Tag Archives: Catie

The intentionally broken bedtime

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It would appear that the combination of being on solo parent duty, being enormously pregnant, and being pretty much full-on racked with chronic anxiety (long story) has made me sort of forget about my blog.

But! We had a great time with my brother here last weekend. Even though I only got this one picture of him and Catie, when we went to IHOP on Sunday morning.

Catie & my brother at brunch this morning.

And on Saturday night, I managed to get this hilarious (very short) video of Catie singing “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars. Apparently she learned it because it’s on a Kidz Bop CD that her teacher played at school, then we heard it on the radio in the car, and she was all, “Hey! I know this song!”


(Apparently you have to click through to see the video. Sorry about that.)

I can’t begin to tell you how much I love that.

Last night she put on another performance for me (after she dressed herself in a crazy winter hat, summer t-shirt, and PJ pants combo), this time singing her ABCs. She has a little trouble after J, but she manages to pick it up again quickly.


(Apparently you have to click through to see the video. Sorry about that.)

That kid cracks me up.

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Unrelated: my mom is flying up tonight, and she’ll be here for a week. It’ll be really nice to have the help with Catie, and I know my mom has been jonesing for some Grandkid Time. So that’ll be great. I love having my mom around.

The only problem is that my mom’s flight doesn’t get in until 10 p.m., and I typically get Catie to sleep around 9 or 9:30. (All of y’all whose kids go to bed at 7 p.m. and sleep soundly all night? Unless you’re going to share whatever drug you spike your child’s milk with, just shut up. Catie went to bed at 11 p.m. for ages, so I consider her current bedtime a HUGE victory.) And since I’m solo-parenting it, I can’t exactly sneak out to the airport after Catie is in bed, since there won’t be another adult in the house. And, you know, I’d rather not go to jail for felony child neglect.

So, I’ve told Catie this is our plan: tonight after school, we’re going to have dinner, take our baths, get in our pajamas, and watch some Scooby-Doo. Then we’ll go to the airport to pick up Mimi. (And yes, I’m wearing my pj’s to the airport too. I mean, it’ll be maternity yoga pants and I’ll probably wear a bra, but still.)

Considering that we’ll have to wait at baggage claim and then drive back home, I realize this means Catie probably won’t be getting to bed until close to midnight. So I’ve made the executive decision to work from home on Thursday, and keep her home from daycare. There really isn’t any need to subject our sleep-deprived cranky selves to the rest of the world. So we’ll have a “chill out at home” day with Mimi, and hopefully recover quickly.

I do have a sneaking suspicion that she’s going to make me regret keeping her up so late, though…

The solo parenting gig, thus far

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Dave left for England on Tuesday night, which means I’ve been doing the solo-parent thing for the past three days. So far, it’s going ok. Catie and I kind of have our weektime routine down: we get up, she goes to daycare and I go to work, we come home, have dinner, and do the whole bedtime routine. It’s been pretty easy to just coast on auto-pilot, honestly.

I told her I'd turn on cartoons if she smiled.
“I’m just taking it easy on her for now. Next week I unleash hell.”

A few things I’ve noticed, though:
1. I don’t sleep well when I’m the only adult in the house. Now, look, I didn’t meet Dave until I was 28 years old, so it’s not like I’d never lived alone before. But I was always in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. In our current house, I lie in bed and think things like, “Hmm, if someone broke in through the garage door, would I even hear it upstairs?” And I worry about things like what would I do if a fire broke out, things like that. Not exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep, obviously.

Oh, and related: I get very jumpy about unexplained noises in the middle of the night. Which is why I’m just about ready to throw Beaumont outside for good. Seriously, cat, it’s 2 a.m. Do you have to jump up on the kitchen counter and knock over a whole bunch of stuff now? (To be fair, he is totally thrown off by Dave’s absence. The past two nights, he’s been asleep in the hall when I got up in the morning. It’s like he’s trying to keep an eye on both Catie’s room and mine at the same time. “We lost one human, gotta keep a watch on the last two!”)

2. While the routine itself is pretty manageable, I forget how much Dave does in the evenings to help out. Because I’ve noticed that by the end of the day, my body just aches. I know it’s pregnancy-related (since it’s mostly my lower back and hips that hurt), but it’s like I hadn’t taken into account how little “sitting on my butt” time I would get while Dave was gone. I miss my sitting-down time. A lot.

