2008:
2012:
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2008:
2012:
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2008:
2012:
Yep. Life is good. (Also, I need to take more pictures of Lucy with my real camera instead of my phone, or she’s going to wonder why I have all of these crystal-clear pictures of her sister, and everything of her is grainy and Instagram-my.)
Random update of stuff that’s been going on lately:
I went out of town about two weeks ago, and the girls stayed with my parents. It was the first time I’d ever spent the night away from Lucy, and it was stressful for me, but I don’t think she even noticed I was gone. It probably doesn’t seem like a big milestone to most people, but it felt like one to me.
Catie also did great while I was gone.
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Other Catie stuff:
On my way back from my trip, I had a layover in Chicago. It occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten souvenirs for my girls while I was out of town, and I noticed a plush toy T. Rex while I was at O’Hare. (It’s based on Sue from the Field Museum of Natural History.) I figured I could use this to my advantage. So, when I came back, I told her that I had a present for her, but I couldn’t give it to her unless she made me a promise: in exchange for the dinosaur, she has to stay in her own bed all night.
(Wait, have I mentioned that Catie has been getting in bed with me every night for months? I forget if I’ve mentioned that or not.)
Anyway, of course my little dino-nut went bonkers over her new T. Rex toy, and she agreed to the terms of my deal. She’s been sleeping soundly in her own bed ever since. Praise the baby Jesus and Hallelujah.
Also, I found out what kindergarten Catie will be going to in a few months, which is freaking me out completely. I’m going to leave that topic for another time.
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Other Lucy stuff:
She’s cruising around the furniture, and letting go/standing on her own for a few seconds at a time. I’m pretty sure she’s going to start walking any minute now.
It’s funny just to discover the things that she knows. Like, she has this little toy bell at my parents’ house, and if you ask her, “Lucy, where’s your bell?” She’ll find it, pick it up, and start waving it around to ring it.
She’s also starting to dance, which I need to get a video of, because it’s impossible to describe, and completely hilarious.
See also: eyelashes. I melt.
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Other me stuff:
Work is good. I’m still working on a diet and hitting a lot of plateaus, but I’m doing my best and figuring that I’ll get there eventually.
I’m also… um… dating. Which is weird, and I don’t really know how much I want to talk about it on the blog.
I will say this: When I first mentioned this to my mom, she freaked out about it (in a bad way). But she’s chilled out significantly, after I explained my motives. The thing is, I work full-time, and I have the kids full-time, so I’m not out looking for a full-time boyfriend. Quite frankly, I don’t have the time. But you know what? It’s really nice to sometimes put on a shirt that doesn’t have a smear of baby snot on it, and to do my hair and make-up, and to feel cute, and… you know, FLIRT.
It’s fun. And there’s been a serious fun shortage in my life for the past year or so.
See? No baby snot anywhere. Also: HAPPY.
The other thing I told my mom: the girls will not be introduced to anyone that I date. They’ve been through enough instability and upheaval, and I’m not about to add to that.
If/when something starts to get serious (and I don’t expect that to happen aaaaanytime soon), they will be introduced to that person as my friend, just like they’ve met female friends of mine. And there will be no public displays of affection in front of the kids, because it’s inappropriate. Just like there wouldn’t be PDA in front of my parents – again, because it’s inappropriate.
I don’t know why I feel like I need to be defensive on that subject. Maybe it’s because I’m not officially divorced yet, that it all feels kind of unseemly. But I also don’t see how this is doing any harm, and it’s been a pretty big ego boost to find out that there are guys out there who think I’m cute. So I think it’s a good thing.
I wasn’t sure how Catie would deal with the loss of Teenie. She’s known that cat her entire life. We talked for several days beforehand about how Teenie was very old and sick, and how it was almost time for her to go to Kitty Heaven. But I was dreading telling her about it when it happened. The poor kid has been through quite enough over the past year, she deserves a break.
She took it all really well at first. She knew it was coming, so it wasn’t a total shock.
But the next day, she walked into the room and said, “Mommy, I just don’t feel like myself without Teenie here.” I told her that I knew exactly what she meant. Then she burst into tears. There wasn’t anything I could do except hold her while she cried for a long time.
She asked if since Teenie had died, could she get a puppy?
I said no way, kiddo, sorry. Mommy is responsible for cleaning up quite enough poop around these parts. We aren’t adding a puppy to the mix.
She said, then can I get a hamster?
I said no, because hamsters stink and Mommy doesn’t want to clean its cage.
She said, then can I have a fish?
Sigh. Damn it.
I’m not made of stone, y’all.
Internet, meet our newest family member(s)…
(See the 3 blobs at the top of the green aquarium plant? Yeah. Them.)
Their names are Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi. Catie named them herself. Obviously.
So, yeah. Fish. At least they’re really low-maintenance pets, right?
I feel like every blog post lately is either “we’re all dying from The Snot Crud OMG send help aaaaiiiieeee….”, or it’s some version of “hey, we survived and I think we’re all better now.”
