Tag Archives: preschoolers

Thanksgiving Wrap-Up

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So… Thanksgiving happened. Here’s the mad-dash recap.

* Thursday – Went to my cousin’s house and had a lovely Thanksgiving meal with her family. Catie had a blast getting to play with her cousins all day, and we left feeling full, tired, and happy. I’d call that a win.

* Friday – Bummed that since we did Thanksgiving at someone else’s house, we’d have no leftovers of our own, I roasted a chicken and made some Thanksgiving-y side dishes, and we had our own little mini-Thanksgiving, just the three of us. It was fun, even though I had a really awful headache most of the day. (I have an OB appointment this afternoon, and I WILL be asking for a prescription for something I can safely take while pregnant, because there are some things that Tylenol can’t even begin to handle.)

Also on Friday: Catie and I put up our Christmas tree. I never thought I’d be one of those people who puts up their tree the day after Thanksgiving, but apparently this is what motherhood has done to me. We even listened to Christmas music the whole time! And I don’t even like most Christmas music, I just thought it’d be fun for Catie. What has happened to me?

(I didn’t put up the outside lights yet, just the tree. I might make Dave do that part.)

We also tried to take pictures for our Christmas card, with… mixed results.

big mug for the camera
I think that CHEESE was a little bit too hard, baby girl.

Frog Jump #1
Frog jump. Alternate title: Holy crap, look at ALL THAT HAIR.

(We actually do have some great pictures for our Christmas card, but you’ll have to wait to see those until the cards are shipped out.)

* Saturday – Catie cleaned up all of her toys all by herself (usually I have to help her), and by doing so, she filled the last square in her reward chart, which meant that I owed her a prize. Her request? She wanted a toy Rudolph and Clarice (Rudolph’s girlfriend from the movie). We have a Rudolph & Clarice Christmas ornament, but it’s a cheap piece of junk and the legs keep breaking off, so that wasn’t going to cut it. My sister insisted that she saw Rudolph and Clarice plush dolls at some drug store – she couldn’t remember which, but she thought it was CVS – so, we set off to hunt them down. Five drug stores and a trip to Wal-Mart later, we had a Rudolph, but no Clarice. Catie wasn’t happy because Rudolph would be sad without his girlfriend, but we found Rudolph another friend (a tiny plush cat wearing reindeer antlers that I found for $2 at Walgreen’s), so that worked as a consolation prize.

Besides, I hear that Santa may have found a lead on Rudolph and Clarice plush dolls on eBay, so no worries there.

* Sunday – I worked on my Epic De-Clutter Operation. My big Christmas gift to myself is that I’ve hired a housekeeper to come clean our house, and I am so excited I could cry. (She’s coming on Tuesday – TOMORROW. It also just so happens that my mother-in-law arrives on Thursday, and then my entire family will be here for Christmas, so it’ll be a huge relief to have a clean house before the family visits begin!) But before the housekeeper and her crew get to my house, I needed to get all of our junk out of the way, so they can actually… you know, clean.

The de-cluttering wasn’t too bad. Some rooms (like the kitchen) took longer than I expected, and some rooms (like our bedroom) took almost no time at all. I don’t know if I have adequate words for how happy it makes me to have someone other than myself clean the bathrooms and vacuum the stairs. But, OMG I AM SO EXCITED, I CANNOT WAIT.

On Sunday afternoon, Catie and I went to see Tangled. I thought it was a very sweet and clever take on the whole Rapunzel story, and I like that both Rapunzel and the guy/love interest actually have personalities. (Disney’s been getting better about that with their more recent movies; not so much in the really old princess tales.)

So, yeah, Tangled was cute. Catie liked it, but some of it scared her a little, which is unusual since she’s typically impervious to that stuff. (Case in point: she recently asked to watch Scooby-Doo before bedtime, and I said no because I didn’t want her to have nightmares. She gave me this exasperated sigh and said, “Mommy! It’s just pretend!”) So when she climbed into my lap during the movie and tried to hide her face in my shoulder, I whispered in her ear, “Remember, it’s all just pretend.” And it worked, she turned back around to face the screen and she seemed to enjoy the movie a lot.