3. I’m really lazy about meals when I’m the only one who eats “grown-up food.” Last night we had mac & cheese with a side of broccoli. Not exactly health food, but whatever, it was easy. (And I love that Catie will eat broccoli.) (Although we did have cupcakes for dessert. You can’t be good all the time.)

4. Trying to wash a four year-old’s hair in the bathtub when you’re 7 months pregnant. I have nothing else to add to that, except: good GOD. And, ouch.

7 months. Holy Moses.
This is not a shape that is meant leaning over the side of a bathtub.

5. As for housework: I give up. I’ve called in the housekeepers. I can’t do it all by myself, so I’m just going to throw some money at the problem and stop worrying about it.

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My brother is on his way here from Charlotte to hang out with us this weekend, and Catie and I are both really excited. My brother is a great guy and Catie adores him, so it should be fun to have him around. No big weekend plans, just hanging out and enjoying some nice springtime weather. Should be fun.

Hope y’all have a nice weekend too, wherever you are.

spring-esque weekend

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We had a freakishly nice weather weekend that felt more like springtime than February (highs in the 70s! W00t!), so we decided to make the most of it.

I left work a little early on Friday so I could take Catie to the playground after I picked her up. We had a blast.

Climbing

Catie on the swing

On Saturday, all three of us headed out to a local park and had a picnic lunch. (Note: I don’t pack picnics. We stopped at Subway and picked up some sandwiches there, and took our food and drinks with us from there. This is the Slacker’s Approach to Picnicking 101. You’re welcome.)

There was a big lake at the park with a small beach area, so we sat on a blanket and relaxed. Dave and I got some nice time to talk, and we laughed ourselves silly watching Catie chase after the geese. I don’t know why she thought charging toward the geese and yelling, “Come here, boy!” would make the geese actually come to her, but she seemed genuinely surprised when they flapped away.

After that, we did another playground trip, which was ridiculously packed, and I realized that we really need to work on the whole “don’t talk to strangers” thing with Catie because she will literally talk to any adult that crosses her path. I’m not exactly sure how to teach her about that without scaring her, though, so if anyone has any ideas, feel free to pitch them my way.

Yesterday, I went on a crazy nesting frenzy and cleaned out a whole bunch of stuff to take to Goodwill. One of our old neighbors called and asked if Catie could come play, so I dropped her off there and ran some errands (including the Goodwill drop-off) by myself. It was really nice to do all that stuff on my own.

Today, Catie is at daycare, and we have the day off. I had an OB appointment this morning (everything’s fine in Baby 2.0-ville) and now Dave and I are planning to just drive around aimlessly and enjoy the sunshine. Sounds nice to me.

Whining Smackdown

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Last night, Catie and I went to the grocery store, figuring that it would be a ghost town during the SuperBowl. (I don’t care about football or sports at all. Sorry, I’ve tried, I just can’t make myself muster up an interest.) Apparently a lot of other people had the same idea, so it wasn’t quite as deserted as I’d hoped, but whatever. Time to shop!

Catie asked if we could get the cart that has that stupid plastic car attached to the front, and I said ok, even though it’s like steering a freaking bus down the aisles. She was really good in the store, she would hop out of the car to get things off the shelf for me (“Hey, don’tcha need spinach, Mommy? Can I get some? What else is on the list? I’ll get it, I’m a good helper!”), and she wasn’t bugging me to buy her toys or junk food. When you’re shopping with a four year-old, that’s about as much as you can ask for.

And really, it was about a 10,000% improvement compared to how she acted when we’d gone to the mall the day before. Which I will always remember as the tantrum that was so epic that an on-duty police officer came over to us to ask if we were ok. Seriously. That actually happened.

Love that face.
Who, me? Act naughty in a public place? Surely you jest! Why, don’t I look angelic?

We passed a mom that was shopping with her two girls – I’m guessing they were 5 or 6 years old, and they were obviously twins. They took one look at our cart and started in on their mother, “Mooo-ooom! That little girl got a car cart! How come WE didn’t get a car cart?? That’s not fair!!” I smiled sympathetically at the mom, and kept walking.

