There’s no daycare today, since Patsy’s daughter is having her wisdom teeth removed, and Patsy needed to be at the dentist with her. It isn’t really that big a deal, except it means that I’ve gotten virtually no work done except for during Cate’s nap. (I did, however, kick major butt for those two hours.)

Anyway, I got this video of her this morning doing her little knee walk/dance thing. It cracks me up every time.

(Please excuse my messy living room. I know, it’s atrocious. But like I said, I haven’t been able to get anything done today, because active! toddler! wants attention! all day long!)

There are also some new pictures on Flickr.

Cate says, “Watch out, or I’ll bite you with my THREE WHOLE TEETH!!!”

Technically Cate won’t be 13 months old until tomorrow, but I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for a contractor to come measure my kitchen counters, so I thought I’d type this up early.

So, my girl’s milestones this month:
* Sleeping. This whole process of putting her to bed when she’s still awake and letting her fall asleep on her own has gone remarkably smoothly. And last night when I laid her down in the crib, she stayed there – all previous nights, she’d immediately sit up to scream at me until I left the room. So it’s getting better and better.

* She is a standing-up-on-her-own maniac. Whenever we play, she is always trying to stand up without pulling herself up on anything. And she succeeds most of the time. However, she still hasn’t shown much interest in walking. Technically, she has taken a step a couple of times, but it was more like she was shifting her weight around than trying to move from point A to point B. Honestly, I think she’s gotten so comfortable with crawling, and she’s such a little speed demon with it, that she’s probably going to skip walking altogether and go straight to running.

She does, however, walk on her knees. Like, sitting up and kneeling on the floor. I really need to get a video of this, because it’s so funny to watch. I don’t really understand why she does it, because it’s not the most efficient mode of transportation. And the weird sort of stiffness of the movement makes her look like a baby zombie when she does it. Maybe it’s her transition phase between crawling and walking? Who knows.

* Talking! Besides kitty (which we got last month), she now says “dada” and “daddy” at appropriate times. Occasionally I get a “mama,” but it’s pretty hit or miss. And last night while we were watching the Signing Time DVD that Cat loaned us, she said both “dog” and “bird” when they said it on the DVD. Which, ok, the point was for her to learn the sign language for it, but if she wants to say the word instead, that’s cool too! I don’t know if she knows what it means, or if she was just repeating a sound that she heard on TV, but either way, that’s pretty cool.

Btw, she said “dahg,” not “doag,” so obviously we’ve avoided the southern accent so far. Although I’m sure that’ll change when we move to North Carolina.

* Baby Girl has got some serious personality quirks, which are starting to show themselves. Last month when Liz’s baby Catie was here, she tried to hug and kiss Cate, and Cate got really upset. I thought it was a fluke – you know, maybe she was tired or hungry and that was the one thing that pushed her over the edge. But no, apparently she really doesn’t like other kids to touch her. Her little daycare “boyfriend” Mason apparently tried to hug her, and now Cate is just done with him. She gets mad anytime he come near her (poor little guy). There’s also an older girl at her daycare – I think she’s 7 or 8? – and she’s tried to pick Cate up a couple of times, and that totally freaked her out. She seems to like Scarlett (who’s 2 1/2), because Scarlett just wants to play next to her, and doesn’t get all up in her face. So what do you know, apparently we’re living with a little two-foot-tall Howard Hughes. The idea of daycare was that it was supposed to help improve her social skills, not make her freak out at the touch of other children. I’m starting to worry about how she’s going to get along with e-baby next week, but whatever, she’ll get over it.

Another quirk: I cannot figure out this child’s taste buds. She’ll eat pretty much anything if it comes off of my fork, but put her in the high chair and use a baby spoon, and who knows? Maybe she’ll go along with it, and maybe she won’t. She won’t eat cheese. Cheese! Who doesn’t like cheese? She just pokes at it and makes a face. Sometimes if I break off a piece and pop it in her mouth, she’ll eat it, but most of the time she spits it out. But she adores broccoli-cheese soup. I don’t get it, but there you go.

There were some other weirdo traits that I was going to mention, but of course I’ve forgotten them all now. For the most part, she’s a total blast, and I think most of the quirks are just her way of establishing her personality and, you know, being a toddler. So it’s fine, I just laugh it off and try to imagine her reaction when she reads about this stuff on my website when she’s (a lot) older.

So just to follow-up on that whole sleep issue: man, that sure was easy.

Since the one Hell Night with the 25-minute crying jag, we have had virtually no problems getting Cate to sleep. Sure, she hollers when I first put her in the crib, but I just turn on her music and say, “Ok baby, it’s time to go to sleep now. I love you, goodnight.” And then I leave and close the door behind me. By the time I get downstairs and pick up the baby monitor, she’s stopped fussing.