Overall: it was a great holiday weekend. And I already can’t wait until Christmas.

two gross-ish tales

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Here are two of those “TMI Mommyblogger” stories that Catie will probably hate me for when she’s a teenager.

1.) Catie’s been fully potty-trained since early this year. She’s had zero accidents for… I don’t know, at least six months, I guess? It’s been so long that I’ve stopped bringing extra clothes with me everywhere I take her, because she’s so reliable about always using the potty.

But in the past week, she’s wet the bed not once, but twice. I know she’s stressed out because of my new job and my pregnancy and all of that, but I guess I kind of expected this to start after the baby got here, not before. True, both of those accidents happened on nights when she didn’t go to the bathroom before bedtime, but she’s done that dozens of times in the past and never had accidents, so… ? I don’t get it.

The thing is, if I have to get up at 6:30 a.m. to get ready for work, I do not have the energy for these middle-of-the-night sheet changes. So I’m implementing a new rule: if she doesn’t pee before bed, she’s going to have to wear a Pull-Up. (And no, just sitting on the potty and telling me that she can’t go doesn’t count.) I have a feeling this might be enough to snap her out of this phase, since she’s very entrenched in that “only babies wear diapers” mindset. Or at least it might convince her to just go ahead and pee before bedtime already. Sheesh.

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2.) Last night, when it was time to head upstairs for bed, she wanted to bring her stuffed reindeer with her to bed. Fine with me. But suddenly, she threw her reindeer on the ground and burst into tears, saying, “I don’t want my reindeer, he’s got white dirt on him!!”

I picked up the toy to check out what this “white dirt” was all about… and pulled two HUGE boogers off of her reindeer.

Me: Oh, eww. Catie, did you pick your nose and wipe it on the reindeer?

C: No.

Me: Then whose boogers are these?

C: Um… I think they’re Daddy’s?

Nice way to throw your father under the bus, kid. We went to tell Dave goodnight, and I repeated the story to him.

Dave: Catie, I did NOT put boogers on your reindeer!
[Aside: y’all should hear how Dave pronounces the word “boogers” with his British accent. It’s completely adorable and hilarious.]
[Aside #2: File THAT quote – “I didn’t put boogers on your reindeer” – with the other million sentences you never thought you’d say until you had a kid.]

C: *giggles because she knows she’s busted*

Me: So, whose boogers were they?

C: Fairy boogers! *falls over laughing*

If that’s true, Tinkerbell really needs to get herself to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist, fast. Yuck.

P.S. I think calling something “fairy boogers” is going to be my new kid-safe way of saying that something is bullshit. It sounds so much more G-rated that way.

Pregnancy Low-Down

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Two major topics I didn’t mention in yesterday’s post:

* Despite the fact that we waited for what feels like AGES for this baby, the timing with my new job could be better. For those of you keeping track, I applied for this job back in August (before I got pregnant), and I found out that I was pregnant sometime around my third interview. Then they waited another five weeks to actually hire me. So I started working here when I was already 10 weeks pregnant. And I’ve been praying that nobody would figure it out right away, and that they’d think I’m chubby with an unfortunate way of carrying my extra weight around my mid-section. But I’m already mostly in maternity clothes, so I think it’s going to be really obvious very soon.

(This is the burden of having a short torso. Nowhere to expand except outward.)

I mean, I just didn’t want to walk in here on Day One and be like, “Hey, thanks for the job and all, but BTW I’m gonna need some maternity leave in a few months.” It seemed… tacky. I wanted to establish myself as a valuable employee first. So, I’m working on trying to figure out a graceful way to handle that one. Obviously, this is not my first time at this particular rodeo, so it’s not like I’m going to be quitting when the baby arrives. I know that I still want to (need to) work, so I just need to make sure I explain that very clearly to my manager when I tell him.

(Oh, that’s the other weird part. My manager is based in the Colorado office, so he has no idea what I look like. I could theoretically wait until a week before my due date to say anything. I mean, I won’t do that, because that would be horrible. But I probably could get away with it.)

