Sunday at the park

July in North Carolina is typically not a good time to plan any outdoor activities, unless it involves a swimming pool. Yesterday, though, it was a little cooler than it’s been lately (temps in the mid-80s), and it was too overcast to go to the pool, so instead I loaded up the girls and took them to Pullen Park.

(Note that I am not being compensated in any way for this post. But if they see this and want to give us free ride tickets next time, hey, I won’t object.)

I’d taken Catie to Pullen Park once, way back when we first moved here, and we hadn’t gone back since it underwent renovations. The park is absolutely beautiful. Tons of playground space, a train ride, kiddie boats, and old-timey carousel… It’s basically kid heaven.

And oh, how my girls did love it.

Hey look, it's Levitating Catie!
[Side note: this picture happened when I told Catie to show me how high she could jump. I was not expecting a picture that basically looks like she’s levitating off the ground. If I knew how to use Photoshop, I would cut her out of this picture and then just randomly insert “Floating Catie” into all kinds of other photos, because I think it’s freaking hilarious.]

Lucy on the baby swings.

This was also Lucy’s first merry-go-round experience, and she… well, she hated it. She wanted NOTHING to do with sitting on a giant fake animal, so instead I ended up holding her on my hip while we stood next to Catie the whole time. She had a very worried look on her face, and every few seconds, she’d say, “No no no,” and shake her head. She didn’t freak out or cry, it was just a very matter of fact, “Ok, y’all, I do not like this one bit.”

The train ride was slightly more successful since I was sitting with both of them, but mostly she just looked confused by the whole thing.

This sums up their reactions to the train ride pretty accurately. Catie: "COOL!!" Lucy: "...the hell?"
Catie is all, “This is SO COOL!!!” And Lucy is all, “…the hell?”

However, it did give me the chance to snap this picture, which I love.

Holding hands with both of my girls.

The absolute favorite part of the park for both girls was the kiddie boat ride. Seriously, I could’ve let them do this all day, probably.

This was their favorite part of the whole day.

Lucy & Catie on the kiddie boat ride

Catie was slightly annoyed that Lucy went on the ride with her, because she wanted to ride by herself, but once they were both there, Catie snuggled up to her baby sister, and they had a fantastic time.

Lucy is very intent on steering. Catie is very intent on ringing the bell over and over.

The best part of the park? It wore. them. out. Lucy was asleep by 7:30 last night, and Catie crashed not much later. And they slept so hard, I had to drag them out of bed this morning so we could get Catie to school on time.

If the park can do that every time, it might become our regular Sunday afternoon outing.

Edited to add:

(My mom asked me to upload this video. Everybody else probably won’t care.)

New Routines

We’re starting to get settled into our new routine now, and it’s good. I’m getting in the habit of making lunches at night before I go to bed, plan out the kids’ outfits in advance… all little things that make the mornings a lot easier.

Once we’re out the door in the morning, I drop Lucy off at daycare first, then take Catie to kindergarten. (The daycare is less than 2 blocks from the elementary school, so it’s an easy commute.)

Me & my buddy.

The past couple of mornings, we’ve gotten there early, so I park the car, and Catie climbs into the front seat with me, and we talk for a few minutes before we head inside. I love that time with her, where we can just sit and talk about what she’s excited to do at school today.

Her reviews of kindergarten so far have been mixed. She mostly seems really happy, but big changes are scary. She likes her teacher a lot (so do I, for that matter), but the rules are a little more strict than at daycare, so I think she’s going to need some time to adjust to that.

Our daycare has an after-school program, so in the afternoons, they pick Catie up on their bus and take her to daycare. Catie was so excited to ride the bus with Miss Debbie (the assistant director of the daycare who picks them up), and it lets her keep a little bit of her routine, since she spends a couple of hours with all of her daycare friends who she already knows.

And, bonus for me, it means that I only have one stop to pick up both of my girls in the evenings.

So, things are working out really well, is I guess what I’m saying.

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In completely unrelated news, Lucy would like you all to know that she has 7 teeth now. SEVEN!!

See?

That is a hard cheese there, Lucy.

And also, that she’s still being a pain in the ass about waking me up in the middle of the night. Which might be the impending arrival of tooth #8, I don’t know, but Motrin at bedtime hasn’t helped at all, and I still feel like I’m going to lose my mind.

