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So, I’m probably going to regret writing this because I certainly don’t want to alienate anybody who reads my website, but here’s the thing. I am obsessed with politics this year. It’s strange, I’ve honestly never really cared that much before now. But this year, I find myself spending waaay too much time on cnn.com and a slew of other news sites, reading everything I can find about this upcoming election. I seriously can’t wait to vote in November. This is a totally new, foreign experience for me.

And in case there was any question, I am 100% an Obama supporter. I know he’s not perfect, I’ve read factcheck.org, I know that both Obama and McCain have misspoken and exaggerated at times, especially in their advertisements. But I’ve weighed the issues that I care about: health care, the environment, women’s issues (equal pay, right to choose, etc.), the war in Iraq, the economy. Obama is my guy on pretty much every topic.

I used to like John McCain. Honestly. I remember back in the 2000 primaries, he was running against Bush, and I remember thinking that he was the most reasonable Republican candidate I had ever seen. If it had been him running against Al Gore, I’m honestly not sure who I would’ve voted for that year. But it seems like in the last couple of years, he decided that his integrity was worth less than his desire to be President. When he caved in on Bush’s torture bill, I lost all respect for him. I mean, for a guy who wants to play his “former POW” card as much as possible, to decide that torture is ok? Yeah, sorry dude, you lost me right there.

And god, y’all, I don’t even know where to start with Sarah Palin. It’s not a sexism thing, it’s not that I think a mother of five (even with a special-needs baby) can’t have a demanding career. That part is fine. But she represents pretty much the exact opposite of every political viewpoint that I have, and she’s even less articulate than Bush. Listening to her speak (or more accurately, try to speak) makes me want to stick a fork in my eye. With McCain’s age and his current health, there’s a relatively good chance that he could die in the next four years. And the idea of Palin as president… lord help us all.

And not that this is nearly as important as the issues themselves, but there’s also the fact that I grew up in Mississippi, and I’ve always been keenly aware of racism in the world. That’s not to say that racism doesn’t exist outside of the South - I think it’s absolutely everywhere, it’s just a little more obvious in the South with its history of slavery, the civil rights movement, etc. Even within my own family, my dad is a pretty racist guy. He was born in 1936 and has lived in the South all of his life, so I guess he’s a product of his generation and environment. We got into a fight during my family’s visit a few weeks ago about the fact that I don’t want him to go on any racist rants in front of Cate. I know she’s too young to understand it now, but pretty soon she won’t be, and I don’t want her to hear that kind of talk in our house. My parents made my grandparents (on my dad’s side) stop using the n-word when we were little because they didn’t want us to hear it, so it’s the same idea. I just don’t want Cate to hear any sentences that start with the phrase, “These blacks…”

You know, that’s just not the world that I want my child to grow up in. I’m aware that racism will always exist in the world, and I can’t shield her from it forever. But I would love it if I could tell her that the first presidential election after she was born was the one where we elected our first black President. And even if Obama doesn’t win, I’ll still be proud to tell her that her mommy voted for him (and that Daddy would have, but he isn’t a U.S. citizen and he can’t vote with just a green card).

But if the worst happens and we do end up with President Palin: don’t worry, baby, you’ll have dual citizenship so you can move to England after the U.S. has been shot to hell.

EDITED TO ADD: The above is all my personal opinion, which as it turns out, I’m allowed to express on my own website. If you disagree with me on every point? Good for you! That’s why we live in a democracy. We’re different people, we’re allowed to have different opinions. But I would like to request RESPECTFUL disagreement, I’m not looking to start a flame war.

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1. MY CAR IS FIXED!!! The repair guys finished it yesterday, and I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to have it back.

See, before:

And after:

Isn’t it insanely shiny? I don’t know what those guys did to it, but it looks fantastic. I was so happy to have it back, I almost jumped on the hood and humped it like I was in a Whitesnake video. Dave said that would leave a bigger dent than the one the movers caused, so clearly I will never be speaking to him ever again.

2. Cate’s asthma is way better. She hasn’t needed her albuterol in over 24 hours, so that’s what we call recovered around here.

3. We went to our very first neighborhood gathering today: little Morgan across the street turned 1 year old, so her parents threw a party and all of the neighborhood kids were there. It was kind of insane, there were kids (mostly older, our neighborhood seems to have a lot of kids in the 5-10 year-old range) running around everywhere. Cate was a little clingy at first with all of the people around, but she soon relaxed and ran around and had a great time. She even let a couple of the other moms (and one teenage girl) pick her up, which is pretty amazing given how mommy-centric she is right now. Also, I got to meet a ton of our neighbors who I hadn’t met yet, and all of them seemed really super nice, so that was great.

