Category Archives: Babies ‘n Stuff

now if we can just maintain the spotlessness…

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I apologize for any technical difficulties today, I decided to upgrade my version of WordPress, which always seems to cause way more of a headache than I think it will.

Last night was good. We cleaned like maniacs, of course, and I learned that Dave is even more nitpicky about clutter than I am, which honestly shocked the hell out of me. (He hid our decorative basket of extra toilet paper rolls! I thought it looked fine.) I baked cookies, left them out with a little note inviting our guests to enjoy, and the three of us headed out for dinner.

And you know? When it takes 15 minutes to drive to Redmond each way, it’s surprisingly easy to kill an hour. We headed over to Redmond Town Center, and took Cate to one of the play areas. [For you locals: the area between Gene Juarez and Ruby’s Diner.] It was the first time we’d gone there, but it turned out to be perfect for her, because it’s covered (no rain!), it’s gated off (no getting trampled by shoppers!), and it’s got that nice rubberized flooring (no head injuries!).

If we go there again, I’m going to have to bring my camera, because Cate was so ecstatic, it was hilarious. She doesn’t usually get the chance to walk around out in public where there are lots of people around, but since this was a small fenced area, we just set her down and let her go. For the first few minutes, she hardly even seemed to notice the big play structure in the middle, she just walked around shrieking with glee.

We let her run around and burn off some energy for about 20 minutes, then we headed upstairs to the Greek place for dinner. (I guess it’s technically Turkish? I don’t know, they serve gyros.) Since Cate had some time to play beforehand, she was really good in the restaurant. Of course, the place was empty except for us so it wouldn’t have mattered either way, but it was nice to not have to eat my dinner with one hand because she wanted to sit in my lap. Instead, she sat happily in the highchair the whole time, and ate a couple of slices of pita bread. (She didn’t care for the lentil soup we got her.) It was really nice.

When we got home, I found the business card of the realtor who showed our house (nice of her to leave it behind), and I saw that they did, in fact, eat three of my cookies. So I guess that worked.

The downside is that with only three gone, we were left with nine freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies, and oh, what to do with them? Yeah. We’d better sell this place fast or I’m not going to be able to fit into my pants pretty soon.

Listing Day!

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Cate is about a thousand times better today than she was on Sunday. She’s still a little bit snotty, but she hasn’t needed her albuterol since Sunday night, and she’s been in a great mood, so I’d say we’re definitely through the worst of it. The only problem is that this illness has totally thrown off her sleep/nap schedule, so the last couple of nights, she’s been playing happily until after 11:00! That is sooo not ok when mama needs her sleep too.

hi, mama!

Today she’s back at Patsy’s house, since I need to be working and cleaning the house. It’s amazing how trashed the place can get when you’re taking care of a sick child. I wouldn’t say that the work of the Super-Duper House Cleaners last week has totally been undone, but there’s more than a fair amount of clutter around here that needs to be picked up.

Because, after all, we’re going to be listing our house on the market TODAY!!! I’ll get a picture of the for sale sign as soon as it’s up. (Oh, and if you know me, you can email me if you want the link to see our house online. I’m not going to link to it here because I have no need for strangers to know my home address.)

The reason why I’m a little frantic about the cleaning is because Renee warned me that sometimes people want to come see your house the first day that it’s listed. Now, I’m guessing that’s pretty unlikely in our case, since we’re so far out in the boonies, and it’s a pretty horrible day outside (raining and in the 50’s). But of course since she put the idea in my head, last night I had a dream that people kept showing up to see my house when it was in its current disaster state and I was mortified. So yeah, I’ll be working on that.

Listing! The house! Today! Woo-hoo!!!

Edited to add:
We're on the market!
Oh yeah. We’re official. Let the happy dances commence.

because we aren't nearly stressed out enough

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Cate is sick. Again. She developed a snotty nose on Thursday, but was otherwise still totally fun and happy and fine. I was praying that it was just a new tooth, and not a real cold, because LORDY we don’t have time to deal with that right now.

This morning she woke up wheezing. Full-on asthma attack. She’s been absolutely miserable, poor kid. It took a few doses of albuterol before she was finally comfortable enough to take a nap, which is what she’s doing right now.