So, she needs to knock off that nonsense immediately. Because I’ve decided that part of our new routine needs to be that everyone in our house gets a good night’s sleep. GET ON THAT, LUCY.

13 months and change

In the past month, Lucy has had this amazing baby-to-toddler explosion. I don’t really know what else to call it. I vaguely remember this happening with Catie, it’s like a whole bunch of things suddenly change all at once, and it’s usually right around their first birthday.

She isn’t walking yet, but I guess she’s decided she’s tired of crawling too. So now she does what we call her “downward-facing dog crawl,” with her tush in the air. Like so.


(I would like to state for the record that my voice in this video is not an actual representation of my accent. I was being silly to make the kids laugh. I don’t actually use words like “git” instead of “get.” Honest.)

She also figured out this weekend how to crawl up and down the stairs. Which meant that she wanted to do it about 20 times in a row. (On the plus side, it’s good exercise for me, I guess?)

She loves the swimming pool, and has no hesitation to leap out of my arms face-first into the water. It scares the crap out of me, and I catch her before she goes under every time, but she’s gotten a nose-full of pool water more than once.

We've discovered that Lucy REALLY likes lemonade.

Although she prefers to mooch her Mimi’s lemonade while hanging with her Pop-Pop.

Walking with only Pop-Pop's thumb for support

The child is fearless to the point of having a death wish. I never really had to childproof anything for Catie (I would point at something and say, “don’t touch that,” and she actually listened to me and never touched whatever the thing was), but I basically have to tie down everything in sight when it comes to Lucy.

A little morning couch dancing.

She seems more precocious than a lot of babies I’ve encountered. I think a lot of that is because she wants to imitate everything her big sister does.

Lucy coloring with Mimi

Of course, this also has its downsides: she’s officially reached Tantrum Age. If you tell her “no” or take away something dangerous that she’s managed to get her hands on, she will throw herself face-down on the floor and scream like she’s being tortured. Most of the time I walk away (it’s my general rule for dealing with tantrums: don’t feed them more attention), but I can already tell that this girl’s toddler years are probably going to kill me.

Lucy-face

She’s damn lucky she’s cute, that’s for sure.

single parenting suckage

Ok, here comes one of those confessional type blog posts that I don’t normally write.

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I’ve been on Lexapro since last year. If you were reading my blog when I was pregnant, I blamed most of my anxiety on the house break-in, but the vast majority of it was that my marriage was falling apart while I was pregnant.

I would go to my OB appointments and see all of these happy glowing pregnant ladies in the waiting room, and when they called me back to an exam room and asked how I was doing, I would cry. I felt awful because there was no sense of excitement or joy about my baby’s arrival. It felt like my due date was just going to kick off the countdown to the end of my marriage.

(And clearly I was right about that, since Dave and I split ten weeks after Lucy’s birth.)

So, yeah, I’ve been on an anti-depressant ever since then. I think for me, this whole depression/anxiety thing is situational and not physiological. There are occasional times when I feel like I probably don’t need it anymore, but since it’s not hurting anything, I’ve decided that I’m staying on it at least until my divorce is finalized.

Honestly, the idea of not taking it scares me, because I have no idea how I’d cope without it. Maybe I’d be fine, but god, what if I’m not?

And really, there’s only one unpleasant side effect of Lexapro: I can’t cry. Or, rarely, anyway. Sometimes it’s awful, because something will happen and I really want to cry, and I can’t. I get a lump in my throat and the stinging in my eyes, but it never breaks through. I’ll get a headache because I just can’t get that release to get it out of my system.

The closest thing I can think to compare it to (be warned, this is not G-rated) is the feeling like when you’re juuuuust about to have an orgasm and for some reason, you can’t get there. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

(Btw, I used this analogy to explain it to the guy I’m dating. His response was, “I understand that there are words coming out of your mouth, but they make no sense.” Typical dude, I’m thinking. He also said that if he had to choose between not being able to cry and not being able to have an orgasm, he’d be fine with never crying again. I’m guessing 99.9% of the males on earth would agree with him.)

So, it’s a bad side-effect, and an annoying one, but most of the time, I can live with it.

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And then I have days like yesterday.

My weekend started off ok. I had a baby-sitter planned for Saturday night, but my date got canceled (emergency came up with his ex-wife and he had to take his kids; it happens, not a big deal). Catie was so excited about the baby-sitter coming over that I decided not to cancel, and instead, I went to the movies by myself.