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* Catie is pretty aware of what’s going on now. We’ve talked about how she’s going to be a big sister “someday,” since it’s hard to explain timelines to an almost-4 year-old. I tried telling her it’ll be next summer, but I don’t know if she understands that or not.

I showed her the ultrasound pictures from yesterday and explained that it was her baby sister and that the doctor took a picture of her in my tummy (she found her own ultrasound pics once and I explained to her that it was a picture of her before she was born, so she’s familiar with that). I told her that it’s going to be a long time before the baby is here, and my tummy is going to get reeeeeally big in the meantime. She said, “Wow, I’m so excited to see a picture of my baby sister! [3-second pause] Mommy, can I play with Daddy’s iPad?” So… yeah. I’m not sure how much she really understands about this whole thing.

But she IS excited to help me decorate the spare room. So there’s that.

Oh, also? Now I really, really, REALLY want my parents to hurry up and sell their house to move up here. I’m going to need their help more than ever, no doubt. Anybody need to buy a 4-bedroom/2-bath house in Ridgeland, Mississippi? Anyone?

Random Odds & Ends

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Catie’s latest obsession is Scooby-Doo. One would think that the excessive amount of monsters, ghosts, etc., would be too much for your average 3 year-old, but apparently that’s not the case for her. I’m pretty sure that in the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched more episodes of Scooby-Doo than I ever did in my all of my childhood years combined.

It’s gotten to the point that I was trying to think of toys for Santa Claus to bring Catie, this action figure set was the first thing I thought of for her. Since she’s already working the names Shaggy and Velma into her imaginative play, I have a hunch that she’s going to flip out over it.

Incidentally, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten with my Christmas shopping and planning. Hmm. I should probably work on that, shouldn’t I?

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This weekend I got Catie all dressed up and took her to our town’s community park, which has a gorgeous lake and some really great views, and I tried to get pictures of her for our Christmas card. (It also helps that we’re having the most vibrant fall I think I’ve ever seen, the colors of the leaves are absolutely amazing.) I got some pictures that I thought were really great, played around with some Christmas card layouts, and ran them past my mom and sister to see what they thought. My mom said that she thought Catie was doing a “fake smile” in every picture and that I needed to re-do the whole thing. I think my mom needs to put down the crack pipe if she thinks I’m going to go through that whole process all over again.

(And for the record: I DON’T think she’s fake-smiling in most of the pictures. Sure, she’s not belly-laughing, but she was happy, and the smiles were real. So there.)

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I’m trying to get in the habit of doing all my chores on the weekend so that I don’t have to worry about them during the week, but it’s hard. I know that eventually we’ll find out groove, but in the meantime, OOF. I seem to forget about a lot of things until Sunday afternoon, then there’s this whole panic of trying to get everything done at the last minute. It’s a weird trade-off: my weekends are busy and semi-stressful, but in exchange, it means that my time at home during the week is pretty chilled out and easy. Eh, I guess it works.

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On the topic of weekend chores: One of the things that drives me insane is that Catie leaves her toys all over the family room, strewn everywhere. Now, it’d probably make more sense to just clean up the small mess she’s made each day, but I’m always tired at night and I forget about it at the time. Then by the time the weekend hits, I’m ready to scream from all of the clutter. The problem is, she’s only 3, so when I tell her to clean up her stuff, she just kind of stands there and stares at it. She can’t seem to figure out what to do first. (Actually, Dave has the same problem, so maybe it has nothing to do with her age and everything to do with genetics.) I don’t mind helping her, but I also want her to learn how to clean up her own messes. It’s part of that whole “teaching your kid to be self-sufficient” thing, which I consider to be a big part of my job as a parent.

But, I think I’ve figured out a way to work with her on this. I tell her that we’re going to have a Clean-Up Race. I set the timer on the microwave for five minutes, and we both work on picking up all of her toys. Whoever cleans up the most stuff in 5 minutes (hint: it’s always the kid, never the grown-up) is the winner, and gets a piece of candy. In Catie’s case, that’s a York peppermint patty, which is her favorite treat on earth.

And bonus points: the two times we’ve done this Clean-Up Race, we’ve gotten the entire family room clean before the 5-minute timer beeped. Love that. Chores that can be done quickly and effectively? WIN.

