Today my girl is 17 months old. And as much as I really want to write a well thought-out, articulate entry about her awesomeness, I have got the most unbelievable headache today, so this is the best I can do.

Monthly milestones:
* Cate has more words than I can keep up with, and my suspicion is that she has even more that we just don’t understand, because Dave and I still aren’t very good at speaking toddler yet. We’re working on it.

* Names! Besides Mommy & Daddy, she knows all the kids’ names at daycare – Faith, Mason, Travis, Parker, and since Scarlett is too hard to say, she just calls her “baby”. (Even though Scarlett is about to turn 3.) And Patsy is either Passy or Bassy, since her P and B sounds sometimes get confused. She hasn’t got the cats’ names yet, but she’s shortened them all from “kitty-cat” to “catty,” which I find pretty funny.

Which reminds me, since she’s getting good with names, and we’re going to be seeing my family in a few weeks, I’ve pulled together some pictures of them and I’m going to start showing them to her every day and explaining who they are. She might not be able to say their names next month, but at least their faces will all be familiar, and that’s good enough. Although, seriously, if she calls my dad “Pop-Pop,” I have a feeling he will melt into a puddle on the floor, so I’m really hoping she can at least get that one.

* Her food issues are becoming less and less of a problem, and she’s eating a much wider variety of stuff, which is fantastic. She really seems to love seafood – popcorn shrimp in particular, although I’ve made baked fish fillets a few times and she always seems to end up eating a good portion of my dinner (not Dave’s, since I make his spicy and mine with just a little salt). She even likes tuna fish, which kind of shocked me, since it’s pretty strong-tasting. I know the food issues are going to resurface soon, so I’m just enjoying this while it lasts.

* Forget walking and running, dancing and jumping are where it’s at, man. I need to get a video of her jumping, but she only does it when she’s holding onto me for support, so I’ll have to get Dave to film it. But for now, here’s a video of her doing a little bit of her stompy dance. The lids on our septic tank are like her own little personal disco platforms, she likes to run to each of them and dance on them. I think it’s because they make a cool echo-y sound when she stomps them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ_tzON5bxU
(Pardon the background noise of the air-conditioning unit. That’s what I get for filming behind the house.)

I know there’s more stuff, but I need to take another headache pill and go lie down before my brain explodes and oozes out of my ear. Hope everyone has a great weekend.

The other night, I was running Cate’s bath and she walked in carrying the rock that we use as a doorstop to prop open the baby gate at night. (I know that probably sounds sillly to some people, but after the cats woke us up at 3 a.m. a few times yowling for us to open the gate and let them in or out, we gave up. So, we now have a rock that lives in our hall. What can I say, it works.) The rock is about the size of a grapefruit, so it’s small, but large enough that it would really hurt if you dropped it on your foot. Cate walked into the bathroom with it and promptly threw it on the floor. I know she was doing it because she wanted to hear the loud noise, but I was worried about her hurting her toes (and also possibly damaging the floor), so I said “no,” picked up the rock, and put it back in the hall.

Of course, being her little toddler self, she immediately went back to retrieve the rock. When she came back into the bathroom with it, I warned her, “Don’t throw the rock.” And she did. So I said, “NO!” in my meanest, stern-mommy tone, and I sat her down on the bathmat. (I realize that eventually I’ll need a designated “naughty spot,” but I worry that she’d forget why she was being punished by the time I moved her there, so for now I think it’s better to just plop her down on the spot.) She howled, while I calmly put the rock back in the hallway. Again.

When I came back into the bathroom, she was still crying. She took one look at me, stood up, and walked out of the bathroom and into our bedroom. She calmed herself down (which took maybe 10-15 seconds), then came back into the bathroom and said “hi.” I said hi back to her, then said, “Come give me a kiss.” And she did! The funny thing is, I don’t think she has ever given a kiss on command before. She gives kisses sort of randomly, but never when we ask for them – although sometimes when we ask for kisses, she’ll offer up her cheek for us to kiss her. It seemed like she genuinely understood that we were making up after she got into trouble.