(I finally saw the Hunger Games. I haven’t read the books, but I was curious about it. And I liked the movie, although I thought a lot of it was extremely disturbing. But I guess that’s the point.)

Sunday morning, when we woke up, Catie asked if we could go get pancakes. It’s rare that she asks me for something that I can say “yes” to, but that sounded do-able. We got dressed and went to IHOP.

While we were sitting at IHOP, Catie just very matter-of-factly blurted out, “Mommy, you love Lucy more than me.”

*RECORD SCRATCH*

WHAT?

I said, “Sweetie, that’s not true. Why would you think that?”

She said, “Well, Lucy’s cuter than me.”

I told her that was absolutely not true, that they were both beautiful and that I loved them both.

It bothered me, and I repeated it to her again later. Just sort of, “Hey, remember when you said that? Y’all are both my girls, and you are both beautiful, and I love you both the same.” She seemed to accept it, but man, that whole thing rattled me.

Really, if I look at it from a 5 year-old’s perspective? I get why she thinks that. I am constantly fussing at Catie to be gentle with the baby, share her toys with the baby, stop being mean to the baby, yadda yadda. But I don’t ever yell at Lucy, because, you know… she’s a baby.

And Lucy gets a lot more of my attention, because, again: she’s a baby. Catie is five and doesn’t need me to constantly watch her every move to make sure she doesn’t shove a choking hazard in her mouth or go tumbling down the stairs.

I don’t know how to fix that. It just is what it is.

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Sunday afternoon, we hung out at my parents’ house for a while. Then I took the kids to the playground, and we came home to do the whole dinner/bath/bedtime thing.

Oh! Big milestone here! During all of that, Lucy took 4 steps on her own. Left, right, left, right, then she fell on her tush. She was so proud of herself, and afterward, she kept standing up on her own with this look on her face, like, “Hey, look at this new trick I learned!” So far, I think 4 steps is her record, but she took 1 or 2 steps a lot last night.

And of course, it’s been 4 1/2 years since the last time I dealt with this, so I forgot how every new developmental milestone totally screws up their sleep schedules.

So bedtime rolls around, and Lucy is nowhere near sleepy. I let her stay up a little later than usual, hoping that she’d burn herself out and eventually go to bed easily.

That didn’t happen. What happened is that I let her stay up just a little too long, and she freaking lost it. She was so past the point of exhaustion, she didn’t know what to do with herself. So she screamed. And screamed.

I tried everything to comfort her. For an hour. Finally I gave up and put her in her crib and figured she’d eventually settle herself down to sleep.

She didn’t.

[Aside: Somewhere during the screaming, I got a, “Hey, how’s your evening going?” text from The Guy.
I texted back: “Teenagers should be forced to come to my house right now as an on-site demo of why they need to use birth control.”
Him: “Oooh, that good, huh?”]

After listening to Lucy scream for another half-hour (so, 90 minutes of screaming total), I called my mom. Both of my parents came over.

Catie was still awake, because it’s impossible to put her to bed while Lucy is up (plus, how could I expect her to sleep with ALL OF THE SCREAMING in the house?). So my parents showed up, and my mom put Catie to bed, while my dad paced Lucy around the house until she fell asleep.

(And yes, I had tried that exact pacing trick myself, and it had not worked for me. But my dad is the only person that Lucy wants right now.)

I took a shower while my parents put my kids to bed, then I came downstairs, sat on the couch, and burst into tears.

So, apparently when things are bad enough, even the Lexapro can’t hold the tears back.

I just felt like the most epic failure of a single parent. My 5 year-old thinks that I don’t love her, and I can’t even comfort my own baby to sleep.

I don’t know if I have made it through an entire weekend, ever, without calling in backup to some extent, and it’s usually my parents. I feel like I dump my kids on them all the time, and even though I know that’s not really true, and hell, they moved up here for the express purpose of helping me with the kids, it still feels shitty.

So many people tell me that they admire how I’m handling being a single mom, or that I kick ass at this, or whatever, and I just don’t see it. My ex-husband moved 3,000 miles away. What choice did I have in the matter except to deal with it? It’s not admirable, it’s just basic survival. I feel like I’m half-assing it at best, and on days like yesterday, I’m white-knuckling it until bedtime.

