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Random update of stuff that’s been going on lately:

I went out of town about two weeks ago, and the girls stayed with my parents. It was the first time I’d ever spent the night away from Lucy, and it was stressful for me, but I don’t think she even noticed I was gone. It probably doesn’t seem like a big milestone to most people, but it felt like one to me.

Catie also did great while I was gone.

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Other Catie stuff:

On my way back from my trip, I had a layover in Chicago. It occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten souvenirs for my girls while I was out of town, and I noticed a plush toy T. Rex while I was at O’Hare. (It’s based on Sue from the Field Museum of Natural History.) I figured I could use this to my advantage. So, when I came back, I told her that I had a present for her, but I couldn’t give it to her unless she made me a promise: in exchange for the dinosaur, she has to stay in her own bed all night.

(Wait, have I mentioned that Catie has been getting in bed with me every night for months? I forget if I’ve mentioned that or not.)

Anyway, of course my little dino-nut went bonkers over her new T. Rex toy, and she agreed to the terms of my deal. She’s been sleeping soundly in her own bed ever since. Praise the baby Jesus and Hallelujah.

Also, I found out what kindergarten Catie will be going to in a few months, which is freaking me out completely. I’m going to leave that topic for another time.

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Other Lucy stuff:

She’s cruising around the furniture, and letting go/standing on her own for a few seconds at a time. I’m pretty sure she’s going to start walking any minute now.

It’s funny just to discover the things that she knows. Like, she has this little toy bell at my parents’ house, and if you ask her, “Lucy, where’s your bell?” She’ll find it, pick it up, and start waving it around to ring it.

She’s also starting to dance, which I need to get a video of, because it’s impossible to describe, and completely hilarious.

See also: eyelashes. I melt.

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Other me stuff:

Work is good. I’m still working on a diet and hitting a lot of plateaus, but I’m doing my best and figuring that I’ll get there eventually.

I’m also… um… dating. Which is weird, and I don’t really know how much I want to talk about it on the blog.

I will say this: When I first mentioned this to my mom, she freaked out about it (in a bad way). But she’s chilled out significantly, after I explained my motives. The thing is, I work full-time, and I have the kids full-time, so I’m not out looking for a full-time boyfriend. Quite frankly, I don’t have the time. But you know what? It’s really nice to sometimes put on a shirt that doesn’t have a smear of baby snot on it, and to do my hair and make-up, and to feel cute, and… you know, FLIRT.

It’s fun. And there’s been a serious fun shortage in my life for the past year or so.

See? No baby snot anywhere. Also: HAPPY.

The other thing I told my mom: the girls will not be introduced to anyone that I date. They’ve been through enough instability and upheaval, and I’m not about to add to that.

If/when something starts to get serious (and I don’t expect that to happen aaaaanytime soon), they will be introduced to that person as my friend, just like they’ve met female friends of mine. And there will be no public displays of affection in front of the kids, because it’s inappropriate. Just like there wouldn’t be PDA in front of my parents – again, because it’s inappropriate.

I don’t know why I feel like I need to be defensive on that subject. Maybe it’s because I’m not officially divorced yet, that it all feels kind of unseemly. But I also don’t see how this is doing any harm, and it’s been a pretty big ego boost to find out that there are guys out there who think I’m cute. So I think it’s a good thing.

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Lucy’s 9-month well-baby checkup was this morning.

She weighed in at 19 pounds, 14 ounces (I thought for sure she’d break the 20-pound mark this time, but she was 2 ounces shy), and she’s 27.8 inches tall. For those of y’all who care, that puts her in the 76th percentile for weight, and 52nd percentile for height. (I’m thinking that awesome potbelly makes up for the height/weight discrepancy.) She’s also in the 97th percentile for head circumference, which puts her as slightly smaller-headed than her sister. Catie was always off the charts for head size.

The doctor diagnosed her as basically perfect except for her eczema, which she’s had since she was a newborn. I could’ve told you that. This little baby girl is freaking awesome.

She crawls all over the place now, and she is FAST. She’s also pulling up to a stand on just about anything she can grab. If I happen to be sitting on the floor near her, she often uses either my hair or my boob to grab and pull herself up. Not so nice for me, but she’s so pleased with herself, I can’t really get mad at her, either.

She took two steps yesterday, pushing a little ride-on toy car in front of her, so I know that walking for real is just around the corner. I’m kind of terrified.

She mostly sleeps through the night now. Not always, but generally. Our routine lately has been that she goes down sometime around 8 or 8:30, and she might wake up sometime before midnight for one last bottle, but then she’s good until morning. So, it’s not too bad.

