PooBou.com

I chose the peekaboo picture for the sidebar - if you don’t see it, you might need to refresh your browser. I do really love that laugh that she’s doing. The only thing that bugged me about the other picture (um, #1 in the top 3, if that makes sense) is that there was a window between our heads, and it was kind of an odd bright spot in the middle of the photo. I do think that I looked better in that picture, which really should be all that matters (ha ha), but I think this one is a funnier picture of Cate, and I like the sort of smeary effects around the edges (which was a total accident). Hopefully I can stand to see my weird neck angle on this picture for a while.

Of course, I’m going to be seeing my sister next month, who’s responsible for almost every really good picture of me and Cate ever taken (like this one, and this one… and also this one), so I’ll probably soon have a super-fabulous picture that I’ll end up using on the sidebar instead of this one.

And speaking of my sister, the first thing that both she and my mom told me upon seeing these pictures is that I am apparently in desperate need of a good eyebrow-waxing. I love my family.

Meanwhile, just to brighten up your Monday, here’s a video I took yesterday of Cate and Beaumont playing in the front yard.

You might think that she’s saying “hi” and running toward me at the beginning of the video, but no, it’s all about the cat. Of course.

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It recently occurred to me that the little “Favorite Picture” over there in the sidebar is from Christmas, and cute as it is, Cate looks nothing like that now. So I decided it was time to update the picture, and I’ve been trying to get a good picture of Cate and me this weekend. None of the pictures we took yesterday really worked at all, because I think I look weird in almost all of them.

Something about my makeup was too harsh. Also, if you have dark hair, you probably shouldn’t wear a black shirt in photos, because you just look like a pasty disembodied head. As for Cate, she was just not in the mood to look at the camera. And when she did, well…

Apparently she’s been watching Zoolander without our knowledge, because she’s clearly giving us her best “Blue Steel.”

Today we had a few better results:

“Oh hai! I can has camera?”

As for me, I took notes from yesterday and tried to soften up the makeup a little (note to self: start doing that every day, because some of those pictures from yesterday were SCARY) and wore a blue shirt so there’s no way it would blend in with my hair.

These are my top three:

This one cracks me up because we were both genuinely laughing. I just wish you could see her pretty eyes.

The angle of my head looks kind of strange, but I love it when she gets behind me and plays peekaboo over my shoulder, which is what she was doing here.

I love this because you can see her pretty blue eyes and her hair looks adorable (check out those curls!), I just wish she had been smiling.

I don’t know, what do y’all think? Any favorites?

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Today my girl is 17 months old. And as much as I really want to write a well thought-out, articulate entry about her awesomeness, I have got the most unbelievable headache today, so this is the best I can do.

Monthly milestones:
* Cate has more words than I can keep up with, and my suspicion is that she has even more that we just don’t understand, because Dave and I still aren’t very good at speaking toddler yet. We’re working on it.

* Names! Besides Mommy & Daddy, she knows all the kids’ names at daycare - Faith, Mason, Travis, Parker, and since Scarlett is too hard to say, she just calls her “baby”. (Even though Scarlett is about to turn 3.) And Patsy is either Passy or Bassy, since her P and B sounds sometimes get confused. She hasn’t got the cats’ names yet, but she’s shortened them all from “kitty-cat” to “catty,” which I find pretty funny.

Which reminds me, since she’s getting good with names, and we’re going to be seeing my family in a few weeks, I’ve pulled together some pictures of them and I’m going to start showing them to her every day and explaining who they are. She might not be able to say their names next month, but at least their faces will all be familiar, and that’s good enough. Although, seriously, if she calls my dad “Pop-Pop,” I have a feeling he will melt into a puddle on the floor, so I’m really hoping she can at least get that one.

* Her food issues are becoming less and less of a problem, and she’s eating a much wider variety of stuff, which is fantastic. She really seems to love seafood - popcorn shrimp in particular, although I’ve made baked fish fillets a few times and she always seems to end up eating a good portion of my dinner (not Dave’s, since I make his spicy and mine with just a little salt). She even likes tuna fish, which kind of shocked me, since it’s pretty strong-tasting. I know the food issues are going to resurface soon, so I’m just enjoying this while it lasts.