And the absolute best part? After getting completely overstimulated by the kids and all the activity, baby girl crashed almost as soon as I got her home. Naptime has never been as easy as it was today. Yay! Can’t wait for e-baby’s birthday party tomorrow so we can wear her out all over again!

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Yesterday we headed off to the pediatrician to check out Cate’s asthma attacks. And I have to say, we picked our new group of pediatricians based on the recommendations of a couple of neighbors, but the first doctor that we met a few weeks ago left me totally unimpressed. I felt like he didn’t really listen to me, and he was very brusque with Cate and basically scared the pants off her.

However, yesterday we met with a different doctor, and I will absolutely be requesting this particular doctor from now on, because he was awesome. He was so sweet and gentle with Cate, she didn’t even cry when he looked in her ears, which is something that always makes her freak out. I mean, it’ll be difficult for anyone to match the love that I had for our pediatrician back in Washington, because she was fantastic, but this guy just might come close.

Anyway, we’ve upgraded Cate’s asthma treatments to the equivalent of her same medication using a nebulizer rather than an inhaler. Cate is definitely not a fan of the nebulizer, and honestly neither am I - it means we have to keep her distracted with cartoons for about 7 minutes instead of the 10 seconds that it takes to do the inhaler. But on the plus side, it really does seem to be help with her wheezing more than the inhaler did. It’s just hard because she gets bored and fidgety long before the medication is done, but if you’ve ever had a child in respiratory distress, you know that the inconvenience factor is pretty minor. Anything it takes to get her feeling better, I’m all for it.

The doctor also gave us an oral steroid, to help with the swelling in Cate’s airways. I got the prescription home, smelled it, and knew that there was no way that I was going to get Cate to swallow it. It smells vaguely like cherries, but it has a really strong chemical smell too. When it was time to give it to her, I set up with a big tupperware container and a couple of towels, just to be prepared for the inevitable gagging and barfing that I knew was going to ensue. And… she loved it. I guess even though it stinks, it must taste like candy, because she sucked the stuff out of the syringe without a single peep of a complaint.

She’s definitely feeling a lot better today, and has even eaten a little bit of actual solid food (when she’s sick, she goes to liquids-only; I guess it’s too hard to chew when you can’t breathe). So that’s great. And she only woke up once last night, for which I am extremely thankful.

So it looks like our birthday party-packed weekend will go on as planned. I wasn’t worried about her being contagious, because I figure we passed that point a few days ago, but I was thinking that we’d have to cancel if she was still wheezing and miserable. Fortunately, it doesn’t looks like that’ll be the case. Hooray for modern medicine!

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Last night may have been one of the worst nights we’ve had since Cate was a newborn. Her asthma flared up yesterday, which I was kind of expecting as her cold was getting worse. I’d started her on her steroid inhaler on Monday, when she first started showing signs of getting sick - the idea is that it’s supposed to help with the swelling in her airways so she won’t have an asthma attack. In my experience, though? It never really seems to work at preventing squat.

So when she started wheezing yesterday, we added on her albuterol inhaler. That plus some Motrin seemed to help… until around 6:00 last night. Then she just started wailing and wouldn’t stop. It was the kind of crying that obviously wasn’t a tantrum or basic toddler frustration; this was the “I’m miserable and you aren’t fixing it” crying.

I gave her a quick bath, some more albuterol, a cup of milk, and put her to bed. She was out in almost no time. She woke up coughing and wheezing about two hours later. And again two hours after that. And lather-rinse-repeat all. night. long.

Sometime around 4 a.m., she woke up and I gave her the albuterol and tried to give her a sippy cup with some milk. While she was drinking, she wheezed and inhaled some milk, which made her gag and then throw up everywhere. All over both of us, the couch, the floor, the coffee table… heck, she even hit the remote controls. Girlfriend put some serious velocity on that barf.

You can imagine how thrilled Dave was when I woke him up at 4 a.m. to go clean up the barf downstairs while I got Cate and myself into the shower. Yeah. That was fun.

She’s still wheezing this morning, so we’re off to see the pediatrician in a couple of hours. The last time this happened, they gave her an oral steroid in the doctor’s office and it really seemed to help a lot. Hopefully the same thing will work this time.

But Miss Priss had better knock off this nonsense soon, because we’ve got a weekend full of birthday parties (little girl across the street on Saturday, e-baby on Sunday), and she needs to be her 100% fun, charming self for both events.

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Cate woke up yesterday with some phenomenal sneezes. You know the kind of sneezes that shoot clear across the room? Or cover the child’s entire face? Yeah, those. So apparently it’s Cold Time again. Fun fun fun.

