There’s a little 7 year-old girl who goes to daycare at Patsy’s house a couple of days a week after school. Her name is Faith, and Cate adores her. The feeling is absolutely mutual; I’ve noticed since Cate was born that babies are like crack for little girls from the age of 5 to about 12 or so. Faith is no exception, she wants to carry Cate around and play with her all the time. It actually took a long time before Cate allowed that. Faith was a little too up-in-her-grill at first, and Patsy had to teach Faith some boundaries, but they worked through it and now they are best buddies. It’s gotten to the point that on the days when Faith is at daycare? Cate basically ignores me when I arrive to pick her up because she’s having too much fun playing with Faith.

So, it wasn’t really surprising that yesterday afternoon, Cate happened to be looking out Patsy’s front window, saw Faith get off the bus, and announced, “Here comes Faith!”

I kid you not. I wish I’d been there to hear it, but Patsy swears that’s exactly what she said. Other stuff that’s come up recently:

* I know I mentioned this before, but she knows that the kitty-cat says meow. Granted, every animal we name also says meow, but who cares? Animal sounds!

* As for the actual animals, she knows kitty, doggy, horsey, birdie, and bunny. I haven’t gotten her to say “cow” yet, everytime we visit the cows across the street, she calls them horseys. (Eh, they’re both really large mammals who hang out in fields all day, right? Close enough.)

* She loves Johnny & The Sprites, perhaps even more than she loves My Friends Tigger & Pooh. (I like it because I kind of dig the music; it’s surprisingly good for a kids’ show, I think because the whole show is done by people who do a lot of Broadway work.) If she gets cranky, and I say, “Hey Catie, wanna go watch Johnny?” She’ll start screaming, “Shonny! Shonny!” She stomps her feet and dances around in a circle during the opening credits, it’s hilarious. I’m going to have to get a video of that at some point.

* She knows the sign for “more” and she says it at the same time that she signs it. Especially when we’re eating strawberries. (Yum.)

* This morning she was in her high chair eating some Cheerios, and she pointed at the refrigerator and said, “Mehk!” Then she did this weird combo sign that she’s been doing for the past few days – basically, it’s the sign for milk, but she does it up against her mouth (because she wants to put the milk in her mouth, of course) so it looks like she’s drumming her fingers on her lips. Took me forever to figure out what the heck she meant by that.

* She says “hi” and “bye” to everyone, but because she repeats back what we say to her, most of the time she says “hi, baby” and “bye, baby.” So it’s pretty funny when we’re leaving in the morning and she says “bye, baby,” to her daddy. Sort of like she’s a cool 60’s hipster, very Austin Powers-ish. Yeah, baby!

I’ve heard about the “language explosion” that happens during the second year, and it seems like we’re right at the very beginning of that. And seriously? It is blowing my mind. My child can TALK. She understands what we say, and she responds. It is the weirdest, coolest thing in the world, and I love it.

Cate is sporting a stylish new ‘do today:

Yes yes, I’m a horrible mother. I can’t help it, I think it’s cute. And her hair has been so shaggy lately, I just wanted to get it out of her face for her.

You know, I’m pretty sure that my sister and I both wore our hair like this in the 80’s. On purpose.

Poor Cate has had a rough day today.

We had a house showing at noon (another couple who came back for a second time; cross your fingers that’s a good sign), so we took Cate to the park right at what should have been her naptime. Brilliant idea, no?

There was a dog at the park whose owners (a group of older kids) insisted he was friendly, and I pet him and tried to slowly introduce Cate to him. She reached her hand out to touch his nose. Before she got there, he bit her. There was no damage at all, I couldn’t even find a single tooth-dent on her, but it scared the bejeezus out of her (and us too, to be quite honest). The kids who owned the dog had been very friendly with Cate and they were so upset about it because I don’t think they’d ever seen the dog do that before, so I couldn’t get mad at them. I think the dog just didn’t know how to react to a toddler, and he was warning her to back off, which is why he didn’t bite her hard at all. After the initial “holy crap my baby’s entire HAND was in that dog’s mouth” shock wore off and I realized she was just freaking out because she was scared and not hurt, we distracted her and she was fine. But we thought it was probably a good idea to leave the park soon afterward, to avoid another incident.

