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.

Thanks everybody for the well wishes. Cate seems to be feeling back to normal except for a slightly runny nose, but that’s nothing we can’t handle.

In the last couple of days, she’s suddenly started walking a lot more. I know I link to videos an awful lot, but the grandparents love these, and I can’t get over how cute she is with her little Frankenstein stagger.

(Apologies for the weird lighting. Evening in our house makes for some serious glares.)

(For those of you just joining us, click here and here for the beginning of the story.)

Ok, so we got admitted to the medical wing for the night, and really, nothing super-dramatic happened after that. The nurses and everyone we dealt with was absolutely amazing. One of the nurse’s aides brought us several different cartoon videos for Cate to watch (the TV in our room had a DVD/VCR combo), they brought us snacks, and were just generally super-nice and fantastic. And Children’s Hospital even has free laundry facilities for families (with detergent!), so I didn’t have to bring our nasty, puke-soaked clothes home with us. I just washed them and we were good to go. If you have to be stuck in the hospital with a sick child, that’s the way to do it.

Also: while we were there, I discovered these in the cafeteria. Best. Cookies. Ever. I’m going to start ordering them for people as gifts, I kid you not. Y’all get ready to hate me.

As soon as we were in our own room, Cate was obviously starting to feel better. The second albuterol treatment and the steroid she got in the ER had finally kicked in, and she was breathing a lot easier. She even smiled at the nurses a little bit, and was starting to seem more like her normal self. She slept a lot, but still managed to put up quite a fight when it came time to give her a dose of albuterol with an inhaler. She isn’t old enough to use an inhaler on its own, so we have to use it with something called a “spacer,” which is basically a tube attached to a mask that covers her nose and mouth. And hoo boy, she did not like it. I had to pin her arms down while the nurse held her head still and gave her the medicine. It was probably a three-person job, but we managed with two people.

Incidentally, we’ve been using the spacer with the inhaler since we got home, and she’s totally fine with it now. Either she’s gotten used to it or else it’s less scary when it’s just me doing it. I turn on cartoons to get her all nice and distracted, then squirt away. She doesn’t even fuss about it anymore. It’s awesome.

By that evening, Cate was feeling much better, because we had to have the nurses unhook her from her monitors so she could cruise around the hospital room and play. She had a blast, even though the pants on her baby scrubs were too long and tripped up her feet a few times. Dave took off around 8:00, and I started trying to get Cate settled down to sleep.

The night was pretty rough, because Cate woke up every couple of hours, which meant that I did too. I’d have to buzz the nurse, ask him (our night nurse was a guy named Matt) to unhook her from all of her monitors so I could bring her over to the fold-out couch with me. Then we’d cuddle on the couch until I got her to fall asleep again, put her back in the crib, buzz Matt to ask him to re-hook her monitors, and lather-rinse-repeat all night long.

(For the record, as much as I wanted Dave around while all of this was going on, I am SO GLAD he went home for the night. That fold-out couch was teeny-tiny – only slightly bigger than a twin-size bed, and so short that my feet hung off the edge, and I’m only 5’5″ – and if both of us had tried to sleep on it, we would’ve bumped into each other all night and neither of us would’ve slept at all. It was much better to be somewhat comfortable for the couple of hours that I was able to sleep.)

The doctor came to see us in the morning, and after a few administrative details (we had to talk with a respiration therapist, watch a video on childhood asthma, etc.), we were discharged and allowed to go home. Cate’s official diagnosis is Reactive Airway Disease, which is essentially an asthma attack that’s triggered by a cold or a virus of some kind. So from now on, whenever she gets a cold, we’ll start using her albuterol inhaler as a preemptive strike to hopefully avoid any more attacks. It’s pretty likely that she will have full-blown asthma later on down the road, since Dave has had it all his life and Cate is already exhibiting the signs for it, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Since we got home, things have been pretty smooth. The steroid inhaler they gave her makes her super-hyper, which is fine because she’s happy and not grouchy, it’s just making naptime a challenge, and she’s wearing me out. But she hasn’t wheezed at all, so she’s off the albuterol entirely (until her next cold, fingers crossed that’s going to be a long time from now). She’s also back on antibiotics for the ear infection she inevitably developed during all of this (whee!), but that isn’t too bad, it’s just making for some, uh, interesting diaper pyrotechnics. Good times.

Picking up where I left off: while I was on the phone with Dave, the paramedics arrived. I got off the phone and retrieved Cate from the nurse – between the doctor, several nurses, the paramedics and us, the exam room was quite crowded and the whole thing freaked Cate the hell out. The paramedics were so sweet, though, and one of them gave Cate a bunny to help calm her down.

