Hey, did you know that at some point, babies turn into toddlers, and then they no longer need two or three naps a day? We’ve recently switched Cate to a “one nap per day” schedule, which is quite a bit more exhausting for me (in the sense of not getting a break from all that Crazy Baby Energy). But for the past few nights, she’s been sleeping 11-12 hours straight. Huh.

Since Cate was itty-bitty, I’ve usually kept her awake until I was ready to go to bed. We’d both crash around 10 or 11 at night, and then she’d be up around 7 or 8, which is when I needed to get up too. But lately, I’ve been moving her bedtime earlier and earlier, and she’s been sleeping later and later. Last night, I put her down at 8:15, and she woke up at 8 this morning. I mean, she woke up briefly at 4 a.m., but I brought her to our bed for a cuddle, and she fell back to sleep within about ten minutes. Not too shabby.

Last night, I actually got to watch the season premiere of “Lost” after I put Cate down for the night, and I didn’t have to turn on the captions so I could follow the plot over the sound of happy baby shrieks. Wow. This whole “toddler with a reasonable bedtime” thing might have its perks after all.

I’ve been looking and looking for Cate’s top two teeth to finally make an appearance, because she’s been gnawing on everything in sight and drooling like crazy for a while. (One of her favorite teething rings? My collarbone. Ow.) And lo and behold, she did have a tooth break through yesterday… on the bottom. I didn’t even notice it until Patsy pointed it out to me. God, Mother of the Year, that’s me. Way to pick up on those major milestones.

Anyway, one tooth is totally out and the other one is not far behind. So, it looks like she’s soon going to have four teeth on the bottom and none on top. The poor kiddo is going to look like a little baby bulldog.

Oh, and you know my theory that the snotty nose was related to teething? Well, Monday, I was wiping her nose every five minutes (sometimes more often). Then the tooth broke through on Tuesday, and there has been nary a single booger since then. So what do you know, I guess my theory that the two things were related was actually pretty accurate. Score one for the Mommy Instinct.

Today we had Cate’s 12-month well-baby checkup. Her stats are as follows:
Height: 30 and 1/2 inches; 90th percentile
Weight: 24 pounds, 5 ounces; 95th percentile
Head circumference: still off the charts huge (hey, at least she’s consistent).

It was a good appointment, I got to ask the pediatrician lots of questions, and she had plenty of time to talk to us because there was a mini-snowstorm last night so a lot of her patients didn’t show up today. Nice.

As for my girl’s milestones this month:
* Humor! She knows that if she puts a (clean, dry) diaper on her head, it makes Dave and me laugh. And she’s getting more and more into peekaboo, it makes her giggle a lot. When you consider what a peekaboo slacker I am, it’s pretty remarkable that she’s picked up the game at all.

* She’s standing on her own for longer and longer periods of time. And it’s so funny when she does it, she gets this big grin on her face like she’s so pleased with herself. No walking yet, but I think that’s because she can crawl/cruise/climb to pretty much wherever she wants to go. Which reminds me…

* Girlfriend has got a serious stubborn streak. If you try to get her to do anything and it isn’t her idea, she gets really, really mad. Which is why we’ve all but given up on trying to get her to walk holding onto our hands. She’ll do it for maybe one or two steps, then she turns her legs to spaghetti and screams. Same thing goes for trying new foods. A few times, I have literally held her head still with one hand and shoved a spoon in her mouth with the other so she could get a taste of the food I’m offering and realize that hey! That actually tastes pretty good! Once I can get the first bite in her mouth, she’ll open up for all subsequent bites. But that first one is like some bizarre version of whack-a-mole, only you’re trying to get a spoon in the mouth of a baby who’s thrashing her head back and forth to try to avoid said spoon. I guess she’s gotta keep us on our toes, right?

* And oh, the food issues. Dave has some problems with food textures, and Cate seems to have inherited the same trait. She likes crunchy things, and she’s ok with pureed things, but nothing that’s squishy or gooey. I can break them into bite-size pieces and put them in her mouth, but she won’t touch them. This applies to cheese, bananas, pasta, and any number of other yummy foods. Even cupcakes!

(Check out that scowl, she is so her father’s daughter.)

She got her first chance at a cupcake this past weekend. She poked at the frosting, realized it was gooey, and started to cry. Eventually, I managed to break off a tiny piece of a cupcake and put it in her mouth, and she decided that was ok. But she still wouldn’t touch it when I offered it to her.

* Today (at one year & one day old!), we got our First Official Word. She said, “Kitty!” She said it twice, and both times it was directed at the cats. Sure, it sounded more like “gitty,” but I think it’s close enough. Yay, language!

That’s actually one of the things we talked to the doctor about today, because (except for “gitty”) Cate hasn’t really shown any interest in either talking or signing. I try to be the laid-back type of parent who says oh whatever, she’ll hit those milestones when she’s good and ready. But the part that concerns me is that she doesn’t respond to us that much either. If we call her name, sometimes she’ll look up, and sometimes she won’t. It could be because she’s really intently concentrating on something else (we do have a family history of ADD, after all). But I wonder if there’s more to it than that.

Our pediatrician said that it’s certainly a possibility. Cate’s already had three ear infections, so it seems like she could be on her way to having a lot problems with fluid build-up in her ears. So in a few weeks, we’re going to take her to a pediatric audiologist to have her hearing checked. I think the pediatrician suggested it more to reassure me than anything else. But both my brother and I needed ear tubes when we were little, and it certainly isn’t the end of the world if Cate needs them too.

And besides, even without verbal communication, she usually manages to get her point across just fine.

And she can at least hear music well enough to dance to it, so things can’t possibly be that dire.

My baby is one year old today.

It’s so stange, looking back at her birth story and realizing that I still know it as if it happened yesterday. All day today, I’ve been looking at the clock and remembering exactly what was happening at this moment last year. Every detail is still completely fresh in my mind.

And yet, here we are, a whole year later. She’s no longer the mythical baby that I daydreamed about when I was pregnant, and she’s not the tiny, wrinkly, pink, alien-seeming creature that she was when she was first born. She’s this little human with her own personality. She’s just Cate.

I know a lot of people (mostly mothers, although I’m sure some dads too) get sad when their kids grow up, because they want to hold on to this particular age or phase for as long as possible. And I get that. If I go through the boxes of baby clothes that Cate has outgrown, it makes me a little wistful, because I remember how adorable she was when she was all teeny-tiny and new. And I hope that someday we’ll have another baby who can wear those clothes, so I don’t have to say good-bye to them forever.

But I have to admit, I am loving this phase so much more than when she was a newborn. Probably a couple of major reasons for that: (a) I’m not a hormonal mess anymore, and (b) I’m getting pretty consistent amounts of sleep these days. But really, she’s just so much fun right now. She has this amazing little laugh, and hearing it makes me feel like my heart could explode from the love.

So hey, she can outgrow all the adorable teeny-tiny outfits that she wants. I just can’t wait to see what happens next.

(Thanks to Amalah, since I got the idea for the video montage from the videos she’s made for Noah’s first and second birthdays. Which if you haven’t seen, you should, because they are awesome and will make you cry.)

I’ll write more tomorrow after Cate’s 12-month well-baby checkup. For now, I just want to say: happy first birthday, Catie-Girl. We sure do love you.