So it looks like I won’t be able to send her to daycare tomorrow, which sucks because (a) I have a meeting at the Giant Software Company in the morning (a weekly event that’s part of my current project), and yeah ok, Dave will be fine to look after her for a couple of hours, but he has a major deadline looming too, so I don’t know how we’re going to juggle this. And (b) we’re planning to list our house on Tuesday, which means it really needs to be clean, and not covered in snotty tissues like it is now. But how can you clean when the only thing that keeps your sick child content is to snuggle on the couch with her and watch a few DVR’ed episodes of “Johnny and the Sprites”? How heartless would I be to just be all, “sorry kiddo, mama needs to vacuum, you’re on your own”? I can’t do it. So instead, I’m just sort of wigging out about how I’m going to swing this. I suppose cleaning during her nap would be a start, which, oh yeah, come to think of it, means I should probably get my lazy ass off the computer.

Before I get to that, my dad requested a new video, so I took this one for him. It’s from yesterday, when she was snotty-but-happy. We walked across the street to visit the neighbor’s horse, who totally ignored us because he was on the far side of the pasture. But you can hear her say “horsey” a couple of times (sort of sounds like “huddy”).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNM2sZZ-Ogc

(Btw, the cows in the next pasture over? They’re called huddy too, in case you didn’t know.)

Mother's Day weekend recap

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Mother’s Day at our house was kind of a non-event. Dave forgot that it was Mother’s Day, I guess because he doesn’t notice any sort of advertising on TV, radio, or the Internet. He felt bad about it, but it really isn’t that big a deal to me. I got to spend a good portion of the day playing with Cate, and that made me happy.

Mother's Day happy girl

(I also shot a bunch of videos, which you can see here if you feel so inclined. I don’t want to be the annoying blogger who embeds a YouTube video of her kid in every single entry.)

We also spent a good portion of the weekend cleaning, which was not so fun. The carpet cleaners came today, so we had to make sure that the floors were cleared off so they could do their thing. You might think that I would gripe and grumble about cleaning the house on Mother’s Day, but the truth of the matter is that since it got me feeling a tiny bit closer to having our house ready to sell, I didn’t mind it one bit. It felt really good, and since Dave was feeling guilty about forgetting Mother’s Day, he helped a lot, which was really nice.

Um, that’s not to imply that Dave is ordinarily unwilling to help with housework. He does the dishes for me almost every night, he’s really great with a lot of the day-to-day stuff. But things like cleaning out our closet and sorting through which of our books we should keep and which ones to trade in at the second-hand bookstore? Yeah, that’s not really his scene. But he did it, and I’m very grateful.

Besides, cleaning out the closet led us to dig up this gem from one of Dave’s old Halloween costumes.

Cate wearing a Bill Clinton wig

It’s a baby in a Bill Clinton wig! You don’t see that every day, now do you?

So yeah, we had fun. And I suppose I should write something really profound about motherhood and how great it is, but… meh. I’ve written about that a few times already, so there’s probably no need for it. And right now, I have to go try to put our furniture back into its proper place and make sure the cats don’t pee on the carpet again until this house has a “sold” sign out front.

up up and away

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Last night, Dave and I were eating dinner in the living room and watching The Colbert Report, while Cate played around us happily. All of a sudden Dave said, “Um… where’s the baby?” She had been right next to me just a few seconds before, so I panicked when I realized that I had no idea where she was.

We looked around, and guess what she was doing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsGb8aMBQfI

Yeah. So, she learned a new trick, apparently. And almost gave her mama a heart attack to boot.

(Btw, that video? That was her fourth or fifth trip up the stairs. When we first noticed she was missing, I found her at the top of the stairs already. I brought her back down to the living room, and she immediately set off to practice her new favorite thing. I’d carry her back down, try to distract her with a toy, and “no thanks Mom, I’m off again.” Lather-rinse-repeat.)

We used to have a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs, but the spring on it broke because I’d accidentally banged into it while carrying the laundry basket too many times. So when we took it down to paint the baseboards a couple of weeks ago, we threw it out. I figured we had nothing to worry about since Cate had expressed mild interest in the stairs when she was about 9 months old, but hadn’t paid any attention to them since then.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that her interest in climbing the stairs might eventually resurface. But I guess I have to go buy another baby gate now. Fabulous.

mid-week update

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Sorry to leave the barf story at the top for so long, I hope nobody was too grossed out. I’ve been trying to think of something to blog about, so here’s the latest on What We’re Doing:

House Stuff:
1. I think I mentioned that my realtor’s husband might be a teensy bit unreliable when it comes to helping us with our home improvements? Well, he gave me at least five different dates for when he expected he would be done with everything, and not only did he miss every single deadline (self-imposed deadlines, I might add! It wasn’t me asking him to have it done by X date, he was the one making empty promises!), but 90% of the time, he never even showed up. So whatever, we’re done with him. I still like Renee (our realtor) and I know that she’s been mortified by all of this because she’s been in the hospital having her spleen removed (stupid horse with its giant powerful stupid hooves) and she hasn’t been able to keep up with what’s going on with us. So I called our contractor guy to come give us an estimate to finish up the job that Scott didn’t do, and we’ll consider this a lesson learned about mixing friends and business. This is also why you shouldn’t pay people for work in advance. (Don’t ask. Just don’t.)

