Category Archives: Cate

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.

quirky or normal?

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Question: do all toddlers have an obsession with sorting and organizing things, or is it just mine?

Lately, Cate seems to want to go through all kinds of things and “file” them away, usually not where I’d like them to be. We recently got her an extra-large toy chest in our family room, and Dave and I are constantly digging things out of it that Cate has carefully placed in there: remote controls, car keys, an empty Pringles can (WTF?), basically whatever she finds that she thinks is interesting and might want to revisit later.

It’s not just the toy chest, either. Take her crayons: she shakes them out of the box, organizes them in some sort of “it makes sense in her little toddler brain” pattern, then picks them up and puts them back in the box. Then she shakes them out again, and lather-rinse-repeat. I thought that by getting her some crayons, we’d be encouraging her to draw, but all she wants to do is sort them. It’s sort of the same thing she does with the gravel in the driveway.

She also loves to go through all the stuff in our bathroom cabinets. She’ll pull out whatever she can find: a tube of Neosporin, my mascara, whatever, and then she’ll take off running down the hall with it. I might find it later in her clothes hamper, under the guest room bed, in her upstairs toy box, or who-knows-where.

Don’t get me wrong, I generally find this behavior to be pretty funny, aside from a few “now where the heck did she put x??” moments now & then. I’m just wondering if this is something that all kids do, or if mine is a little bit of a weirdo. (My guess is that it’s probably the latter.)

everyone in my house is medicated today

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This allergy-sinus-cold-whatever thing that’s been driving me bonkers for the past week and a half is getting worse, so I’m off to the doctor this afternoon to get some drugs. I usually try to avoid antibiotics when they aren’t absolutely necessary, but it’s been going on since last Sunday. That’s ten freaking snot-filled days. I can’t take it anymore, and I gots stuff to do, man.

Baby stuff: last night and this morning, Cate has been in a totally foul mood. Lots of tantrums, and (this is perhaps a bigger clue) she was gnawing on her hands a lot. Oh boy. Could this be the start of the molars that I’ve been dreading for so long? Last night she started screaming for no reason; she wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t tired, she was just angry. It wasn’t even crying-screaming, she was just pissed. I gave her some baby Motrin, and she cheered up after about a half hour or so. Same thing this morning: mean as a snake until she got some pain meds.

I’m scared, y’all. I’ve heard nightmare stories about molars, I’m sooo not looking forward to this.

15 months

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Although Cate’s 15-month birthday is today, her well-baby checkup was actually last week. We found out that she’s dropped from the 95th percentile for height and weight to the 75-90% range. Which makes sense, now that she’s walking, she’s not gaining weight at quite the same speed anymore. And it’s fine with me if her growth wants to slow down too, since she seems so tall to me all of a sudden. (Stop outgrowing your clothes, child! Mommy and Daddy are on a budget!)

As for her milestones this month:
* She’s trying so hard to talk. She’s got all of these babbly sounds, and she puts inflections on them that are obviously mimicking us. Sometimes her voice will go up at the end like she’s asking a question, sometimes she’ll start quietly and end on a SCREEEAM like I do when I’m being dramatic, and sometimes she just sort of quietly mumbles in a sing-songy way like Dave. She’s got a few words down, but I’m waiting for her to go from her little handful of words to full sentences at some point. Oh, and speaking of words…

* She knows “no”. I first learned this from Patsy – apparently Mason tried to hug Cate a couple of times, and when he got too close, she smacked him and said “NO!!” Which, wow. Girl knows how to ward off the unwanted advances, eh? But she says it all the time now, and she even shakes her head when she says it. A lot of times I’ll offer her something – a toy, a snack, whatever – and if she doesn’t want it, she’ll smack it away and yell, “no!” Kind of rude, but ok, point taken. She also says “yeah,” but I don’t think she really knows what it means.

* She’s trying to run. Mostly she’ll only attempt this upstairs, where it’s carpeted and a bit softer. But it’s so funny because she looks sort of like an iguana or a baby T-Rex or something. Her little arms flail in the air and she’s all bowlegged with her butt stuck out. It is HIGH-larious, but since she generally only does it during Naked Time, those are not videos that I’ll be putting online.

* At some point when we weren’t paying attention, she went ahead and sprouted two more teeth. I just noticed it yesterday – Dave was holding her in his lap and I was sitting on the floor, and when she laughed I saw the roof of her mouth. And what do you know, there were a couple of new nubbies up there! So that brings our grand total up to seven: four on top and three on the bottom. (I’m still wondering where that fourth bottom tooth is. It made a brief appearance, her gums swelled up, the tooth went back in, and it hasn’t returned since.)

