A few weeks ago, I was on the cell phone with my mom and about to head into the grocery store with Cate, who was in a foul mood. My mom suggested that I dash over to the bakery department and see if they’d give her a cookie. [And yes, I did get off the phone before going into the grocery store. I try not to be the obnoxious shopper yakking on my hands-free headset and entertaining my kid at the same time. It happens occasionally, but I do my best to avoid it.] I thought that was strange, but when I went there, sure enough, they had a container of shortbread cookies open behind the counter to give to kids. The lady even told me, “If we aren’t here, you can just reach behind the counter and grab one. We always have ’em.” Nice!

I’ve used the cookie trick once or twice since then, but it really bothers me to bribe Cate with sugar starting at such a young age. It seems like an unhealthy pattern. I know the reason she gets cranky at the store is because she wants to get out of the cart and walk around, and I’m just not comfortable letting her do that yet. (I know she’d drop to her knees and touch the floor, and eww, germs, gross.)

So in an effort to try to avoid the cookie bribe, one time as we were heading through the produce section and I was getting some sugar snap peas, I handed her one just to see if it would interest her. And it did! She held the sugar snap pea in her hand for the entire time we were in the store, and she was totally chilled out and happy with it. She’d occasionally put the end of it in her mouth, but she isn’t really able to eat raw, crunchy veggies yet, so for the most part she just held onto it.

Later, when I was strapping her into the car seat, I accidentally knocked the pea out of her hand, and she got so mad at me. I apologized and handed it back to her, and she went back to studying it quietly. When we got home, she walked around with the pea in her hand for a good 15 or 20 minutes before she finally dropped it and moved onto something else.

I’ve tried it again a few times since then, and every time, the sugar snap peas always keep her happy for the entire grocery store excursion. She always seems to hold onto them until long after we’ve gotten home. My guess is that she’s interested in them because she sees me eating them all the freaking time. (Seriously, you can ask Dave, I snack on sugar snap peas all day long, it’s kind of an obsessive thing. I get really upset when my grocery store runs out and I will drive 10 miles to Redmond to find a grocery store that has them.)

But why she wants to hold it and not eat it, I’m not exactly sure. It’s just funny how kids develop their own little quirks. Regardless, if she wants raw veggies instead of a cookie? I’ll follow her lead on that one every time.

Not that much has been going on for the past couple of days, and considering the way last weekend went down, I’m more than grateful for that.

Cate has been mostly cheerful and lovely for the past few days. The snottiness is almost completely gone, she’s walking all over the place, sleeping like a champ at night, and picking up a couple of new words here and there. She recently learned the sign for “food,” which is helpful. And she’s started saying “mommy,” although I’m not convinced that she knows what it means.

A couple of random Cate anecdotes:
* Last night in the bathtub, she invented a game where she’d pick up one her foam letters (these guys), shove it in my mouth, and I’d “ptooey!” spit it across the tub. For some reason, this was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and a couple of times I had to catch her to keep her from drowning when she fell over laughing.

* She loves to get into the pantry, and I generally try to distract her into doing something else, but sometimes… eh, it just isn’t worth it if it keeps her happy. There’s nothing dangerous that she can reach, all she does is make a huge mess. Anyway, we have a case of V-8 that we bought at Costco, and Cate loves rolling the cans around the floor. They make a nice satisfyingly loud noise as they roll across the hardwood floors – it’s sort of like V-8 bowling. She’d love to do this with soda cans too, but that’s where I draw the line. Mommy doesn’t want her Diet Coke to explode in her face. But seriously, if you show up at our house unannounced (as in, before I’ve had a chance to tidy up), you’d see anywhere from 3 to 10 cans of V-8 juice in various places around the house. Sticking out from under the couch, rolled into a corner somewhere, whatever.

Anyway, last night, I heard something sort of similar to the V-8 bowling, but somehow… different. I turned around, and here comes Cate, rolling a 5-gallon drum of protein powder across the dining room. The thing weighs almost as much as she does, so I have no idea how she did that. It was on the floor of the pantry, so I guess she just pulled it onto its side, and then they were off to the races. But it’s so huge, she could’ve done barrel rolls over it. I couldn’t even get mad when I saw that she had dragged yet another thing out of the pantry, I just laughed and laughed. She was so proud of herself, it was hilarious.

Man, I don’t know what we did for entertainment before this kid showed up.