[Oh, have I ever told y’all that our contractor guy’s name is Paul Newman? He spells his last name slightly differently, but it cracks me up. The first time he called me and said “hi, this is Paul Newman,” I thought it was a prank call. (I knew his name was Paul, I didn’t know his last name.) I always have the urge to ask him what it was like to work with Robert Redford, or how the salad dressing is coming along, or something completely stupid like that. But my guess is that he’s been hearing those jokes for the last 30+ years, so I try to leave it alone.]

2. I also talked with a guy who owns a power-washing company about getting the deck and siding power-washed, so the house will look all shiny and spiffy. He’s working on an estimate for us too. We actually rented a power-washer from Home Depot, got it here, then figured out that it was waaaay too big a job for Dave and me to tackle on our own. So we’re calling in the pro’s.

Work Stuff:
My current project is turning into a huge pain in the butt, but it’s fine. I’m going to end up with a whole lot of billable hours, and I really can’t complain about that.

Baby Stuff:
Nothing really to report, just that she’s awesome and hilarious and we’re having so much fun right now. Oh, and this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlKeGWpUOqw

(The camera adds ten pounds, shut up.)

Other Stuff:
Dave and I will be celebrating our three-year anniversary a week from tomorrow (the 15th). I’ve made that our target date for listing the house on the market, so we’ll see how that works out.

And a week after our anniversary, the new Indiana Jones movie comes out. I’ve already talked to Patsy about baby-sitting (she sometimes does after-hours stuff for extra money) so Dave and I can have our anniversary date night then. I can’t wait.

how to ruin a Saturday night

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Best-friend Kris’s birthday was earlier this week, and she wanted to get everyone together for dinner last night to celebrate. She started planning it weeks ago. A bunch of us were supposed to meet up at a Japanese restaurant in Lynnwood, which is close to where she & her boyfriend Tony live, but it’s about 25 miles from us. Normally a drive like that would be enough to make me flake out, but you know, special occasion, best friend, and all that.

Dave and I did a lot of work on the house yesterday, and Dave hurt his back lifting too many heavy boxes, so he had decided to stay home. He offered to keep Cate at home with him, but Kris had specifically requested that I bring Cate along, since it’s been ages since she’s seen her. I told Dave that it was fine, I’d bring her with me, I’d just take Dave’s car, since it has the flip-down DVD player for the backseat, and I thought that might help keep Cate happy for such a long drive. (Cate’s normally fine in the car, but we rarely go for drives longer than ten or fifteen minutes.)

So I loaded up the diaper bag with snacks and toys for the restaurant, grabbed her “My Friends Tigger & Pooh” DVD, and we set off. About halfway there, she started to get fussy, but I thought it was just because she was tired of being in the car. She wasn’t overly distraught or anything, she was just mildly crying off and on.

At this point I should back up and explain that I always had terrible motion sickness when I was little, and Dave still can’t so much as read a map in the car without getting nauseous. So the kiddo definitely has a genetic predisposition toward carsickness, I just didn’t think about it before this. And it really didn’t occur to me that maybe watching the damn DVD player (a stationary object while you’re in a moving object) might make her sick.

When we were about three miles from the restaurant, I heard an “urp” followed by the sound of liquid splashing. I turned around just in time to see Cate barf the contents of her lunch all over herself. She heaved a few more times just for good measure.

I, predictably, freaked. I pulled over in the first parking lot I could find, and I stripped her barf-soaked clothes off of her, getting quite a bit all over myself in the process. (And oh god, the smell. It was awful.) I cleaned her and the car seat up the best that I could with the baby wipes in the diaper bag. (Of course I didn’t have any extra clothes or towels or anything with me.) Cate was absolutely hysterical by this point, so she and I sat in the backseat of the car with the engine running (and the heat cranked up to “high,” since she was almost naked) for about 10 minutes until she calmed down.

I finally got her to drink a little bit of water from her sippy cup, which I think helped a little bit, and I was able to put her back in the carseat and head home. She conked out and slept most of the way home.

carsickness: 1. Mama's planning ahead with extra clothes & supplies: 0.

Thankfully, Kris was very understanding when I called her to tell her what had happened. And Cate and I were both showered and in our PJ’s – and the car seat cover was in the washing machine – before 7:30 p.m. Yeah, I tell you, this motherhood gig sure does leave room for some wild and crazy times.