* The big one… drumroll please… Girlfriend is weaned. No more bottles. At all. I was scared to write about this for fear of jinxing it, but it’s been going on for almost a week now, so I think we’re safe. This is huge because I was working on it for ages. But every time she got a cold, she would regress and only want the bottle, not a cup. (Which I understand – you’re sick, you don’t feel well, you want the thing that’s familiar & comforting.) And since she was getting sick about once a month, we were constantly in this endless loop of cutting down and then going back to the bottle almost exclusively.

This time, after the whole asthma/hospital episode, I got her down to just one bottle in the morning and one right before bed. During the day, if she wanted milk, she had to drink it from a cup. Then I switched the morning bottle to a sippy cup, but I didn’t change anything else – we still snuggled on the couch and watched cartoons, and she didn’t even really seem to notice the difference. After we did that for about a week, I did the same with her nighttime bottle. I am honestly amazed at how easily she took to it, and it makes me wonder if it was sort of like her sleeping through the night thing, where she was ready for the transition a long time ago, and it just took her boneheaded mommy a while to catch on.

I cannot tell you how happy I am about that one, because I hate washing baby bottles, and it is so much easier to just toss a sippy cup in the dishwasher. And yeah, ok, there is a little bit of a “wow, she really isn’t a baby anymore” twinge that goes with it, but mostly I’m just super-excited, because have I mentioned how much fun toddlers are? Oh my god, they are SO! MUCH! FUN!

I mean, yeah ok, there are the tantrums and the full-on screaming meltdowns, but the laughter and the game-playing and all of the fun stuff more than makes up for it. Sometime in the last couple of days, Dave and I learned that if we sit on the floor and hold our arms out toward her, she’ll run to us and collapse on our chest for a big bear hug. And oh my lord, it is so cute that I just want to eat her up with a spoon.

say cheese!

Seriously, can you blame me?

more gravelly fun

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Not much to report here, really. This cold is still kicking my butt, and I’m spending an awful lot of time in a Sudafed-induced haze. Which is unfortunate, since my work project suddenly started and I’m supposed to hit the ground running and start writing about a subject I’m totally unfamiliar with. And studying documentation while all fogged up on over-the-counter cold meds? Not so easy, as it turns out.

But this afternoon, for a couple of hours, the weather was beautiful, the fog on my brain briefly lifted, and the three of us sat in the driveway to revel in the joy that is playing with rocks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNJ6CPWYf7I

I love how Cate is so serious about sorting her little pebbles, and how she’ll stick her hand out – not to give us one of her rocks, mind you, but just to show it to us briefly and then take it right back.

We also went for a walk, and found out that one of our neighbor’s horses is clearly familiar with toddlers, because he leaned his head over the fence and licked the snack tray on her stroller. Funny, yes, but also really gross. Surprisingly, Cate was not at all freaked out by the giant horse face looming only a few inches in front of her. She just laughed and laughed at him. Pretty awesome.

She was totally indifferent about the chickens, though. Can’t really blame her. They don’t do much of anything that’s super-interesting to watch.

who knew gravel was so much fun?

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This past weekend was crazy. First of all, it snowed off & on all weekend long. Snow! In late April! WTF?? I am so over winter, will someone please bring on the spring?

In spite of the crummy weather, Dave and I (taking shifts with Cate) worked like dogs and managed to finish cleaning out the garage. Yay! The dumpster is chock full of garbage, it’s kind of horrifying to see how much junk we’ve accumulated over time. And in spite of a few soul-wrenching, “but wait, what if I need [item] someday?” moments, it felt really good to purge ourselves of all the junk. I won’t lie, though; I threw away some shoes, and boy, that stung. Nevermind that I hadn’t worn them since the mid-90’s, I was still sad to let them go.

Oh, and people: how do you keep a garage clean? Because the spider webs in ours are out of control, and the only way I could think of to remove them was to use the hose attachment on the Dyson. This accomplished two things: 1) It got those spider webs out of there, FAST (zip-zam-zoom, bye-bye, dead bugs!); and 2) it kept me at a nice safe distance from said spider webs so I didn’t have to touch anything remotely cobwebby. But I spent a good couple of hours vacuuming the walls of the garage, and it still doesn’t look clean to me in there. Any other ideas?

The one really fun part of the weekend was yesterday afternoon. It finally stopped snowing and the sun came out for a couple of hours, so we brought Catie outside and let her play in the driveway for a while. She had a BLAST. She had a little plastic tub and she picked up individual gravel rocks to put in her little container and then she’d shake them around. If Dave or I picked up a rock and handed it to her, she’d put it in the tub, then peer in and study it, then remove the rock and hand it back to us. Like, “no thanks, this one doesn’t meet my selection criteria.”

Between playing with the rocks, walking around everywhere, and shrieking with glee at the horse next door, she had a fantastic time. Which, of course, meant that she was in total meltdown mode by the time we went back inside and promptly sacked out for a nap. I usually try to keep her on the one-nap-per-day schedule, but sometimes you gotta bend the routine a little.

Unrelated: today I chased off a coyote for the third time this year. I. Want. To. Move.