We still had some time to kill before we were allowed to go home again (the showing was from noon to 1:00), so we went to the grocery store. Again, remember that this is in the dead-middle of naptime? Yeah. Great idea there. She started to have a meltdown almost immediately, and we caved in and tried to bribe her with a cookie from the bakery department, but it didn’t really help that much. We grabbed the stuff on our list and got the heck out of there. Poor kiddo fell asleep in the car, didn’t wake up when I moved her out of the car seat or when I put her in her crib, and slept for another 3 hours.

When she woke up, we went outside to play, and she fell on the gravel part of our driveway and skinned her knee. Ouch. Like I said, rough day. Not that you’d know it for the most part, she’s been pretty ok this evening, all things considered.

Sorry, baby. We’ll try to make sure tomorrow is more fun.

P.S. Today when we were visiting our horse friend across the street, I asked Cate what the horsey says. She said, “meow.” Ok, not the right animal sound at all, but I wasn’t expecting her to say anything even close to an animal sound, so I was ridiculously excited. I told Dave, and he was like, “Oh, you didn’t know she did that?” Nice.

This morning, she announced:

“I BE SAVED!!”

Apparently we’re raising a born-again Christian. Dave and I are very worried.

I promise you, though, the second she starts talking about what a great president Bush is, we’re going to find some sort of toddler-brainwashing camp and send her there.

Today Cate is 16 months old. I meant to get her monthly milestone post written a lot earlier, but we were caught off guard with an unexpected house showing (our third!), and it threw off our whole day.

So! This month Cate has learned:
* The sign for “milk”! At last! I’ve been trying to teach that one to her since she was about 7 months old, and she just finally started doing it back a couple of weeks ago. She usually signs “eat” first, then signs “milk,” so there’s absolutely no mistaking what she wants.

* However, the sign for “eat/food” has become the default sign for everything she wants. Cup of water? Sign food. Sleepy? Sign food. Want to go outside? Sign food. It’s almost like her way of saying, “I want something, and now it’s up to you to figure it out.” It’s… challenging.

I’ve been trying to teach her the appropriate signs, but you know, it took her 9 months to get “milk” nailed down, so I think this process might take a while. And that’s fine, she’s just the type of kid who takes her time observing and thinking stuff over in her head before she gives it a try.

* She has a few new words: horsey is by far the most popular one right now, especially since we’ve been visiting the neighbors’ horses pretty much every day. And the other day at the park, she saw a dog who I guess kind of looked like Patsy’s dog (in that it was small and brown, but a totally different breed), and she said “Buddy!” (Patsy’s dog’s name). Oh, but one of my favorite developments is that she now says “hi” and “bye” appropriately.

She’s even got the bye-bye wave down, although she doesn’t do it in that video. The weird thing about her talking is that I’m pretty sure she has several other words that Dave and I can’t understand. She says them with the same inflection over & over, we just haven’t caught onto what she’s trying to tell us yet. Too bad there aren’t second language classes for speaking Toddler. I’m not sure which’ll come first, either we’ll figure it out or her enunciation will get clearer.

* Sort of along the lines of talking, but pretend play and mimicking are new milestones this month. The phone is the big thing. She’ll pick up her toy phone (or anything really – a hairbrush or the stick from her xylophone work just as well), hold it up to her ear, say “hello” (uh-llo), then she’ll jabber away for a while, throw in a couple of “yeah, yeah”s, and then she’ll say, “k, bye-bye!” and hang up. This slays me like you have no idea. Dave isn’t really a phone guy so I’m thinking she got pretty much all of this from me. (Although maybe a little from Patsy too, I know she talks to her sister at least once a day.)

* She gives kisses, and even makes a smacking sound when she does them. Oh, be still my heart. It’s too cute for words.

I know there are a ton of other little things that I’m forgetting. I could go on all day about how fantastically awesome and wonderful she is, and how she has Dave and I both on the floor laughing pretty much every day. But you know, I think this has been long enough.

Our girl rocks. Simple as that.