So what do you know, I applied discipline to my kid and it worked. And she was a total sweetheart for the rest of the night. I know this is going to happen about a million more times, but I was really excited that she seemed to “get it” so easily. I’m crossing my fingers that things are still this easy a year from now when we’re in the middle of the terrible two’s. (You more experienced moms out there can go ahead and laugh at me now, if you’d like.)

A couple of nights ago, I had a nightmare that I lost Cate in the airport. I’m sure it’s probably just general anxiety about moving that’s manifesting itself in my brain, but it really upset me, and it made me decide to go invest in a toddler harness, so it’s one less thing for me to worry about. (Note to Cat: I remembered that e-baby had the monkey version, and since our girls already have so much other gear in common, I intentionally got the dog so we’ll always know whose is whose.)

We’ve tried out the harness a couple of times for walks around the neighborhood, just to get Cate used to idea of wearing it, so she doesn’t wig out over it in the airport. And she really seems to like it. She likes the doggy a lot, and she plays with him even when she isn’t wearing him. She’s given him a few kisses on the nose, it’s very cute.

The weird thing is that since I bought the harness, it’s like it’s suddenly clicked in her head that she’s supposed to walk next to me instead of just running around wherever. The couple of times that we’ve gone for walks without it, she’s actually held my hand (something she would never do before, I always assumed because it messed with her sense of balance), and she patiently walked beside me for ages. It was kind of awesome. And of course, the irony here is that I’m pretty sure I swore that I’d never own a toddler harness before I had kids, but I totally get it now.

Oh, and today we took Cate to get a for-real haircut. The kids’ salon is still closed for renovations (they were supposed to re-open 2 weeks ago!), so we went to one of those super-cheap, chain barber shops instead.

They just did her bangs because she was squirming and crying the whole time (even though she was in my lap). It pretty much sucked for everyone involved. But I think this is good enough for now. At least I can stop constantly brushing her hair out of her eyes.

I don’t know if I’m boring y’all with this, but I want some way to keep track of these new language developments, and well, this blog is it.

So, here are Cate’s latest and greatest:
* ‘Side (or sometimes “shide”) means outside. And she now refers to herself as either Baby Cate or Baby Catie, since that’s what all the kids at daycare call her. So last night, when we went out for our walk, she said, “Baby Cate shide!” Yes, sweetie, Baby Cate is indeed outside.

* We stopped at one of the neighbors’ houses to talk to their horse. The horse eventually got bored with us and walked away. Cate screamed, “Baaack heeeeere!!!!” This might indicate something about how often we tell her to “come back here.” For the record, the horse was not impressed, and he did not come back. We went down the road to talk to the cows instead.

* Not a sentence, but a new word: “stah-bee” for strawberry. Yum.

* When we were leaving the house to go to Patsy’s this morning: “We go bye.”

Actually, “bye” seems to be one of her favorite words. If she gets mad at me, she’ll say “BYE!!” and stomp away. Like, dude, I am sooo done with you. She’s done it to both Dave and Patsy too, it’s not just me. But man, if you tick her off, she’ll let you know.

Now, if someone could please tell me what “oppy-boppy” means, I’d really appreciate it, because she says it ALL the time, and Dave and I can’t figure it out. I think it’s just a nonsense word that she likes the sound of, but… yeah. I don’t have the foggiest idea on that one.

Want to know how Dave and I entertain Cate almost every evening?

I got the camera out after we’d already been playing for a while, which is why she seems to be winding down toward the end. Her laugh is a lot more maniacal when I don’t have the camera shoved in her face too.

I love when she decides to tackle me for kisses. That’s my favorite part.

Oh, and yesterday? She had pooped, so I said, “let’s go upstairs to change your diaper.” She said “dah-puh” and started crawling up the stairs without me. I was right behind her, so it wasn’t a safety issue. But when we got to the top of the stairs, she went straight to her room to get changed (normally she heads for our room to find a cat or to take apart the bathroom cabinets).

Afterward, she started to go after Teenie (which Teenie hates), and so to distract her I said, “Ok, let’s go downstairs.” Crawling up and down the stairs by herself is her new favorite activity, so she said to Teenie, “Bye, baby! We go down!” It was pretty awesome.