a killer allergy attack, which has now transformed into a full-blown cold. Ugh.

And you know, it’s really hard to get much work done when you’re all loopy on over-the-counter cold medications.

To be fair, though, I have done a lot. All of the boxes that I’ve packed have been moved to the garage and stacked neatly in one corner. It’s just that the house is still so cluttered, and there’s still so much that needs to be packed up and moved out.

You might notice that I keep saying “I” and not “we”? Well, Dave was a huge help with cleaning out the garage over the weekend, but his work schedule is insane right now, so he doesn’t really have time to do any house stuff during the week. The poor guy is working on his laptop all the time. He stops for meals and to sleep, but that’s about it. I, on the other hand, have all the time in the world, since Cate is at daycare and I’m still waiting for my next work project to start. I thought it was supposed to start Monday, but apparently there was some miscommunication about that. No big deal, and I’m fine with having the free time, I just wish I was feeling better so I could really take advantage of it. I’m still trying, it just feels like I’m moving in slow-motion.

In other news: Sally had a baby yesterday! Or maybe she’s having it today, but god, I hope for her sake that she’s not still in labor. Can’t wait to meet Baby Spike!

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This past weekend was crazy. First of all, it snowed off & on all weekend long. Snow! In late April! WTF?? I am so over winter, will someone please bring on the spring?

In spite of the crummy weather, Dave and I (taking shifts with Cate) worked like dogs and managed to finish cleaning out the garage. Yay! The dumpster is chock full of garbage, it’s kind of horrifying to see how much junk we’ve accumulated over time. And in spite of a few soul-wrenching, “but wait, what if I need [item] someday?” moments, it felt really good to purge ourselves of all the junk. I won’t lie, though; I threw away some shoes, and boy, that stung. Nevermind that I hadn’t worn them since the mid-90’s, I was still sad to let them go.

Oh, and people: how do you keep a garage clean? Because the spider webs in ours are out of control, and the only way I could think of to remove them was to use the hose attachment on the Dyson. This accomplished two things: 1) It got those spider webs out of there, FAST (zip-zam-zoom, bye-bye, dead bugs!); and 2) it kept me at a nice safe distance from said spider webs so I didn’t have to touch anything remotely cobwebby. But I spent a good couple of hours vacuuming the walls of the garage, and it still doesn’t look clean to me in there. Any other ideas?

The one really fun part of the weekend was yesterday afternoon. It finally stopped snowing and the sun came out for a couple of hours, so we brought Catie outside and let her play in the driveway for a while. She had a BLAST. She had a little plastic tub and she picked up individual gravel rocks to put in her little container and then she’d shake them around. If Dave or I picked up a rock and handed it to her, she’d put it in the tub, then peer in and study it, then remove the rock and hand it back to us. Like, “no thanks, this one doesn’t meet my selection criteria.”

Between playing with the rocks, walking around everywhere, and shrieking with glee at the horse next door, she had a fantastic time. Which, of course, meant that she was in total meltdown mode by the time we went back inside and promptly sacked out for a nap. I usually try to keep her on the one-nap-per-day schedule, but sometimes you gotta bend the routine a little.

Unrelated: today I chased off a coyote for the third time this year. I. Want. To. Move.

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A few weeks ago, I was on the cell phone with my mom and about to head into the grocery store with Cate, who was in a foul mood. My mom suggested that I dash over to the bakery department and see if they’d give her a cookie. [And yes, I did get off the phone before going into the grocery store. I try not to be the obnoxious shopper yakking on my hands-free headset and entertaining my kid at the same time. It happens occasionally, but I do my best to avoid it.] I thought that was strange, but when I went there, sure enough, they had a container of shortbread cookies open behind the counter to give to kids. The lady even told me, “If we aren’t here, you can just reach behind the counter and grab one. We always have ‘em.” Nice!

I’ve used the cookie trick once or twice since then, but it really bothers me to bribe Cate with sugar starting at such a young age. It seems like an unhealthy pattern. I know the reason she gets cranky at the store is because she wants to get out of the cart and walk around, and I’m just not comfortable letting her do that yet. (I know she’d drop to her knees and touch the floor, and eww, germs, gross.)

So in an effort to try to avoid the cookie bribe, one time as we were heading through the produce section and I was getting some sugar snap peas, I handed her one just to see if it would interest her. And it did! She held the sugar snap pea in her hand for the entire time we were in the store, and she was totally chilled out and happy with it. She’d occasionally put the end of it in her mouth, but she isn’t really able to eat raw, crunchy veggies yet, so for the most part she just held onto it.

Later, when I was strapping her into the car seat, I accidentally knocked the pea out of her hand, and she got so mad at me. I apologized and handed it back to her, and she went back to studying it quietly. When we got home, she walked around with the pea in her hand for a good 15 or 20 minutes before she finally dropped it and moved onto something else.

I’ve tried it again a few times since then, and every time, the sugar snap peas always keep her happy for the entire grocery store excursion. She always seems to hold onto them until long after we’ve gotten home. My guess is that she’s interested in them because she sees me eating them all the freaking time. (Seriously, you can ask Dave, I snack on sugar snap peas all day long, it’s kind of an obsessive thing. I get really upset when my grocery store runs out and I will drive 10 miles to Redmond to find a grocery store that has them.)

But why she wants to hold it and not eat it, I’m not exactly sure. It’s just funny how kids develop their own little quirks. Regardless, if she wants raw veggies instead of a cookie? I’ll follow her lead on that one every time.

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Moving status:
1. There is a dumpster in the driveway, waiting for us to clean out the garage. As soon as that task has been accomplished (no easy feat, believe me), we can start moving all of the boxes I’ve packed into the garage and make the rest of the house look de-cluttered.

2. Our contractor guy is coming to install our new kitchen cabinet doors tonight and tomorrow night (he has a day job, so evenings and weekends are kind of his thing). It’s looking like most of the interior work that needs to be done on the house will be finished by Sunday. I almost can’t believe that. I have a feeling we’re going to find at least a half-dozen other projects as soon as he’s finished.

More motivation to move:
1. Yesterday, it was raining on & off, and the cats were driving me insane wanting to either go outside or come back in, depending on the weather. I finally gave up and left the door open for them. Mistake! Beaumont came running in with a still-alive, mostly-disemboweled mouse, and dropped it in the front hall. No one else was home but me. Lucky, lucky me. I won’t get into the details of how I dealt with it, just in case any of y’all are eating while you read this. But my stomach still knots up every time I think about it. And seriously, the whole incident put me in such a foul mood that for a couple of minutes there I would’ve been happy to load up all four cats and drop them off at the nearest shelter.

2. This morning, as soon as I got home from dropping Cate off at Patsy’s house, I had to run into the backyard to chase off a coyote. Again.

When I first moved out here, I wondered if I would know a coyote on sight, or if I would just think it was an exotic-looking dog. You know how a lot of people cross-breed their Siberian Huskies with wolves or whatever? I wondered if it would be something like that, and I’d be all “oooh, hello puppy,” and then get my face bitten off. Well, let me reassure you, if you ever see this in your backyard:

You’ll know without a doubt in your mind that that is a f’ing coyote. And if you’re anything like me, you will wig the hell out. I don’t know how bright it is of me to go running toward the coyote screaming at it to go away, but I guess the whole cat-owner instinct takes precedence over common sense sometimes.

It’s funny how my southern redneck heritage comes out during moments like this, though, because I swear that I actually screamed, “GO ON! GIT!!” Which, dude. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time that’s ever come out of my mouth. At least I didn’t call him a varmint or say dagnabbit or anything like that. I’ll save that for the next coyote.

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