She eats like a champ. Baby food, finger food, regular table food… whatever you got, she’s game for trying it. Catie was always a bit of a picky eater, so this is kind of awesome to be able to just toss anything on her high chair tray and know that it’s most likely not going to go to waste.

She’s starting to get words here and there, too. The most popular ones are “hi” and “bye,” complete with hand wave. She’s not totally consistent, sometimes she waves and says “hi” to the door, or she’ll say “bye” a minute or two after we’ve left. Still, she’s getting it.

She can kind of say “bottle,” but it sounds like “bwuh”. And “all done” sounds like “nuh-nun.” She definitely has her own little dialect, but we’re figuring it out.

She can say “Pop-Pop,” which made my dad damn near melt. And she can say “Kay!” for Catie.

Still no consistent use of “mama,” but sometimes when she’s upset and wants me, she’ll say “mamamamamama,” which I figure is close enough.

For the most part, though, she is so much fun. We’re past the newborn stage and getting into the fun baby/early toddler phase where she seems to be learning something new every day.

And now that she’s getting bigger and a little more interactive, I’ve found that the dynamic between Catie and Lucy is changing too. Sometimes this is a bad thing – Lucy is mobile and wants to check out toys that Catie has deemed as “hers,” so we’ve had lots of long talks about how certain things have to be shared. Because, yes, of course, Catie has some toys that are very special to her and I don’t expect her to share those. But she also doesn’t get to yank every single thing away from Lucy with a, “That’s mine!” (And a lot of times, the things she yanks away are toys she hasn’t played with in months, if not years.)

But on the good side, it also means they play together sometimes now. Lucy loves watching Catie, and wants to do everything that her big sister does.

I have to say, this phase that we’re in right now is so much fun. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

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Things that were good this week:

1. Nobody is sick. I’m almost scared to say that out loud for fear of jinxing it and bringing the Germ Fairy back to our house. But for the moment, nobody has The Crud. So that’s awesome.

2. I’ve hit the point in my diet/exercise plan where I can now see the difference myself. I’ve lost around 10 pounds, my clothes fit better, and I caught myself checking out my own butt in the mirror. Like, more than once. Not so much being vain, more “hey, look at that!”

3. Lucy seems to have figured out this whole “standing up” thing.

Now I need to hurry up and figure out the whole “baby proofing” thing, because man, she is into EVERYTHING. And unlike Catie, Lucy wants to put EVERYTHING in her mouth. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to stick my fingers in her mouth to fish out something she shouldn’t have gotten. Neither of us are happy when this happens, and yet, she keeps doing it. Babies really don’t catch on quickly, do they?

4. I’ve been having late night Skype dates with Matt after the kids are in bed. I think my crush on that guy is bigger than it was back in 1999. He makes me giddy.

5. I’m going out with a girlfriend tonight while my parents watch the kids. I can’t wait. I need to get dressed up and get out of Mommy Mode for a while.

So yeah. Pretty good week here overall.

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Once again, I mention that Lucy seems fine in one blog post, so it’s pretty much inevitable that we’d end up at Urgent Care over the weekend, right?

Lucy had been acting a little out of character (grumpy, tired, etc.). Then today, I noticed her pulling on her ears, which is basically THE BIGGEST, REDDEST FLAG EVER.

So, off to Urgent Care we went.

Turns out, filming the baby with an iPhone is a good way to keep her distracted while waiting for a doctor.

The doctor said her ears don’t look infected, but her sinuses are so infected that her ears were clogged (sort of like the airplane ear-popping effect, but for poor Lucy, it was all the time), so now she’s on an antibiotic.

In case you were keeping track, yes, that now makes all three of us on antibiotics.

I’m giving the cats the side-eye. They better not get any ideas. I’m getting sick of shoving syringes in people’s mouths up in here.

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I feel like every blog post lately is either “we’re all dying from The Snot Crud OMG send help aaaaiiiieeee….”, or it’s some version of “hey, we survived and I think we’re all better now.”

As for today: I don’t know. I suddenly got waaaaay worse and had to go back to the doctor’s office, and Catie has an ear infection, so at the moment, we’re both on antibiotics. I’m hoping we can knock this out once and for all.

Lucy seems ok for now. She’s got the eternal case of Drippy Nose, but she doesn’t seem terribly bothered by it, she’s still happy and funny and sleeping well.

(Oh man, can I tell you about the sleep? I mean, no, I know I can’t tell you about the sleep because that will jinx it and she’ll go back to waking up every 3 hours. But suffice to say: God bless sleep training. We seem to have hit some sweet spot of sleep, and I know it’s likely temporary and we’ll have to start over the next time she gets sick, or a new tooth comes in, or she hits some other developmental milestone. But for now, it’s so, so good, y’all.)