Later, when we were in the bakery section, Catie mentioned she was hungry, and asked if she could have a cookie. We were at Kroger, and they usually have a box of cookies out in the bakery for the little kids to have one. I tend not to get too uptight about the occasional treat, and since Catie was being so well-behaved, I said sure, and grabbed a cookie for her.

As luck would have it, we passed the mom with her twin girls again. They started up again, “Mooo-ooom! That little girl has a cookie! How come WE didn’t get a cookie?? We want a cookie! No fair! COOKIE COOKIE COOKIE!!!” They were like twin Veruca Salts with the whining. I kind of felt sorry for the mom, but I noticed that she didn’t respond to the kids at all when they whined, so I wondered if she hears it so much that she just tunes it out. I don’t think I could tune it out. There’s a certain pitch that little girls can hit with their voices that makes me feel like my head is going to explode. Catie has only tried it on me a few times, and it’s gotten her nowhere (the only reaction she gets from me is, “Try saying that again politely, and maybe I’ll answer you.”), so she seems to have given up on it.

Of course we passed each other two or three more times (why, God, why?), and they repeated their complaint about Cookie Injustice every time. By the last time we passed them, we were on our way to the checkout, and Catie had long since finished the damn cookie. That didn’t stop them. “That’s the little girl that had the cookie! We want a cookie too!” And so on.

Now, I generally have a rule about interfering with other people’s children. And the rule is: I don’t. I wouldn’t appreciate it if someone did it to me, so I don’t do it to anyone else. But I felt so bad for this mom, she seemed so worn out by these kids and their non-stop whining, and… well, I couldn’t resist.

So I turned to the girls and interrupted their little complaint-fest. I said, “You know why she got a cookie? Because she was really good the whole time we were in the store, and she never whined once.”

Both girls snapped their mouths shut. The mom said to them, “You see? THAT’S what it takes if you want a cookie!”

I hope the mom wasn’t offended (and I’m guessing by her reaction and the smile she gave me that she wasn’t). But I figure I bought her at least 30 seconds of shocked silence from her kids, so I’ll call that a win.

It does make me a little nervous about having two girls, though. If they both crank up the whining on me at the same time, I don’t know how I’ll react. Maybe my head really will explode. Who knows.

the big sister transition

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Catie’s been talking a lot about becoming a big sister lately. I’ve been trying not to talk about the new baby constantly, so I tend to wait for her to bring it up. Which she does, often.

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Example 1:
A couple of weeks ago, she cleaned out her toy box and filled up a huge bag with toys that she doesn’t play with anymore. She says, “These are baby toys. We can give them to Baby Sister.” We put the bag in what will be the baby’s room. I kept thinking she’d go back and decide that she needed something from that bag of toys, but so far? She hasn’t even mentioned it once.

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Example 2:
She decided that we needed to set up the baby crib, like, right at that moment. (Which is funny because I was the exact same way when I was pregnant with her.) I told her no, we have plenty of time to do that. She started to cry, “But my baby sister needs a beeeeed!!” So, as a compromise, we set up the Pack & Play together (which takes like 10 seconds, tops). Catie put a bunch of the baby toys in the Pack & Play, so it’ll be all ready for her.

And I have to admit, it sort of threw me for a loop to see that Pack & Play again. I had a major, “OMG this really is happening all over again, isn’t it?” moment.

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Example 3:
Last night, Catie and I lay in her bed together snuggling after we read a book.

Catie: Hey, Mommy? How is Baby Sister gonna get out of your tummy? What if she gets lost?
Me: *trying to dodge the question and be vague – saying stuff like, oh, babies know how to get out, it’ll be fine.*
Catie: I think the baby comes up out of your mouth just like the barf does.
Me: Well, no, sweetie. The baby will come out of my noonie. That’s how all babies come out.**
Catie: *shocked & laughing* YOUR NOONIE???
Me: Yep.
Catie: Hey! That’s just like in Milo & Otis!
Me: Um… Yeah, I guess?

(Side note: I had no idea what she was talking about for a minute, but then I remembered that toward the end of the movie, Otis and his “wife”(?) have a litter of puppies, and they showed the female dog giving birth to them. So… Yeah, ok, I guess it is sort of like that?)

