happy normal stuff

Not that much has been going on for the past couple of days, and considering the way last weekend went down, I’m more than grateful for that.

Cate has been mostly cheerful and lovely for the past few days. The snottiness is almost completely gone, she’s walking all over the place, sleeping like a champ at night, and picking up a couple of new words here and there. She recently learned the sign for “food,” which is helpful. And she’s started saying “mommy,” although I’m not convinced that she knows what it means.

A couple of random Cate anecdotes:
* Last night in the bathtub, she invented a game where she’d pick up one her foam letters (these guys), shove it in my mouth, and I’d “ptooey!” spit it across the tub. For some reason, this was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and a couple of times I had to catch her to keep her from drowning when she fell over laughing.

* She loves to get into the pantry, and I generally try to distract her into doing something else, but sometimes… eh, it just isn’t worth it if it keeps her happy. There’s nothing dangerous that she can reach, all she does is make a huge mess. Anyway, we have a case of V-8 that we bought at Costco, and Cate loves rolling the cans around the floor. They make a nice satisfyingly loud noise as they roll across the hardwood floors – it’s sort of like V-8 bowling. She’d love to do this with soda cans too, but that’s where I draw the line. Mommy doesn’t want her Diet Coke to explode in her face. But seriously, if you show up at our house unannounced (as in, before I’ve had a chance to tidy up), you’d see anywhere from 3 to 10 cans of V-8 juice in various places around the house. Sticking out from under the couch, rolled into a corner somewhere, whatever.

Anyway, last night, I heard something sort of similar to the V-8 bowling, but somehow… different. I turned around, and here comes Cate, rolling a 5-gallon drum of protein powder across the dining room. The thing weighs almost as much as she does, so I have no idea how she did that. It was on the floor of the pantry, so I guess she just pulled it onto its side, and then they were off to the races. But it’s so huge, she could’ve done barrel rolls over it. I couldn’t even get mad when I saw that she had dragged yet another thing out of the pantry, I just laughed and laughed. She was so proud of herself, it was hilarious.

Man, I don’t know what we did for entertainment before this kid showed up.