Maybe this makes me a terrible mother, because you know, unconditional love and all that. But I find her much cuter when she lets me sleep at night.

As for crawling – yes, Lucy is crawling, kind of. She gets herself into a yoga downward-facing dog pose on her hands and tippy-toes, then can’t seem to figure out what to do next, and she gets really mad about that. Sometimes she’ll kind of throw a leg out sideways and scoot like a crab. I’ve seen her do a normal hands-and-knees forward crawl only a handful of times. So, unlike Catie, who started crawling one day and then never stopped crawling, Lucy seems to be taking her own sweet time with this.

Or, you know, maybe Lucy just prefers to sit on the floor and scream for me to come pick her up. It certainly seems like it some days.

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A couple of other random Lucy developments:
1. Probably because Catie and I have been sick so much, Lucy has developed a fake cough. Seriously. If I cough, she smiles and echoes me, like it’s a game. It’s both cute and pathetic at the same time. How many times do you have to cough in front of your baby before they learn this? APPARENTLY A MILLION COUGHS. WHICH I HAVE DONE.
2. She’s started waving bye-bye and saying “ah-bah,” sort of like bye-bye. The only problem is that she seems to have no idea of the appropriate context of how or when to use this. She says bye-bye to the bathtub, to her toys, to the TV, to her own shadow. I think she just likes doing it over and over.
3. According to her teacher at daycare, she learned to say “uh-oh,” but I have yet to get her to repeat that one at home. The few times I’ve tried saying “uh-oh” in front of her to see if she’ll parrot it back to me, she just laughs at me like I’m hilarious. So, who knows.

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Unrelated to anything: I’m in the process of registering Catie for kindergarten. I just… man. That’ll be a whole other post someday, when I come up with the words to adequately express my feelings about it. For now, I think “overwhelming” about sums it up.

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We’re mostly all better here now, thankfully. I still have a little bit of a cough and Lucy still has a chronic case of Drippy Nose, but I think that’s more just because she’s a baby who goes to daycare. Sort of goes with the territory, right?

I don’t know, what do you think? She looks pretty healthy to me.

This week is chaotic in both good and bad ways. The good is that Catie’s birthday is tomorrow, and my big girl is turning FIVE. YEARS. OLD. A fact which she gleefully tells anyone who’ll listen. So we’re having a party at one of those bounce house places, because I really don’t need her entire daycare class plus all of their parents in my house. She is ecstatic.

[Aside: Can I rant about parents who don't RSVP to birthday parties? I have 5 confirmed guests and about 11 others that have been given invitations, but I have no idea if they're coming or not. And the party is Saturday. Rudeness!]

The not-so-good chaos is that Dave is coming for a visit, which means working out details about visitation and dealing with lawyers (because that’s the only way we communicate these days), and all kinds of things that I’d rather not have to worry about.

So, yeah. That stuff. Boo on that.

I also started this new diet thing this week because I decided that my jeans were getting too tight and I’ve had quite enough of that, thankyouverymuch. I don’t really want to talk about it too much because it seems like every time I do, I jinx myself. But that’s another added layer of chaos to my life, just because it’s something new and different, and changes are difficult, yadda yadda.

Lots of ups and downs, clearly. But overall, things are good, I think. Even though I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I’m about to be the mother of a five year-old child. How the hell did that happen?

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First, Catie got sick.

Then, on Saturday night, when we had our girls’ night out, some internal instinct told me not to drink anything with alcohol in it. I felt tired, headache-y, and run-down, and I knew that drinking would make me feel a lot worse, so I didn’t. Not a big deal, I figured I was just tired.

Sunday, I woke up full-on sick. (Side note to all of the ladies who were with me on Saturday night: I apologize if you caught my germs!)

This virus has now taken out both me and Lucy. (And let me tell you, taking care of a sick baby when you feel like death yourself? Not fun.) We’re both coughing and congested. Lucy decided to throw in some fever and diarrhea just for good measure, which was enough to get me to haul her off to the pediatrician’s office.

She’s trying her best to still be a sweet and happy baby in spite of it all. “Miserable” is not this child’s baseline personality, to say the least.

Lucy was deemed fine – no ear infection (my main concern), just a really nasty virus.

Today, my dad woke up sick. And my mom said she feels like she’s coming down with something, too. And so it continues.

2012 is not getting off to the best start. I know it’s just winter and the stupid dry air in the furnace and the germs at daycare and all of that. But I will be really happy when The Plague has left our house.

Until then, I need to go buy some more DayQuil. I’m chugging that stuff like there’s no tomorrow.

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