* Forget walking and running, dancing and jumping are where it’s at, man. I need to get a video of her jumping, but she only does it when she’s holding onto me for support, so I’ll have to get Dave to film it. But for now, here’s a video of her doing a little bit of her stompy dance. The lids on our septic tank are like her own little personal disco platforms, she likes to run to each of them and dance on them. I think it’s because they make a cool echo-y sound when she stomps them.

(Pardon the background noise of the air-conditioning unit. That’s what I get for filming behind the house.)

I know there’s more stuff, but I need to take another headache pill and go lie down before my brain explodes and oozes out of my ear. Hope everyone has a great weekend.

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The other night, I was running Cate’s bath and she walked in carrying the rock that we use as a doorstop to prop open the baby gate at night. (I know that probably sounds sillly to some people, but after the cats woke us up at 3 a.m. a few times yowling for us to open the gate and let them in or out, we gave up. So, we now have a rock that lives in our hall. What can I say, it works.) The rock is about the size of a grapefruit, so it’s small, but large enough that it would really hurt if you dropped it on your foot. Cate walked into the bathroom with it and promptly threw it on the floor. I know she was doing it because she wanted to hear the loud noise, but I was worried about her hurting her toes (and also possibly damaging the floor), so I said “no,” picked up the rock, and put it back in the hall.

Of course, being her little toddler self, she immediately went back to retrieve the rock. When she came back into the bathroom with it, I warned her, “Don’t throw the rock.” And she did. So I said, “NO!” in my meanest, stern-mommy tone, and I sat her down on the bathmat. (I realize that eventually I’ll need a designated “naughty spot,” but I worry that she’d forget why she was being punished by the time I moved her there, so for now I think it’s better to just plop her down on the spot.) She howled, while I calmly put the rock back in the hallway. Again.

When I came back into the bathroom, she was still crying. She took one look at me, stood up, and walked out of the bathroom and into our bedroom. She calmed herself down (which took maybe 10-15 seconds), then came back into the bathroom and said “hi.” I said hi back to her, then said, “Come give me a kiss.” And she did! The funny thing is, I don’t think she has ever given a kiss on command before. She gives kisses sort of randomly, but never when we ask for them - although sometimes when we ask for kisses, she’ll offer up her cheek for us to kiss her. It seemed like she genuinely understood that we were making up after she got into trouble.

So what do you know, I applied discipline to my kid and it worked. And she was a total sweetheart for the rest of the night. I know this is going to happen about a million more times, but I was really excited that she seemed to “get it” so easily. I’m crossing my fingers that things are still this easy a year from now when we’re in the middle of the terrible two’s. (You more experienced moms out there can go ahead and laugh at me now, if you’d like.)

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A couple of nights ago, I had a nightmare that I lost Cate in the airport. I’m sure it’s probably just general anxiety about moving that’s manifesting itself in my brain, but it really upset me, and it made me decide to go invest in a toddler harness, so it’s one less thing for me to worry about. (Note to Cat: I remembered that e-baby had the monkey version, and since our girls already have so much other gear in common, I intentionally got the dog so we’ll always know whose is whose.)

We’ve tried out the harness a couple of times for walks around the neighborhood, just to get Cate used to idea of wearing it, so she doesn’t wig out over it in the airport. And she really seems to like it. She likes the doggy a lot, and she plays with him even when she isn’t wearing him. She’s given him a few kisses on the nose, it’s very cute.

The weird thing is that since I bought the harness, it’s like it’s suddenly clicked in her head that she’s supposed to walk next to me instead of just running around wherever. The couple of times that we’ve gone for walks without it, she’s actually held my hand (something she would never do before, I always assumed because it messed with her sense of balance), and she patiently walked beside me for ages. It was kind of awesome. And of course, the irony here is that I’m pretty sure I swore that I’d never own a toddler harness before I had kids, but I totally get it now.