Last night she slept from about 10:00 until after 8 a.m. She woke up and fussed for about 30 seconds at 4 a.m., but she quieted down and went back to sleep before I even had a chance to drag my lazy butt out of bed to go check on her.

Naps have been a bit trickier, and by that I mean that sometimes she’ll scream for up to a whole minute before she quiets down. (Which is probably hardest for me, since I can’t stand to hear her cry.) So, overall I’d say it’s been a raging success.

I do wonder how much of it has to do with the Baby Mozart CD. She’s heard that music so many times because I always turn on the DVD when she’s upset or sick, as a way to help calm her down. So my guess she associates the music with being comforted, which probably helps tremendously. I’m scared to try it without the CD, honestly. And you know, if she wants the music to help her drift off, I don’t really see the harm in that.

So I guess that’s that. Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope that the 18-month sleep regression I’ve read about won’t be too awful when the time comes.

It has recently come to my attention that Cate’s sleep habits are, quite frankly, insane. I knew this, of course, it’s just becoming more & more glaringly obvious. She is officially a toddler, and yet she has to be cuddled to sleep every night (and for naps too! Even if she’s at Patsy’s house!), and she continues to wake up at least once a night, no matter what other factors we adjust with our bedtime routines and rituals.

On the one hand, it still feels like “oh, but she’s just an itty-bitty baby, so of course she needs help falling asleep,” but in reality… um, no. She’s not. She’s old enough to figure out how to fall asleep on her own, and to get herself back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night. And really, it’s better to get a handle on this now, rather than in another year or two when she won’t be in a crib, and it’ll be much harder to enforce any sort of bedtime ritual.

So I’m doing something that I never thought I’d do, and letting her cry it out. [Pause and take a breath while any attachment parenting types who read this have a conniption fit.] I’d read Moxie’s theory about babies’ personality types with regards to CIO, and I thought that Cate might be the type of baby who increases tension by crying, but I thought what the heck, I’m desperate. Give it a shot and see, right?

Last night, my plan was to put Cate down for the night when she was still slightly awake, but I let her cuddle with me on the couch too long and she was totally out by the time I put her down. (I was distracted watching Supernanny, of all things – oh, the irony of neglecting your baby’s sleep cues while watching a show about how to be a better parent.)

Cate woke up at 5 a.m., so I got her from her crib and gave her a “snack” bottle. It’s about half as much milk as she normally drinks, and I’m gradually cutting down the amount so that she’ll eventually decide that it’s not worth the effort. Now, after the snack bottle is normally when I would cuddle her back to sleep and let her stay in our bed for the next few hours until we were ready to get up for the day. But last night, after she finished the bottle, I gave her a hug & a kiss, put her back in her crib, turned on her “Baby Mozart” CD (just the music from the DVD, which she loves) and left the room.

And oh, how she wailed. It was awful. A lot of the books say that you can go back in the room after a few minutes just to reassure your baby that you’re still there, but that you shouldn’t pick them up. Let me tell you, that is a big fat LIE. Going back into the room made things about a hundred times worse. I didn’t even realize that Cate had actually been starting to calm down until I went in and heard the air-raid siren that she unleashed when she saw me and I didn’t pick her up immediately. I rubbed her back, told her I loved her but that it was time to go to sleep, and I left the room again.

The CD is only 30 minutes long, and I had been looking at the clock from the minute I started it because I figured the crying would get worse when the music was over. Around the 25-minute mark, my whole body was in knots and I was about to cry myself. I woke up Dave and said that I couldn’t take it anymore, and I was going to get her. (Don’t ask me why I had to wake him up for this. I guess I was expecting him to talk me out of it, but he was half-asleep so all I got was a “mplphff, ok.”) I headed down the hall to Cate’s room, but before I got to the door I noticed… silence. I could hear the music from the CD, but there was no more crying. I went back to bed and listened on the baby monitor for any more noises, but there wasn’t a peep. She slept until 9:30 a.m.(!!), and was in a fantastic mood when she woke up. Normally if she goes to bed cranky, she wakes up cranky, but not this time. And she was totally happy and chipper all day, even during diaper changes and everything.

Tonight, I put her down when she was still awake, turned on the Mozart, and left the room. Afterward, I heard a couple of half-hearted “ehh, ehh” fussing noises on the baby monitor, but that was it. If that’s really all there was to sleep training her, I’m going to kick myself for not doing it sooner. But somehow I have a feeling that it’s going to get a lot worse before we get it all figured out. Fingers crossed that this process won’t be too terribly traumatic for either one of us.