Poor Cate has had a rough day today.

We had a house showing at noon (another couple who came back for a second time; cross your fingers that’s a good sign), so we took Cate to the park right at what should have been her naptime. Brilliant idea, no?

There was a dog at the park whose owners (a group of older kids) insisted he was friendly, and I pet him and tried to slowly introduce Cate to him. She reached her hand out to touch his nose. Before she got there, he bit her. There was no damage at all, I couldn’t even find a single tooth-dent on her, but it scared the bejeezus out of her (and us too, to be quite honest). The kids who owned the dog had been very friendly with Cate and they were so upset about it because I don’t think they’d ever seen the dog do that before, so I couldn’t get mad at them. I think the dog just didn’t know how to react to a toddler, and he was warning her to back off, which is why he didn’t bite her hard at all. After the initial “holy crap my baby’s entire HAND was in that dog’s mouth” shock wore off and I realized she was just freaking out because she was scared and not hurt, we distracted her and she was fine. But we thought it was probably a good idea to leave the park soon afterward, to avoid another incident.

We still had some time to kill before we were allowed to go home again (the showing was from noon to 1:00), so we went to the grocery store. Again, remember that this is in the dead-middle of naptime? Yeah. Great idea there. She started to have a meltdown almost immediately, and we caved in and tried to bribe her with a cookie from the bakery department, but it didn’t really help that much. We grabbed the stuff on our list and got the heck out of there. Poor kiddo fell asleep in the car, didn’t wake up when I moved her out of the car seat or when I put her in her crib, and slept for another 3 hours.

When she woke up, we went outside to play, and she fell on the gravel part of our driveway and skinned her knee. Ouch. Like I said, rough day. Not that you’d know it for the most part, she’s been pretty ok this evening, all things considered.

Sorry, baby. We’ll try to make sure tomorrow is more fun.

P.S. Today when we were visiting our horse friend across the street, I asked Cate what the horsey says. She said, “meow.” Ok, not the right animal sound at all, but I wasn’t expecting her to say anything even close to an animal sound, so I was ridiculously excited. I told Dave, and he was like, “Oh, you didn’t know she did that?” Nice.