As for today: I don’t know. I suddenly got waaaaay worse and had to go back to the doctor’s office, and Catie has an ear infection, so at the moment, we’re both on antibiotics. I’m hoping we can knock this out once and for all.
Lucy seems ok for now. She’s got the eternal case of Drippy Nose, but she doesn’t seem terribly bothered by it, she’s still happy and funny and sleeping well.
(Oh man, can I tell you about the sleep? I mean, no, I know I can’t tell you about the sleep because that will jinx it and she’ll go back to waking up every 3 hours. But suffice to say: God bless sleep training. We seem to have hit some sweet spot of sleep, and I know it’s likely temporary and we’ll have to start over the next time she gets sick, or a new tooth comes in, or she hits some other developmental milestone. But for now, it’s so, so good, y’all.)
Maybe this makes me a terrible mother, because you know, unconditional love and all that. But I find her much cuter when she lets me sleep at night.
As for crawling – yes, Lucy is crawling, kind of. She gets herself into a yoga downward-facing dog pose on her hands and tippy-toes, then can’t seem to figure out what to do next, and she gets really mad about that. Sometimes she’ll kind of throw a leg out sideways and scoot like a crab. I’ve seen her do a normal hands-and-knees forward crawl only a handful of times. So, unlike Catie, who started crawling one day and then never stopped crawling, Lucy seems to be taking her own sweet time with this.
Or, you know, maybe Lucy just prefers to sit on the floor and scream for me to come pick her up. It certainly seems like it some days.
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A couple of other random Lucy developments:
1. Probably because Catie and I have been sick so much, Lucy has developed a fake cough. Seriously. If I cough, she smiles and echoes me, like it’s a game. It’s both cute and pathetic at the same time. How many times do you have to cough in front of your baby before they learn this? APPARENTLY A MILLION COUGHS. WHICH I HAVE DONE.
2. She’s started waving bye-bye and saying “ah-bah,” sort of like bye-bye. The only problem is that she seems to have no idea of the appropriate context of how or when to use this. She says bye-bye to the bathtub, to her toys, to the TV, to her own shadow. I think she just likes doing it over and over.
3. According to her teacher at daycare, she learned to say “uh-oh,” but I have yet to get her to repeat that one at home. The few times I’ve tried saying “uh-oh” in front of her to see if she’ll parrot it back to me, she just laughs at me like I’m hilarious. So, who knows.
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Unrelated to anything: I’m in the process of registering Catie for kindergarten. I just… man. That’ll be a whole other post someday, when I come up with the words to adequately express my feelings about it. For now, I think “overwhelming” about sums it up.
Since we are still felled by the Puking Plague here, I thought I’d share a random funny that happened a couple of weeks ago that I meant to write about at the time.
Scene: Driving along, classic rock radio station is on, because everything else is playing commercials. “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger comes on, which is one of those random guilty pleasure “there’s no reason on earth that I should like this, but I kinda love it” songs.
Catie: Hey, I know who this is singing this!
Me: You do?
Catie: Yeah, it’s the same guy who sings [breaking into song], “You better be hooooome soooooon.”
Me: Uhh. No, sweetie. That song is sung by a guy named Neil…
Catie, interrupting: Hey, there’s a kid named Neil at my school!
Me:… Ok. And this song is by a guy named Bob Seger.
Catie, disappointed: Oh. There’s no Bob Seger at my school.
Right. Well. Thank God for that.
Catie’s birthday party was on Saturday at a bounce house place called Monkey Joe’s. She’d been to birthday parties there before, and was so excited to have her own party there.
[Note that unlike when she turned two and freaked the hell out at the Chick-Fil-A cow, she is no longer scared of adults in giant mascot costumes.]
This year, Catie asked for a cake “with dinosaurs on it.” I learned from last year’s birthday party that most grocery stores don’t do custom artwork, so rather than stressing about it, I grabbed a bag of little plastic dinosaurs to use as cake toppers, and POOF! Dinosaur birthday cake!
She absolutely loved it.
Lucy had a pretty good time at the party too. She got to ride around on both me and her Pop-Pop…
… and she got to roll around on a floor that was covered in oh my god I don’t even want to know so don’t make me think about it.
(See that spot on my jeans? That’s where Lucy had been chewing on my leg moments earlier. Nice, kid.)
The kids ran around and bounced their little hearts out for a couple of hours, then had pizza and birthday cake. Then there were presents, and that was about it. Pretty basic, but so nice to not have to deal with clean-up and all of that other stuff that usually goes with birthday parties.
The last thing Catie got to do was the prize grab. She had seen her friends do this before, and she was absolutely terrified of it, but I explained that if she didn’t do it, she wouldn’t get a prize.
She was so serious and obviously scared, but so ABSOLUTELY DETERMINED that she was going to get her damn prize, no matter what. So into the giant scary ticket grab booth she went.
She ended up getting enough in tickets for two new dinosaur toys, so you know, WORTH IT. At least in her mind.
Overall, she had a fantastic party.
(The whole set of pics is here.)
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Then, there was the rest of the weekend.
Warning: things go quickly downhill from here.