Thanks everybody for the well wishes. Cate seems to be feeling back to normal except for a slightly runny nose, but that’s nothing we can’t handle.

In the last couple of days, she’s suddenly started walking a lot more. I know I link to videos an awful lot, but the grandparents love these, and I can’t get over how cute she is with her little Frankenstein stagger.

(Apologies for the weird lighting. Evening in our house makes for some serious glares.)

(For those of you just joining us, click here and here for the beginning of the story.)

Ok, so we got admitted to the medical wing for the night, and really, nothing super-dramatic happened after that. The nurses and everyone we dealt with was absolutely amazing. One of the nurse’s aides brought us several different cartoon videos for Cate to watch (the TV in our room had a DVD/VCR combo), they brought us snacks, and were just generally super-nice and fantastic. And Children’s Hospital even has free laundry facilities for families (with detergent!), so I didn’t have to bring our nasty, puke-soaked clothes home with us. I just washed them and we were good to go. If you have to be stuck in the hospital with a sick child, that’s the way to do it.

Also: while we were there, I discovered these in the cafeteria. Best. Cookies. Ever. I’m going to start ordering them for people as gifts, I kid you not. Y’all get ready to hate me.

As soon as we were in our own room, Cate was obviously starting to feel better. The second albuterol treatment and the steroid she got in the ER had finally kicked in, and she was breathing a lot easier. She even smiled at the nurses a little bit, and was starting to seem more like her normal self. She slept a lot, but still managed to put up quite a fight when it came time to give her a dose of albuterol with an inhaler. She isn’t old enough to use an inhaler on its own, so we have to use it with something called a “spacer,” which is basically a tube attached to a mask that covers her nose and mouth. And hoo boy, she did not like it. I had to pin her arms down while the nurse held her head still and gave her the medicine. It was probably a three-person job, but we managed with two people.

Incidentally, we’ve been using the spacer with the inhaler since we got home, and she’s totally fine with it now. Either she’s gotten used to it or else it’s less scary when it’s just me doing it. I turn on cartoons to get her all nice and distracted, then squirt away. She doesn’t even fuss about it anymore. It’s awesome.

By that evening, Cate was feeling much better, because we had to have the nurses unhook her from her monitors so she could cruise around the hospital room and play. She had a blast, even though the pants on her baby scrubs were too long and tripped up her feet a few times. Dave took off around 8:00, and I started trying to get Cate settled down to sleep.

The night was pretty rough, because Cate woke up every couple of hours, which meant that I did too. I’d have to buzz the nurse, ask him (our night nurse was a guy named Matt) to unhook her from all of her monitors so I could bring her over to the fold-out couch with me. Then we’d cuddle on the couch until I got her to fall asleep again, put her back in the crib, buzz Matt to ask him to re-hook her monitors, and lather-rinse-repeat all night long.

(For the record, as much as I wanted Dave around while all of this was going on, I am SO GLAD he went home for the night. That fold-out couch was teeny-tiny – only slightly bigger than a twin-size bed, and so short that my feet hung off the edge, and I’m only 5’5″ – and if both of us had tried to sleep on it, we would’ve bumped into each other all night and neither of us would’ve slept at all. It was much better to be somewhat comfortable for the couple of hours that I was able to sleep.)

The doctor came to see us in the morning, and after a few administrative details (we had to talk with a respiration therapist, watch a video on childhood asthma, etc.), we were discharged and allowed to go home. Cate’s official diagnosis is Reactive Airway Disease, which is essentially an asthma attack that’s triggered by a cold or a virus of some kind. So from now on, whenever she gets a cold, we’ll start using her albuterol inhaler as a preemptive strike to hopefully avoid any more attacks. It’s pretty likely that she will have full-blown asthma later on down the road, since Dave has had it all his life and Cate is already exhibiting the signs for it, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Since we got home, things have been pretty smooth. The steroid inhaler they gave her makes her super-hyper, which is fine because she’s happy and not grouchy, it’s just making naptime a challenge, and she’s wearing me out. But she hasn’t wheezed at all, so she’s off the albuterol entirely (until her next cold, fingers crossed that’s going to be a long time from now). She’s also back on antibiotics for the ear infection she inevitably developed during all of this (whee!), but that isn’t too bad, it’s just making for some, uh, interesting diaper pyrotechnics. Good times.