I try not to use the f-word on my blog, but really? I fucking hate it. There are two of them and only one of me, I feel like I will never be able to be “enough” for both of them. I keep hoping it will get easier when they get older, but I also know that just presents a whole different set of issues, and I’m not prepared for any of it.

It sucks, basically, is what I’m saying.

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I tweeted about it last night, and I got a lot of awesome responses because I have a fantastic online support system, and I cannot even begin to express how grateful I am for that. Really, you guys rock.

The Guy offered to come over and rub my feet, which was very sweet, but he lives a half-hour away, and no way was I staying awake that long.

I thought, oh, you know, it’ll all be better tomorrow after I get some sleep.

Then Lucy woke up 3 times last night.

Sigh.

I wish I had some cute, funny way to tie this up, but I don’t. I’m exhausted and I feel like hell.

I know it’ll be ok eventually. I know this. But for now, I’m bracing myself for another half-assed day at this whole single parenting thing.

Lucy at One

Dear Lucy,

Yesterday, you turned one year old.

This is a happy birthday baby right here.

I suppose I should’ve written this post yesterday, but Mommy was a little bit distracted with her friends being in town.

You see, baby, you won’t understand this until you’re a lot older, but this past year? Has probably been one of the hardest and longest years of my life. And that’s not your fault at all, that’s just life. But this was the week that I needed my friends around me to help me celebrate the fact that I survived this past year.

Lucky for you (and your sister), this means that you get a whole bunch of bonus honorary aunties who absolutely adore you.

It's @amazinggreis and the birthday girl.

Sometimes they even bring you Abby Cadabby dolls for your birthday.

A few months ago, someone (I won’t say who, it doesn’t really matter) unthinkingly told me that I shouldn’t have had you, because your birth happened right around the same time that your dad and I separated. That blew my mind.

Obviously, if I’d had a crystal ball and knew how things would play out, then no, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to get pregnant with you, because being a single parent to one kid is hard enough, let alone two. But now that you’re here? I cannot imagine our lives without you in it.

Lucy splishing and splashing.

You are just pure light and joy and laughter and sunshine. You probably helped me through this past year more than anything else. You showed me that I can handle pretty much anything.

One year old seems pretty young, but in so many ways, you’re already becoming a big girl. For one thing, you can communicate like crazy. You point at whatever you want and say, “Dat?”

When I get you from your crib in the morning, you point at the door and say, “Ba?” I know that means you want to go downstairs and have a bottle.

You call your sister, “Tay-tee.” She loves that. She loves YOU, even though she’s already getting cranky about having to share her toys with you.

Day 1: morning. TGIF, y'all. #photoadayjune

You know your grandfather is Pop-Pop (although you say it more like Bop-Bop). You call your Mimi, “Meemuh.” You even know the cat’s name – every morning, you say, “Hi, Buh-muh” to Beaumont.

You sometimes call me Mama, but it’s rare. It’s ok, though, because I know when you want me.

Right now, Pop-Pop is your favorite person in the world. When I take you to their house, you lunge out of my arms toward him. He spoils you rotten, he carries you around all the time; he knows you’ll fuss if he sets you down, so he just doesn’t. He lets you nap on him and insists he can’t possibly put you down in the Pack & Play to sleep.

Wearing Mardi Gras beads & Pop-Pop's MS State hat. And no pants. As you do.

You cry when he carries you out to my car because you know that means it’s time to leave Mimi and Pop-Pop’s house.

You’re sooooo close to walking, but you can get where you need to go by crawling at top speed for now. I’m reasonably certain you’re going to figure it out sometime in the next month.

Lucy & Beaumont are workout buddies. (It was unplugged, I promise.)

You are just so delightful. I cannot believe in the past year, you’ve gone from being this wide-eyed tiny newborn…

Lucy late at night

…to this sweet baby girl with a million miles of personality.

HI EVERYBODY I'M ONE TODAY AND I FEEL LIKE YELLING ABOUT IT.

We love you so much, my sweet Lucy-girl, Lulubelle, Little Lulu. Happy first birthday.

Love,
Mama

learn from my mistakes, people

So, yesterday. Oh man, where do I start?

(Be warned, this is a long story.)

Yesterday started off as a good day. Got the girls off to daycare with no problem, I was able to squeeze in a run during my lunch break, I was really productive with work, etc. All good stuff.

Then it started to go south.

I was supposed to pick Catie up from daycare early to go on a tour of her new kindergarten. She doesn’t start for a couple of months, but she’s been a little anxious about the idea of kindergarten, so I figured that maybe checking the place out would ease some of her worries.