Oh, and today we took Cate to get a for-real haircut. The kids’ salon is still closed for renovations (they were supposed to re-open 2 weeks ago!), so we went to one of those super-cheap, chain barber shops instead.

They just did her bangs because she was squirming and crying the whole time (even though she was in my lap). It pretty much sucked for everyone involved. But I think this is good enough for now. At least I can stop constantly brushing her hair out of her eyes.

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Ever have one of those days where your toddler wakes you up almost two hours earlier than usual for no discernible reason, and your house is completely trashed because you’ve let the housekeeping slide since you’ve sold and haven’t had to show the place, and the house also smells vaguely of baby poop because you really should’ve emptied the diaper pail last night, and then when you pull in the driveway after dropping your kid off at daycare, you see a big white utility van sitting there waiting and you remember that oh yeah, this was the day that the electrician was supposed to come?

No? Just me? Ok then!

So yeah, today has not been good so far. Cate woke up at 5:45 this morning, cheerful as a lark and totally wiiiide awake. She’s been getting up progressively earlier and earlier, and it’s driving me insane. I’m not sure if it’s because the sun is coming up earlier, or if it’s because she isn’t eating enough at night so she’s waking up because she’s hungry. (She has been eating less at dinner time, and when I go get her in the morning, she starts signing “milk” before I even get her out of her crib, so the hunger issue seems plausible.) And the food thing is the one issue that I might be able to work on, so I’m going to try to get her to eat more in the evening to see if that helps.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she was still going to bed at a reasonable time, but lately she’s been staying up until almost 10:00 every night. She’s not grouchy, she’s just a whirling dervish of energy and we don’t know how to calm her down other than to let her run around until she collapses from exhaustion.

Ok, cute baby video time! Last night we went out for a walk and I brought the video camera in case we saw the new baby horse down the street (sadly, he & his mama were in one of the back pastures where I couldn’t get a good shot of them). As we passed one of the little gravel side roads, these two dogs behind a fence started going berserk, barking and growling at us, and basically sounding like they wanted to eat us for lunch. Cate screamed “doggy!” and ran toward them.

They were a little scary, but she didn’t seem to notice. She does the sign for “dog” in this, or close to it - for those unfamiliar with baby sign language, you’re supposed to pat your hip like you’re calling a dog to you, and Cate pats her belly. But it was close enough, I knew what she meant. She also screams “Patsy!” after she signs “dog,” I guess because Patsy is the only person she knows who has dogs.

I love when she says “hi, baby” and waves at them.

P.S. She has two new words since yesterday, both used appropriately: “ball” and “book”. Right on.

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I don’t know if I’m boring y’all with this, but I want some way to keep track of these new language developments, and well, this blog is it.

So, here are Cate’s latest and greatest:
* ‘Side (or sometimes “shide”) means outside. And she now refers to herself as either Baby Cate or Baby Catie, since that’s what all the kids at daycare call her. So last night, when we went out for our walk, she said, “Baby Cate shide!” Yes, sweetie, Baby Cate is indeed outside.

* We stopped at one of the neighbors’ houses to talk to their horse. The horse eventually got bored with us and walked away. Cate screamed, “Baaack heeeeere!!!!” This might indicate something about how often we tell her to “come back here.” For the record, the horse was not impressed, and he did not come back. We went down the road to talk to the cows instead.

* Not a sentence, but a new word: “stah-bee” for strawberry. Yum.

* When we were leaving the house to go to Patsy’s this morning: “We go bye.”

Actually, “bye” seems to be one of her favorite words. If she gets mad at me, she’ll say “BYE!!” and stomp away. Like, dude, I am sooo done with you. She’s done it to both Dave and Patsy too, it’s not just me. But man, if you tick her off, she’ll let you know.

Now, if someone could please tell me what “oppy-boppy” means, I’d really appreciate it, because she says it ALL the time, and Dave and I can’t figure it out. I think it’s just a nonsense word that she likes the sound of, but… yeah. I don’t have the foggiest idea on that one.

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