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There’s some other stuff going on with us right now, but this entry is getting way too long, so it’ll have to wait until later this week. (I know, you’re like, DYING of anticipation, aren’t you? Heh.)

Working Me Over

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Conversation last night…

Me: Hey, Catie-bug, who’d you play with at school today?

Catie: Nobody. I didn’t play with anybody.

Me: Really? Not even Isabelle?

C: No. I don’t have any friends at school. You’re my only friend.

Me: I’m your ONLY friend? What about Daddy?

C: No. Just you. I just wanna stay with you all day.
[Side note: Dave was sitting a few feet away when this conversation took place. It got a raised eyebrow and a “gee, thanks a lot!” when informed that he wasn’t her friend.]

Me: What about Tracy? Is Tracy your friend?

C: (pause) Yes.

Me: What about Mimi?

C: (probably realizing that I had her on a slippery slope to admitting that she has more than 1 friend) NO! Not Mimi. Just you and Tracy and that’s all. And I only love you.

Me: Well, sweetie, I love you too, more than just about anything in the world. But I love other people too, you know.

C: You do?

Me: Sure. I love Daddy, and Mimi and Pop-Pop, and Tracy and Chris, and [list of basically our entire family tree]. You can love more than one person, and you can have lots of friends, there’s nothing wrong with that.

C: But I don’t want lots of friends, I just want you.
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That’s around the point where I gave up. I decided I was going to talk to her teacher today to see if Catie’s acting a little reclusive and sad at daycare, or if she’s just saving it all up to work a guilt trip on me at home. I also think that if Catie knows that both her mommy and her teacher are onto her act, that might put an end to it.

Of course, today when I walked her in, we found out that it’s her teacher’s day off, so there was a fill-in daycare teacher instead. So that conversation will have to wait until tomorrow. (But, one plus: the fill-in teacher is someone who Catie knows and absolutely adores, so I know that if she whines about school when she gets home this evening, she’s full of horse puckey.)

But the thing is, yes, Catie whines about getting dressed for school in the morning, and she talks about hating it when we’re home at night. But as soon as we get there every day, she skips down the hall and is happy and excited to see her friends. She barely even takes two seconds to run over and kiss me good-bye. And on Sunday, she cried when I told her that it was the weekend and she COULDN’T go to school. (“But where are my friends???” *sob*sob*)

So what the hell, kiddo? What on earth are we going to do with you?

About the Job

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People keep asking me how the new job is going, so I figured that I should probably just blog it and get it all out there.

It’s good. It’s really really good. The people are great, and the technology is pretty cutting-edge stuff and very interesting, even though a lot of it is WAY over my head. (I’m learning it. Slowly.) And yeah, ok, I’m working in a cubicle, but it’s a pretty darn large cube (like, I have way more desk space than I did at Microsoft where I shared an office with another person), and most everybody around here is really quiet, so it’s easy to concentrate.


This is my second nameplate because the first one said “Cynthia,” and I asked the office manager to please get me another one because nobody actually calls me that. She’s awesome and printed up a new one for me.

The main thing I’m struggling with is that it’s been four years – FOUR. YEARS. – since the last time I had a full-time office job. So even though it’s a very casual environment here (i.e., as long as I don’t show up in pajama pants, I’m fine; most of the people here are all jeans-and-t-shirts, all the time), it’s still weird just to go through the process of getting up early every day, making myself at least somewhat presentable, packing my lunch, etc. Add that in with Catie’s normal morning routine, and my mornings have gotten pretty crazy. I think it’ll settle down once we find our groove, it’s just that transitions (especially those that involve little kids) are never easy.

Also? I haven’t had to use this much of my brain for such an extended period of time in a really, really long time, so just that alone is kicking my butt. By the time the end of the workday rolls around, I feel like I’ve been flattened by a steam roller. It’s a good tired, a “wow, I really did a LOT today” kind of tired, but the exhaustion makes it hard to then switch back into Mommy Mode and really engage with Catie in the evenings. Again, this is stuff that I know will get easier over time. It’s just finding our “new normal” that’s rough.

