Thanks, everybody, for your comments and emails. I really appreciate all of the support, and I know that with all of the prayers and good vibes and everything that she has going for her, my mom is going to be in tip-top shape in no time.

And now, to get the mood back on track: who needs a dinky pink breast cancer ribbon when you have a baby in a pink velour track suit?

Eat your heart out, Yoplait!

Nothing new here – we’re all sick and miserable, although I sent Cate to daycare today anyway, because she’s been on antibiotics since Saturday, so there’s no way she’s contagious. And besides that, I am way behind on work since I got absolutely nothing done yesterday. (Poor kiddo is super-clingy when she’s sick, I could hardly set her down all day.)

This is a post that I started last week and meant to finish, before the Plague settled on our house. Here are just a few of the ways in which I totally spaced out this last week.

* Our nighttime ritual is that I give Cate a bath, and then Dave gives her a bottle and settles her to sleep while I take a shower. (I’m a nighttime showerer. Morning showers are nice, but I prefer feeling like I’m all squeaky clean when I get in bed.) So we did that, I came down and took the baby off of Dave, put her in her crib, then I finished cleaning the kitchen, mixed up a pitcher of formula, all those typical nightly rituals that you do. By the time I headed up to bed, my hair was half-dry, and I noticed that it felt… wrong. Sort of greasy and clumpy. I then realized that I had completely forgotten to shampoo my hair. I had used the conditioner, but no shampoo. I hopped back in the shower and re-washed my hair before I crashed for the night. Brilliant.

* I accidentally shoplifted two cases of soda from the grocery store. The big 24-packs. I actually feel really bad about that one because I like the check-out ladies at my Safeway and I don’t want them to get in trouble. Normally I point it out if I have anything on the bottom of the cart, but I was distracted – Cate was riding in the cart and trying to climb up me, so I was trying to keep her happy while also preventing her from pulling my shirt down and showing the entire store my bra. And I was trying to get all of my other groceries loaded onto the belt, and get my debit card info run through the thingie, blah blah blah. So the checkout lady didn’t notice, and neither did I. I thought about it when I got home, checked the receipt, and nope, no sodas. Whoops. Dave pointed out that we spend enough money there every week that they can spot us a couple of free sodas, and I’m sure that he’s probably right, but I still feel guilty.

* I went to pick Cate up at daycare and forgot her carseat. Twice. Both incidents happened on days when Dave had dropped her off in the morning, so the carseat was still in his car, and I meant to transfer it to mine before I left the house, I just sort of spaced out and forgot. The first time, I realized it when I was almost there, and had to turn around and head back home to retrieve it. The second time, I was still on our street when Dave called my cell phone to remind me. Whoops.

Of course, if anything like that happens this week, I can blame it on the decongestants. Last week I just seemed to have several of those random brain-dead days in a row. Still don’t know why, but hopefully I’ll be back to my normal, semi-coherent self after this cold passes.

Cate appears to be a little better today, although it’s hard to tell because she’s been asleep for most of it. The poor kiddo is just wiped out – she went down for her third nap of the day around 2:30 this afternoon and she’s still out. And that’s after sleeping for almost twelve hours last night. (She woke up once, for about a half hour at 4:30 in the morning, but quickly went back to sleep.)

She still acts like she’s feeling miserable – just generally cranky and fussy. But the river of snot seems to be drying up, and she can drink a bottle without stopping to gulp for air every few seconds, so I’m going to call that an improvement. And the amoxicillin-induced explo-poops are back, so I’m guessing it must be back in her system. I’m trying to do the BRAT and yogurt diet, but she’s been very clingy and doesn’t want to sit in her high chair for too long, so that’s been a challenge.

I’m relieved she doesn’t have daycare tomorrow, since I’m sure I wouldn’t want to send her. Hopefully by Tuesday she’ll be feeling normal enough that it won’t be an issue.

I’d write more, but she just woke up and started howling, so I’d better go fetch her from Dave.

This is now the second time in less than a month that I wrote a “Cate is sick, but it’s not so bad” post, only to have things immediately spiral into “holy mother of crap, we are in Baby Sickness Hell.” Cate’s cold got a lot worse yesterday, and the three of us were awake most of the night because she was so miserable. Her nose was so congested that she couldn’t even drink a bottle – she had to keep stopping to take big gulping breaths through her mouth since she wasn’t able to breathe through her nose. Poor baby. We tried everything we could think of to help (Baby Motrin, humidifier, elevated her head), and nothing seemed to comfort her.

Our pediatrician’s office has one branch location that’s open on Saturdays for urgent care, so we headed over there and found out that she has yet another ear infection. This one appears to be pretty bad. The word “pus” was mentioned. I may have nearly thrown up a little.

Hello, amoxicillin, my old friend. We meet again.

The stuff coming out of her nose is just… wow. Dave has helped me hold her down a couple of times so we could use the baby snot-sucker on her, and I am just awed and amazed that someone with such a teeny-tiny nose could possibly have that much gunk stored up there. It’s insane.

(And yes, it really does take both of us to hold her down to accomplish that one little task. Dave holds her head still, I hold both of her hands with one of my arms, and I use the aspirator with the other hand. And hoo boy, does it ever make her mad.)

So that’s our weekend. I bought one of those VapoRub plug-in thingies for us to try in her room tonight. No idea if it’ll help or not, but I’m desperate. Cross your fingers for us. Mama and Dada really need a good night’s sleep.

Cate seems to have developed yet another cold. I think this is just standard “welcome to daycare” stuff – I noticed another little girl there seems to have the same thing. It seems really minor, even though it’s been going on for over a week now. She has a runny nose, and she coughs a lot at night. I set up a humidifier in her room, and that seems to be helping. It’s weird because she doesn’t really seem bothered by it – she’s still active and happy during the day, and it hasn’t affected her appetite at all.

See? Totally happy, in spite of the endless booger supply.

Oh, but if anyone knows a trick for wiping a baby’s nose that won’t make her scream like I’m trying to pull her nose off of her face, please let me know.

I’m trying to gather my thoughts for NaBloPoMo, and figure out what the heck I’m going to blog about for the next 30 days. I have some ideas for things that I’ve been meaning to write about: work, daycare, home improvement projects, etc. My “drafts” folder is full of potential blog posts that are made up of one sentence or a couple of phrases, with the intention to go back and turn them into something real later. I’m kind of curious to see if I can pull off 30 posts in a month, since I’ve never done it before. Or I might end up with a lot of entries that consist entirely of baby photos, who knows.