The one perk is that she’s now old enough that when she sneezes, she doesn’t immediately try to wipe it away with her hands (thereby spreading the mess around even worse). Now she waits for me to come running with a tissue. She’s trying to figure out how to blow her nose when I hold up the tissue, but… yeah. Not so much with that milestone just yet. We’re working on it, though.

I’m a little brain-dead from dealing with a sick kiddo, but here: this article is kind of fascinating. I’ve never really understood why some Americans (um, mostly Republicans, I think) are so anti-France, but most of their system sounds pretty good to me.

I should probably do a political post at some point and expand on my thoughts about our American government and the upcoming election, but I think I’ll save it for when I’m a little more coherent. Good night, y’all.

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We’ve had the most gorgeous weather here for the past few days - it’s been mild and in the mid-70’s, just about perfect. I really hope this is how summer is going to end, because last weekend it was in the 90’s and absolutely brutal. But this? This, I can totally handle.

On Friday, Cate and I met up with Cat and hit up a big consignment sale at one of the local outlet malls. Because did you hear? They’re having a boy! So Cat needed to stock up on onesies with puppy dogs and fire engines on them, and well, Cate and I just needed to get out of the house.

Which reminds me: the car situation. The movers finally sent me a check for $2400, based on the car’s weight. (Apparently our moving insurance was only 60 cents per pound, which makes no sense at all, since you can have a heavy thing that’s worth nothing or a lightweight thing that’s very expensive, but whatever.) I had AAA tow it to a local repair shop - one that was recommended by my insurance company - and they said that the repairs are going to cost over $4,000. My insurance company told me to send back the movers’ check with a “thanks, but this isn’t sufficient” letter, which I did. So, my car will get fixed, I’ll pay my $500 deductible, and that’ll be the last of it for me. Meanwhile, Progressive is going to unleash their Mighty Lawyer Hellhounds on the moving company to try to get the full amount out of them. But either way, I have nothing to do with it from that point onward. So hooray! My car is getting fixed! And it should be ready this Wednesday, which is great. I mean, boo on paying $500, but at least they promised that this won’t make our insurance premiums go up since this whole thing was in no way my fault. I wasn’t even there when it happened.

The point is, after 6 weeks of being a single-car family, we’re kind of going insane. There have been a lot of days that Dave has to go into the office, which means he takes the car and Cate and I are stuck at home with no transportation. So, since he was able to work from home on Friday and we had the opportunity to meet up with Cat and go shopping? Even though I was just tagging along and didn’t need to buy anything? HECK YEAH! Anything to rid myself of this cabin fever.

(Oh, and for the people who suggest that I drop Dave off at the office so I could have the car all day: yes, I suppose we could do that. But it’s 12 miles from our house to his office. That’s 24 miles round-trip, and if I’m dropping him off & picking him up, that’s 48 miles in one day. Gas is expensive, and Cate tends to throw up if she’s in the car for more than 15 minutes. So really? Kind of not worth it.)

Ok, apologies for the random aside. Back to the weekend recap. Yesterday, we hit Target in the morning and got some items crossed off our shopping list. In the afternoon, since the weather was so nice, we headed over to our town’s community park. It was our first time there, and it was really nice. There’s a big lake, with ducks and geese in it. I had brought some bread to feed them, so they swarmed all around us, which was pretty exciting, since Cate had never been that close to a duck or a goose before.

But, some of the ducks were either shy or not hungry, and they didn’t come onto the shore. Cate decided that was no good, so she’d just go hop in the lake and try to grab them herself. When her plan to go splash in the filthy lake with the big “NO WADING OR SWIMMING AT ANY TIME” sign was thwarted… oh, she was angry. She threw quite an epic tantrum, to the point that we had to move far away from the lake and the assorted water fowl, just to get her to chill out. She eventually did, and we had fun people-watching. Especially the people who brought their dogs to the park. (Oh, how my girl loves doggies. She freaks out every time one is within view.)

Today is another gorgeous day, although Dave and I spent most of the morning cleaning. Bummer, but the house is looking (and smelling) really nice. Cate is napping right now, but when she wakes up, we’re going to head over to our neighborhood playground. It’s pretty dinky, but she likes it, and it’s a nice 15-minute walk to get there, so mama will get some exercise too. Should be fun.

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I’ve been a bad blogger this week. There’s lots of stuff swirling around in my head, but I can’t seem to figure out how to put it all into a string of coherent sentences. I’ll work on it and try to be better next week, I promise.

In the meantime: today is Dave’s birthday! So I just wanted to throw a little birthday shout-out for my favorite 37 year-old Brit.

So, to Dave: Thank you for always being such a great husband and daddy, and for putting up with us. We love you.

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