[How cute is that? It didn’t really work, but she seemed to like the bunny later when she was feeling better. And she said, “Unny!” Which, um, ok kiddo, we didn’t know that you knew that word. I guess all those episodes of Bunnytown weren’t totally useless after all.]

I gave one of the nurses my car keys and she went to get Cate’s car seat out of the car so the paramedics could put it in their rig. She also gave me a diet coke to take with me, god bless her. We had run out the door so fast, I hadn’t even had a sip of water or put any make-up on or anything (and those of y’all who know me know that I never leave the house without make-up), and suddenly it looked like we were going to be in for a long day. So I was grateful for the caffeine, and since diet coke is like my favorite beverage in the world, I’m seriously thinking that I need to write her a thank-you note for that.

We got in the ambulance, strapped Cate into her car seat (which was strapped to a gurney), and they set up another albuterol treatment for her (the vaporizer kind where it just kind of blows in her face for several minutes, rather than the inhaler). It must’ve helped, because she was finally comfortable enough to fall asleep, and she stayed conked out until we got to the ER at Children’s Hospital and I had to take her out of the car seat.

The staff there was really great too, and gave Cate this really cute ballerina doll to entertain her.

Again, she didn’t care anything about it. Dolls are so not her thing. I wish someone had just given her a broken cell phone or something with buttons that lit up, because that would’ve helped way more. Oh well, it was really sweet of them to try. They also turned “Teletubbies” on the TV, which at least gave Cate something to stare at, although I don’t know if she was really into it or not. We’ve never watched Teletubbies at home, so it wasn’t familiar and comforting, it was just something to watch. But it definitely helped to keep her from crying quite so much. And I’ve decided that they aren’t nearly as creepy as I once thought they were.

We had our own room in the ER, and I sat in the bed with Cate on my lap. Dave got there about 10 minutes after we did, which made me feel so much better. Dealing with these types of crises are so much easier when there are two of you. Cate was examined by about a dozen different doctors and nurses, and they set her up with more albuterol treatments. She alternated between squirming and crying (which she did a lot) and sleeping. Her oxygen level was up to the mid-90’s by that point, which was much better than it had been earlier, but it would start to drop into the 80’s if I moved the oxygen mask away from her face. But as long as I kept it hovering close to her nose, she seemed to be fine. Once things calmed down a bit, I sent Dave to the cafeteria to get me some food before I passed out.

The nurse took us to get an X-ray of Cate’s chest, to rule out pneumonia. That was pretty horrible, because they had to strap her to a chair and pin her arms over her head to keep her totally still, and she howled through the whole thing. It was awful, but thankfully it didn’t take very long and they got what they needed on the first try.

Since the X-ray showed it definitely wasn’t pneumonia, asthma was the most likely culprit. They told us we were going to have to be admitted overnight. I gave Dave a list of things we were going to need and sent him home to fetch it, since there was no way I could leave Cate.

Btw, our ER room didn’t have a bathroom (of course), so eventually I handed Cate over to Dave so I could go pee. When I left, I took Dave’s cell phone with me and I popped outside to call my parents and tell them what was going on. My mom wasn’t awake yet, so I had to unload all of this info onto my dad. And of course, the day that all of this happened was his birthday. Happy birthday, Dad! Your one & only grandbaby is in the hospital and can’t breathe, and we don’t know what’s wrong yet! My dad is a world-class worrywart, so as you can probably imagine, this was not a great day for him.

At some point I offered Cate some milk, since I at least had enough of a brain to stick a bottle in the insulated pocket of my diaper bag before we left the house. She sucked down about half of it really fast, and started to doze off again. The nurse came back and wanted to give her some decadron, a steroid to help reduce the swelling in her lungs. She said it was cherry flavored and most kids liked it. Hmph. Most kids aren’t my kid, lady. We squirted a tiny bit in her mouth, she gagged, and the medication plus all of the milk she drank came right back up. All over both of us.

Of course, this was before I had sent Dave home to get extra clothes for all of us, so we were just stuck, soaked, and stinky. The nurses found a pair of scrubs for me, and we let Cate hang out in just her diaper for a while. An hour or so later, we were admitted to the medical wing, and the nurses there found some baby scrubs for Cate (which were hilarious and I wish I had gotten a picture of her wearing them, but I brought them home with me, so I may have to get her to model them again at some point).

Up next: the longest night ever.