Picking up where I left off: while I was on the phone with Dave, the paramedics arrived. I got off the phone and retrieved Cate from the nurse – between the doctor, several nurses, the paramedics and us, the exam room was quite crowded and the whole thing freaked Cate the hell out. The paramedics were so sweet, though, and one of them gave Cate a bunny to help calm her down.

[How cute is that? It didn’t really work, but she seemed to like the bunny later when she was feeling better. And she said, “Unny!” Which, um, ok kiddo, we didn’t know that you knew that word. I guess all those episodes of Bunnytown weren’t totally useless after all.]

I gave one of the nurses my car keys and she went to get Cate’s car seat out of the car so the paramedics could put it in their rig. She also gave me a diet coke to take with me, god bless her. We had run out the door so fast, I hadn’t even had a sip of water or put any make-up on or anything (and those of y’all who know me know that I never leave the house without make-up), and suddenly it looked like we were going to be in for a long day. So I was grateful for the caffeine, and since diet coke is like my favorite beverage in the world, I’m seriously thinking that I need to write her a thank-you note for that.

We got in the ambulance, strapped Cate into her car seat (which was strapped to a gurney), and they set up another albuterol treatment for her (the vaporizer kind where it just kind of blows in her face for several minutes, rather than the inhaler). It must’ve helped, because she was finally comfortable enough to fall asleep, and she stayed conked out until we got to the ER at Children’s Hospital and I had to take her out of the car seat.

The staff there was really great too, and gave Cate this really cute ballerina doll to entertain her.

Again, she didn’t care anything about it. Dolls are so not her thing. I wish someone had just given her a broken cell phone or something with buttons that lit up, because that would’ve helped way more. Oh well, it was really sweet of them to try. They also turned “Teletubbies” on the TV, which at least gave Cate something to stare at, although I don’t know if she was really into it or not. We’ve never watched Teletubbies at home, so it wasn’t familiar and comforting, it was just something to watch. But it definitely helped to keep her from crying quite so much. And I’ve decided that they aren’t nearly as creepy as I once thought they were.

We had our own room in the ER, and I sat in the bed with Cate on my lap. Dave got there about 10 minutes after we did, which made me feel so much better. Dealing with these types of crises are so much easier when there are two of you. Cate was examined by about a dozen different doctors and nurses, and they set her up with more albuterol treatments. She alternated between squirming and crying (which she did a lot) and sleeping. Her oxygen level was up to the mid-90’s by that point, which was much better than it had been earlier, but it would start to drop into the 80’s if I moved the oxygen mask away from her face. But as long as I kept it hovering close to her nose, she seemed to be fine. Once things calmed down a bit, I sent Dave to the cafeteria to get me some food before I passed out.

The nurse took us to get an X-ray of Cate’s chest, to rule out pneumonia. That was pretty horrible, because they had to strap her to a chair and pin her arms over her head to keep her totally still, and she howled through the whole thing. It was awful, but thankfully it didn’t take very long and they got what they needed on the first try.

Since the X-ray showed it definitely wasn’t pneumonia, asthma was the most likely culprit. They told us we were going to have to be admitted overnight. I gave Dave a list of things we were going to need and sent him home to fetch it, since there was no way I could leave Cate.

Btw, our ER room didn’t have a bathroom (of course), so eventually I handed Cate over to Dave so I could go pee. When I left, I took Dave’s cell phone with me and I popped outside to call my parents and tell them what was going on. My mom wasn’t awake yet, so I had to unload all of this info onto my dad. And of course, the day that all of this happened was his birthday. Happy birthday, Dad! Your one & only grandbaby is in the hospital and can’t breathe, and we don’t know what’s wrong yet! My dad is a world-class worrywart, so as you can probably imagine, this was not a great day for him.

At some point I offered Cate some milk, since I at least had enough of a brain to stick a bottle in the insulated pocket of my diaper bag before we left the house. She sucked down about half of it really fast, and started to doze off again. The nurse came back and wanted to give her some decadron, a steroid to help reduce the swelling in her lungs. She said it was cherry flavored and most kids liked it. Hmph. Most kids aren’t my kid, lady. We squirted a tiny bit in her mouth, she gagged, and the medication plus all of the milk she drank came right back up. All over both of us.