I had a work conference call come up, which I absolutely could not miss, and of course it conflicted with the time of the kindergarten tour.

I called my mom in a panic. She said not to worry, she’d pick Catie up early and they’d go to the local garden center together, to distract her.

(Side note: Catie is currently obsessed with helping my mom with her flower beds. They work in the yard together all the time. It’s completely adorable. Maybe the green thumb gene skips a generation, because lord knows I don’t have it.)

I was stuck working until late, but my parents had both kids and said they’d feed them dinner, so I was fine. (Hooray for grandparents!)

I wrapped up work around 6:30 pm and headed over to their house. As soon as I pulled up in their driveway, I burst out laughing, because this was in my mom’s front flower bed:

The bane of my existence

Without even asking, I knew it meant that Catie saw the lawn flamingo at the garden center and begged my mom for it, and she caved.

I went inside still laughing, and my mom said, “Oh no, that’s Catie’s flamingo. She’s taking it home with her. She wants to put it in your yard.”

Umm, are you kidding me? Have you SEEN my house? I basically live in a pastel blue Easter egg.

See, look:

Apparently the landlord is a big UNC fan. I don’t know.

I mean, I don’t particularly care because it’s a rental and it suits my purposes, but let’s be honest. I live in the eyesore of my neighborhood. And now I’m going to make it even tackier by putting a pink flamingo in the yard? HELL NO.

Then Catie starts in, “But I named him Mango and I LOVE him! He HAS to come home with us!”

I must admit, Mango is kind of an awesome name for a flamingo, even though it makes me think of Chris Kattan.

Yep. Perfect name for a flamingo. You win, Catie.

We compromised and decided that the flamingo could live in the backyard, where it’s kind of woodsy and he wouldn’t offend all of the neighbors.

So, I load up the girls and head home. Lucy was starting to get a little fussy, and my parents had mentioned that she hadn’t eaten much, so I plopped her in her high chair and put a snack on the tray for her.

Then I went into the backyard to set up Mango the Flamingo’s new home.

Catie saw me and said, “Wait, Mommy, I want to come with you!”

She came running behind me, and pulled the back door closed behind her. I didn’t realize it because I always use the deadbolt locks on my doors, but somehow the doorknob lock had gotten turned, so when Catie closed the door? She locked us out of the house.

And Lucy was still inside. So was my cell phone.

Once Catie realized we were locked out, she burst into tears. I told her to calm down and I ran next door. My neighbors weren’t home.

I knew I needed to run, and I knew that a sobbing and hysterical five year-old was only going to slow me down. I told Catie to stay right there in the driveway and not move. I sprinted (like, I have never run that fast in flip-flops in my life) across the street. Those neighbors weren’t home either. Dammit.

So I ran to the house next to them. It’s a very nice older lady who lives there who has tried to sell me Avon stuff a couple of times. I was like, “Uh, hi, I live across the street? And my 5 year-old locked us out of the house? And my baby is inside? CAN I PLEASE USE YOUR PHONE?!!”

She let me in and handed me her phone. I called my parents and sort of shrieked out enough key words that my mom understood. (Something like: “LOCKED OUT LUCY INSIDE NEED EXTRA KEY COME NOW!!”)

I thanked my neighbor profusely and went back to my house. Catie and I sat on the front steps. And thank God my parents live so close by and were able to come quickly, because this was probably the longest five minutes of my life. Catie was crying and saying, “I’m so sorry, Mommy! Poor Lucy!!”

I tried to calm her down by telling her that it was ok, it was an accident, and Lucy was ok, she was safe in her high chair, so she wasn’t going to get hurt, and she’d be ok for a few minutes until Pop-Pop could come unlock the door for us.

Meanwhile I could hear Lucy inside, screaming her head off because she realized pretty quickly that nobody was around. That damn near ripped my heart out.

I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack during all of this, but I also knew that I had to keep it together. What other choice did I have?

My dad pulled up in the driveway a few minutes later and threw me his keys. I ran to the door and rushed inside to get Lucy. She was so distraught, she wanted absolutely nothing to do with me, she only wanted my dad. (She’s in a very Pop-Pop-obsessed phase right now.)

Unfortunately, my dad had only come to unlock the door and still had to go back home. As soon as he handed Lucy back to me, she started screaming all over again.