** I know it’s not how ALL babies come out, but it was late at night and the thought of trying to explain a C-section to a 4 year-old was too much for me.

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Example 4:
Two nights ago, while we were snuggling in bed…

Catie: I love you, Mommy.
Me: I love you too, Catie bug.
Catie: *pats my tummy* You too, Baby Sister.

And then I died from the sweetness.

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Honestly, the main reason for this blog entry? I wanted to make sure I had a few of these little moments written down, so I can reference them someday when all she does is complain about how her little sister drives her crazy.

Birthday Party Recap

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Catie’s birthday party on Saturday was so much fun. The downside of Catie having a January birthday means that backyard parties aren’t really an option, and I don’t particularly want a whole slew of kids running around my house. So, if she wants a party, we basically have to host it elsewhere.

We had the party at a local place called Hopper’s House, which turned out to be one of the cheaper options as far as an indoor place with bounce houses and lots of other kiddie entertainment. Catie’s been there several times before and loves playing there, and I knew it would be a hit with the three and four year-old crowd. We had a smaller turnout than I had expected, around 10 kids, but it turned out to be perfect. (And trust me, ten kids? Make PLENTY of noise on their own.)

Elizabeth & Catie

Plus we had two of Catie’s favorite people there, my brother Chris and my sister Tracy (plus my sister’s boyfriend Everett). So that made it even better.

Tracy, Chris, Dave & Everett

Catie had requested a unicorn birthday cake, but I couldn’t find any stores that do custom artwork on cakes, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to attempt it on my own. So, thanks to a suggestion from the lovely Danielle, we got a unicorn cake topper from Birthday Express. It was perfect.

Unicorn cake!

Except for the part where the unicorn sank into the cake like quicksand and then fell over, but eh, whatever, it was fine. The birthday girl herself didn’t mind at all, it was exactly what she wanted. As evidenced here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzT9rJP4InU
(Video bonus: you can see my pregnant self for like 0.5 seconds. Lovely.)

She was a very happy birthday girl.

One odd thing about birthday parties, and I don’t know if this is a local thing, or if it’s a new tradition everywhere, but it seems like kids don’t open their gifts at the party, they open them later at home? Now, I can think of a few reasons that would motivate this:
1.) You can’t rely on a four year-old to graciously receive a gift.
2.) Because the birthday boy/girl might be sad about the party ending, so hey, guess what? Now we get to go home and open presents! Yay!
3.) So other kids don’t feel left out. (Which is kind of lame, because, well, that’s part of life, you know? It isn’t always about you. Sometimes you’re the guest of honor, sometimes you’re the guest.)
4.) It’s a whole lot easier on the parents to keep track of who gave what for thank-you notes when it isn’t a gift-opening free-for-all.

While I don’t necessarily approve of this tradition, I can certainly see the motivation. So, since every other birthday party we’ve been to for the past year has done things this way, this is how we did it too. We opened presents at home, and I have to say, it does make things a lot easier. And I can ensure that all the kids who were there will get appropriately personalized thank-you notes this week.

Opening presents

birthdays are fun!

It took Catie a long time to settle down after her party, but when she crashed, she crashed.

Zonked out on the air mattress.

Catie spent almost the entire day on Sunday playing with her cousins, which was a great distraction to keep her from being sad about our houseguests leaving. And when we got home, she got to have leftover party pizza and cake for dinner. Can’t beat that.

All in all, it was a really great birthday weekend.

Four.

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Catie is 4 years old today. FOUR. I can’t really wrap my head around that.

How on earth did we get from this:
baby and mama

To this:
say cheese!

To this:
I think she likes it

To this?
Can't wait for her birthday party on Saturday!

I wanted to try to sum up everything that’s different about Catie now from a year ago, but I can’t. She’s just… such a person. She’s smart and she’s hilariously funny and oh my lord she never stops talking for a second.

This morning was one of those rare occasions that she happened to sleep past 7:30, so I crawled into her bed next to her, rubbed her back, and whispered the “Happy Birthday” song in her ear until she woke up. I would normally enjoy letting her sleep in, but I just needed to nuzzle her hair and see that first sleepy-headed smile of the day.

Catie's self-portrait

Happy birthday, my Catie-bug. I love you so, so much.