Of course, this was before I had sent Dave home to get extra clothes for all of us, so we were just stuck, soaked, and stinky. The nurses found a pair of scrubs for me, and we let Cate hang out in just her diaper for a while. An hour or so later, we were admitted to the medical wing, and the nurses there found some baby scrubs for Cate (which were hilarious and I wish I had gotten a picture of her wearing them, but I brought them home with me, so I may have to get her to model them again at some point).

Up next: the longest night ever.

We got home from the hospital this afternoon, and I have a feeling this story is going to take a while to tell. I’m breaking it into pieces, since Cate is finally asleep and I’m on my way to bed right behind her. And besides, I need to make sure to thoroughly document this story so that when she grows up, she can read about the time that she scared the bejeezus out of her poor mother.

Ok, first of all, I knew something was up on Thursday night when I could barely get Cate to drink any milk before I put her to bed. She drank about 2 ounces, and normally would have had about 7 or 8. Oh well, I put her to bed anyway, and put the remainder of her milk back in the fridge, figuring that she’d wake up in about an hour and want it.

Sure enough, she did wake up about an hour later, but she didn’t want any milk (in fact, got upset when I even tried to offer her the bottle). She just fussed and squirmed, and I noticed that her eyes weren’t even open, she was just whining while still half-asleep. So I put her back in her crib, turned her Baby Mozart CD on again, and she quieted down and went back to sleep. An hour later, we repeated this process. And again. And again. Finally, somewhere around 3 a.m., I decided that nothing was really wrong, she probably wasn’t wanting to drink anything because of a sore throat (since I already knew she had a cold, it didn’t seem like that big a leap), and that she was just fussing because she got herself into a position in her crib that she didn’t like, and she didn’t have the energy to readjust herself.

So – and this is the part that I haven’t forgiven myself for yet – I turned off the baby monitor. I figured that if she really needed me, I’d hear her yell. She’s just down the hall, and it’s not like our walls are anywhere near soundproof. I thought to myself that if I just got a decent chunk of sleep, I’d be a much better parent to her in the morning. I know it probably seems totally logical, but in hindsight it feels totally selfish and horrible.

Around 7 a.m. on Friday morning, I heard her down the hall. When I got her out of her crib, the first thing she did was vomit mucus all over both of us. Lovely. I took us both into the bathroom, stripped off our jammies, and got us into the shower. Around that time, I noticed that she was wheezing. She was taking really short, rapid breaths and there was a horrible rattling sound when she breathed. I woke Dave up and made him listen to her. He agreed that we should take her to the doctor. I called Patsy to let her know we wouldn’t be coming, and got Cate and I both dressed and out the door. We didn’t have an appointment, but I knew the office opened at 8:00, so I figured we’d just show up and surely they could squeeze us in.

Turns out, the office technically does open at 8, but none of the doctors show up until much later. The only people there are nurses and administrative staff. After talking with the receptionist (who told me to come back at 9:30 – um, no way, sorry lady), she sent one of the nurses out to talk to me. She listened to Cate’s chest, and said, “hmm, ok, let’s get her into a room so we can check her oxygen levels.” She told one of the other nurses to get an oxygen tank ready because she thought they were going to need it.

Cate’s oxygen saturation level was around 80%. (It’s supposed to be 100.) So they brought in some oxygen for her, and tried to get a doctor on the phone to give an order for albuterol. We couldn’t get the mask on her face because she freaked out and tried to pull it off, so we settled for just holding it near her face and letting the oxygen blow as close to her nose and mouth as possible.

I was bordering on freaking out during most of this, but I kept it together pretty well. Cate’s pediatrician finally got there (after Cate had already had one round of albuterol, per the instructions she gave the office staff via her cell phone), and after listening to her chest and giving a second round of albuterol, she told the nurse that we should go to Children’s Hospital. The nurse asked something, I forget what, I just remember hearing Dr. Wen say, “No, call 911. They’ll get here faster.” That was when I freaked out. I hate crying in front of people, but I just lost it. They were all so sweet, telling me that I did the right thing, everything was going to be fine, etc. One of the nurses called Dave for me, since this was (of course!) the one time in my entire life that I forgot to charge my cell phone before leaving the house. After she got him on the phone, I went into the hall to talk to him while one of the nurses held Cate. We agreed that he’d meet me at the hospital.

Next time: ambulance rides, baby x-rays, and how I ended up in a pair of scrubs.