Oh, and about Catie… Man. I guess I was naive when I thought that, hey, she was going to full-time daycare before and she’ll keep going to full-time daycare now, no big deal, right? I forget that she picks up on everything. So the fact that Dave and I are dropping her off at daycare together (because we’ve been carpooling), and then both of us leave together to go someplace she doesn’t know… it’s definitely thrown her for a loop. And she’s working me over like a pro.

Example 1: Yesterday she told me how she sat under the slide on the playground and cried for me because she missed me so much. (I thought she was b.s.-ing me, but her daycare teacher confirmed that yes, she really did do that.)

Example 2: At bedtime, she didn’t want me to leave her room or say goodnight. She said, “But I’ll miss you if you leave. I’m almost about to cry.”

Jeez, kid. Way to show a flair for the dramatic. And yes, I know that she’s just testing the boundaries of this new situation, which is all normal developmental stuff, but… Yeah. It gets to me. I’ll admit that I did stay in her room to snuggle and sing lullabies for an extra 15 minutes last night.

So that’s what’s going on here. Trying to find our groove and keep everybody sane and maintain a reasonable bedtime. It’s tough, but it’s also really good for all of us.

And you know what’s even better? I’m earning enough money that by next month, we ought to be able to afford a twice-a-month housekeeper. OH HELL YES, PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

Dress-Up Weekend

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I know a lot of people have little girls who dress up in some sort of costume every day. That’s normally not Catie’s thing, she’s not a big “playing dress-up” kind of girl. (Unless we’re talking about putting my bra on her head like Princess Leia hairbuns, in which case, yes, she does that almost every day.)

Something about Halloween, though, brings out the need to play dress-up for most kids, I imagine.

On Friday, as I mentioned, was Catie’s daycare Halloween party. Catie decided months ago that she wanted to be a unicorn for Halloween. My mom bought her this costume on eBay, and she has been loving on it and talking about it for ages.

Catie the Unicorn

The kids did a little parade around the building, which was fun, but that was when we first started to realize a problem with the unicorn costume: it’s kind of hard to manage four legs when you’re used to two. Catie kept tripping on the unicorn’s front legs. We brushed it off because she was so in love with the costume.

On Saturday afternoon, we went to our neighborhood Halloween parade, and again Catie wore her unicorn costume. She had so much fun, and it was such a beautiful afternoon, that she wanted to walk home rather than drive. No big deal, but again, she tripped and fell on the sidewalk in her costume.

Dave & Catie walking home from the neighborhood Halloween parade

Despite the happy appearance in that picture, she was pretty upset by the time she got in the house, and immediately took off her unicorn costume and announced she wasn’t going to wear a costume for Halloween at all. I suggested that she wear her dinosaur costume from last year (which still kinda-sorta fits), but she didn’t want to do that.

Finally, I had a light bulb go off over my head and I suggested that maybe she could wear the princess dress that Mimi made her? She tried it on once when she first got it, but she decided that the fabric was too itchy (which it sort of is, I get where she’s coming from), and she hasn’t worn it since. I pointed out that since it was cold, she could wear a long-sleeve shirt under it, so the itchy part wouldn’t touch her or bother her at all.

Catie the Princess

Mommy FTW!

Only, uh, I kind of assumed that since the neighborhood Halloween party was on Saturday, that everyone would be trick-or-treating then, rather than on Halloween (Sunday)? And… I was wrong. We went to 3 houses, all of whom seemed pretty surprised to see us, and the 3rd house didn’t have their candy yet, and that’s when I realized we were the only ones out trick-or-treating. Huh. We went home with many, many promises from Mommy to let her have whatever candy she’d just gotten, in addition to playing fun games at home, AND the promise of more! trick-or-treating! tomorrow!

It worked. And tonight we went trick-or-treating for real.

Catie the Princess

We hit just about every house on our street, and she was lovely and fun the whole time. In between houses, she kept telling me, “Mommy! This is the most fun party EVER!” And she was pretty much right, it was awesome.

I already can’t wait until next year.

P.S. New job starts tomorrow! Yay!