Saturday night, we were all tired from the party. My brother Chris & my sister Tracy were both staying at my house for the weekend (they drove over from Charlotte for the party). Catie’s birthday present from Tracy had been a couple of new sets of princess pajamas, and Catie wanted to wear her new Little Mermaid PJs. It didn’t even occur to me that I needed to wash them first.
At bedtime, Tracy noticed that Catie was really itchy and scratching herself all over. She called me to check her out. My first thought was dry skin – Catie gets eczema in the winter sometimes. So I took her into the bathroom and slathered her with almond oil, which is mild and odorless and normally makes her skin feel better.
(Here’s a tip in case you hadn’t guessed: that was my major mistake. I basically took whatever was in the pajamas that had irritated her skin, and I sealed it to her. Which made things go way worse.)
The next thing I knew, Catie was screaming her head off that her skin was burning. She started to hyperventilate and have a panic attack. We went into my bathroom because she was freaking out so much I was afraid she was going to make herself vomit. I couldn’t calm her down, and my brain just kept thinking that she was having some kind of major allergic reaction to something, and I was worried about her asthma and breathing, so I yelled for my brother to call 911.
The EMTs got there within minutes, and were absolutely amazing. They checked her oxygen SATs (normal) and her lungs (all clear), and guessed that it was probably contact dermatitis from the pajamas. Since they gave her the all-clear on her breathing, we opted to not take Catie to the hospital, and instead I gave her a bath and tried to wash everything off of her skin, then gave her all new clean clothes to wear. Once I got her back in bed, she was asleep in minutes. The poor kid was exhausted (it was almost 11 p.m. by the time this was all finished).
On the plus side: Lucy slept through all of this. Even Catie’s screaming. So that was nice. But still? Yeah, that sucked.
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Sunday, I sent both girls to hang out with Dave for the day. That seemed pretty uneventful. They had fun, and came home in the evening around dinnertime. We did the bedtime routine, yadda yadda. Normal as usual.
Around 1 a.m., I heard Catie scream, “MOMMY!!!” It was not a normal “I had a bad dream and want to get in your bed” yell, it was… THAT scream. The kind that all parents (or at least all moms) know. The “something really bad is happening” scream. I was out of bed and across the hall before I even opened my eyes all the way.
I ran into Catie’s room just in time to see her vomit all over her bed. Faaaaabulous.
She spent the rest of the night in my bed (she managed to puke into a bowl every other time except once, which required me to change the sheets on my bed at 4 a.m. Let me tell you, I am not a fan of that).
She doesn’t have a fever, so my guess is that it’s some stomach virus she picked up from the germ-factories that are those bounce houses. (She didn’t eat anything unusual, so it’s my best guess. A 24-48 hour incubation period is normal for these things.)
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Both girls are with my parents today. My mom called a little while ago to tell me that Catie is keeping down tiny sips of Sprite, and that Lucy is officially crawling as of this morning. So, there you go. I’m sad I missed that milestone of Lucy’s, but glad that my parents and Catie got to see it.
To sum up: Hooray for birthday parties and baby milestones. However, illnesses and 911 calls and all that nonsense? Can suck it.
Dear Catie,
Today, you are five years old.
Actually, you informed me this morning that today is not your birthday, because you said that it’s stupid that your party is not on the same day as your actual birthday. I can’t really argue with that logic, but today is your real birthday. Get used to the fact that your birthday will not always fall on a weekend. Just because you were born on a Saturday afternoon doesn’t mean that’s when your birthday will always be.
This was probably the hardest year of your life so far, and my hope is that it’s the hardest one you’ll ever have to face in your life. You became a big sister, your dad and I separated, and we moved to a new house – all in the span of six months. The experience almost broke me, so I cannot imagine how hard it was for you. I am so sorry for that. I don’t even know how I’ll begin to explain it all to you when you’re older and start to ask questions.
Overall, though, I have to say that you’ve handled everything phenomenally well.
Sometimes I worry that I put too much on you. Since it’s just the three of us now, I ask you to help out with a lot of things. Sometimes I’ll catch myself starting to ask you to do something, and I’ll hold back. I don’t want you to grow up feeling like you didn’t get to have a childhood because you had to be Mommy’s Helper all the time. I want you to be a kid.
When you get upset with me, you sometimes yell that you don’t want to be a big sister anymore. My response to that is always the same: “You don’t have to be a big sister. You just have to be Catie.” Because, baby girl? Let me tell you, Catie is freaking awesome.
I have to say that watching your relationship develop with Lucy has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I was worried before she was born, because you were never interested in babies before we had one of our own. But you are so sweet and nurturing with her, it’s amazing to witness.
Look, you even make the same facial expressions. Freaky, right?
And oh, babe, the way your sister loves you. She lights up every time you walk in the room. You are hands-down her favorite person ever.
(I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to get away with calling her “Boopy” forever, though. It’s cute now when she’s a baby, but I’m warning you now, she’s going to get mad about that nickname someday.)
You are an absolute joy, and I cannot begin to tell you how thankful I am that I get to be your mama.
Happy birthday, my sweet Catie-bug. I love you to the moon and back.
Love,
Mommy