Today Cate is 16 months old. I meant to get her monthly milestone post written a lot earlier, but we were caught off guard with an unexpected house showing (our third!), and it threw off our whole day.

So! This month Cate has learned:
* The sign for “milk”! At last! I’ve been trying to teach that one to her since she was about 7 months old, and she just finally started doing it back a couple of weeks ago. She usually signs “eat” first, then signs “milk,” so there’s absolutely no mistaking what she wants.

* However, the sign for “eat/food” has become the default sign for everything she wants. Cup of water? Sign food. Sleepy? Sign food. Want to go outside? Sign food. It’s almost like her way of saying, “I want something, and now it’s up to you to figure it out.” It’s… challenging.

I’ve been trying to teach her the appropriate signs, but you know, it took her 9 months to get “milk” nailed down, so I think this process might take a while. And that’s fine, she’s just the type of kid who takes her time observing and thinking stuff over in her head before she gives it a try.

* She has a few new words: horsey is by far the most popular one right now, especially since we’ve been visiting the neighbors’ horses pretty much every day. And the other day at the park, she saw a dog who I guess kind of looked like Patsy’s dog (in that it was small and brown, but a totally different breed), and she said “Buddy!” (Patsy’s dog’s name). Oh, but one of my favorite developments is that she now says “hi” and “bye” appropriately.

She’s even got the bye-bye wave down, although she doesn’t do it in that video. The weird thing about her talking is that I’m pretty sure she has several other words that Dave and I can’t understand. She says them with the same inflection over & over, we just haven’t caught onto what she’s trying to tell us yet. Too bad there aren’t second language classes for speaking Toddler. I’m not sure which’ll come first, either we’ll figure it out or her enunciation will get clearer.

* Sort of along the lines of talking, but pretend play and mimicking are new milestones this month. The phone is the big thing. She’ll pick up her toy phone (or anything really – a hairbrush or the stick from her xylophone work just as well), hold it up to her ear, say “hello” (uh-llo), then she’ll jabber away for a while, throw in a couple of “yeah, yeah”s, and then she’ll say, “k, bye-bye!” and hang up. This slays me like you have no idea. Dave isn’t really a phone guy so I’m thinking she got pretty much all of this from me. (Although maybe a little from Patsy too, I know she talks to her sister at least once a day.)

* She gives kisses, and even makes a smacking sound when she does them. Oh, be still my heart. It’s too cute for words.

I know there are a ton of other little things that I’m forgetting. I could go on all day about how fantastically awesome and wonderful she is, and how she has Dave and I both on the floor laughing pretty much every day. But you know, I think this has been long enough.

Our girl rocks. Simple as that.

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”).

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

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?

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.