He left, and I said, “Ok, you know what? BATHTIME.”

Catie, Lucy, and I headed upstairs, walked into the bathroom, I flicked on a lightswitch… and a fuse blew and all of the upstairs lights went out.

Son of a bitch.

Back down the stairs. I set Lucy down on the playroom floor, which made her SCREAM like I was cutting off an appendage. I told Catie, “Just hug and kiss your sister for just a minute!”

I ran to the garage and flipped the circuit breaker to get the lights back on, then started the whole bathtime process all over again.

Lucy never calmed down during any of this. She basically spent the entire evening looking sort of like some variation of this.

Seriously. It was a bad night.

Finally, I got them bathed, PJed, and back downstairs. Catie scampered off to call Dave on her iPad to tell him all about the evening’s dramatics, while I fixed Howlin’ Baby Lucy a bottle.

She was asleep after about two gulps on the bottle. Poor thing had screamed herself hoarse and was completely exhausted. I didn’t hear a peep from her until 8:30 this morning.

Later, I got Catie to bed, took a Klonopin, and watched the finale of Dancing with the Stars.

Moral of the story?

Get one of those “hide-a-key” things and keep a spare key outside of your house because MY GOD.

I’m going to the hardware store today. Never doing this again.

six things for Friday afternoon

Ok, I have to get that picture of Alice Cooper off the top of my blog.

So! Moving on! Here’s a bunch of random kid stuff.

1. Words of wisdom from my 5 year-old: “In China, they eat their food with Chapsticks.”

There is a very important vowel distinction that needs to be made there.

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2. She also informed me, after watching perhaps one too many episodes of Dinosaur Train, that she is an omnivore.

“That means that I eat both meat AND vegetables.”

Why, yes. Yes it does. Slow down, kiddo. You’re getting too smart. Kindergarten doesn’t even start for another 2 months.

(Related: holy crap, she starts kindergarten in 2 months!!)

I can almost never get a picture of Catie smiling for the camera. Victory!
(No reason for this picture except I can never get one of her smiling at the camera.)

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3. Speaking of my kids growing up too fast, this just started happening.

So, this is happening. Holy Moses.

That right there is an 11 month-old baby, walking. And yeah, ok, she needs to use her little push car for support and balance, but still. WALKING. I am so completely not prepared for this.

And look how pleased she is with herself!

Did ya see me walking with the car, mama? Did ya?

KNOCK IT OFF, LUCY!!

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4. Maybe because of the almost-walking milestone, or teething, or maybe it’s just a standard-issue sleep regression, but Lucy’s sleeping habits lately have been horrific. A couple of nights ago, she was awake every hour from when she went to bed (at 8:30 p.m.) until 3 a.m. And you know, I don’t get to take a day off work just because I’m tired, so that was awful.

At some point, I decided that I just couldn’t take it anymore and I left her to cry it out in her crib. It was after midnight, and I hadn’t had a chance to take a shower because she’d been awake so much. I figured that in the 10 minutes it takes me to shower, surely she’d give up and fall asleep, right?

She was still screaming when I got out of the shower. I gave up and walked into her room. The smell hit me before I even turned on a light, and I knew (even in the dark) that she’d puked. And yep, I was right, she’d screamed so much that she made herself barf. Fabulous.

Because, you know, cleaning up a puke-soaked sobbing baby and changing crib sheets is TOTALLY what you want to do at 1 a.m.

(Plus side? Catie slept through all of it. Small favors and all that.)

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5. Last night, I had a really hard time getting Lucy to sleep (again) and she was up until almost 10 p.m. But, once she was out, she actually slept all night. So, I guess we could call that an improvement? Maybe we turned a corner? Fingers crossed.

I have to say I find both of my kids to be way cuter and more endearing after they let me get a full night’s sleep.

Even if this morning, Lucy did crawl over to me to give me a kiss, and she Alicia Silverstone’d me with a mouth full of chewed-up Cheez-Its.

Kids are disgusting creatures, man.

(And yes, I used Alicia Silverstone’s name as a verb. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, google it. And prepare to be grossed out.)

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6. One baby milestone that I fully endorse?

This self-feeding thing is my favorite. She's all, "It's cool, mama. I got this."
“It’s cool, mama. I got this.”

Self-feeding FTW! This has got to be my most favorite thing ever.

Yeah, alright, I guess I’ll keep her around. For now.