Last night, Cate slept from midnight until 8:30 this morning.

(Drops to knees, sings “hallelujah” chorus.)

She might’ve slept longer, except I did that new-mommy panic thing where you think “oh god, she hasn’t woken up yet, something must be wrong,” so I crept into the nursery to check on her. And she was just fine. She had gotten one arm out of her swaddling blanket and was holding it up in sort of a “fight the power” fist above her head, but otherwise she was still pink, still breathing, and most importantly, sound asleep.

Of course, ten seconds after I tiptoed out of the room, she woke up. Stupid creaky floorboards.

And I realize that I have just totally jinxed myself by writing about this, and she’ll probably never do it again until she’s 15. Oh well. For now, me = ecstatic.

Cate learned a new trick this morning: she actually pulls her tongue back into her mouth (shock!), she forms her lips into kind of an O shape, and she makes this little “hoo-hoo-hoo” sound. It’s like we have a little baby owl in the house. And of course Dave and I think it’s the coolest thing ever, so we keep making the “hoo” noise back at her so she’ll do it even more. I need to get a video of her doing it, it’s so cute.

Meanwhile, we’re recovering from a very long trip to Costco this afternoon (during which I came up with my own little song “At the Costco,” sung to the tune of Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” – yes, I am oh so clever), and I’m going to go cook up some of our bulk items for dinner tonight.

Sorry this is kind of a lame entry. It’s Sunday, I’m lazy.

But hey, look at the smooshy cuteness!

I don’t know why I feel like this is shameful to admit, but here’s my nasty little confession: Cate sleeps in our room. Not in our bed, although we have taken a few “family naps” together (as long as she’s between Dave’s pillow and mine, I don’t worry about either of us rolling over on her). But we have a Pack ‘n’ Play set up in our bedroom, and that’s where she’s slept since she was born.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. When she was about 6 weeks old, I tried moving her to the nursery. But she woke up every hour screaming in terror because she didn’t know where she was, and I woke up even more frequently than that because every little bit of static on the baby monitor had me practically flying out of the bed and down the hall. So that lasted about two nights. Then it was back to the Pack ‘n’ Play.

For the past several weeks, we’ve had a nice little nighttime routine going:

1. Cate sleeps about 5-6 hours.
2. She wakes up, I pull her into our bed and she has half of a bottle. (A million thank-you’s to Cat & Tony for this, which lives on my nightstand, so I can warm up a bottle without even getting out of bed.)
3. We go down the hall to the nursery for a quick diaper change.
4. If she’s wide awake after the diaper (which she almost always is), we head downstairs so she can play for a little while & burn off some energy, and I can take all the vitamins that I have to take every day (part of that whole gastric bypass thing, I have well over a dozen pills that I take on a daily basis, lucky me). I figure it’s one less thing I have to do when I get up for the day, so that’s fine.
5. When she seems tired of playing, we head back upstairs, and she usually zonks out before she completely finishes the bottle.
6. She sleeps another 2-3 hours, then we’re up for the day. (Although sometimes I pass her off to Dave so I can get a little more sleep.)

The whole process from start to finish takes about an hour. I know that some people have miracle babies that sleep through the night from the time they’re six weeks old; in fact, according to my mom, my sister was sleeping 12 hours a night by three months. (To be fair, my sister has always been a freak about sleep – take your eyes off of her for five minutes and she’s out like a light.) But I also know there are moms out there whose babies are still waking them up three or four times a night when they’re a year old. So by comparison, one wake-up call a night doesn’t seem like I have much to complain about.

The irony is that this is one of those things that I was so opinionated about before Cate was born. I was adamantly opposed to co-sleeping, and I still generally think it’s a bad idea. It seems like a slippery slope into something that can become habit-forming, and the idea of having a 5 year-old child who still sleeps with her parents… well, that’s just kind of creepy to me. I mean, whatever works for your family is great and all, but that’s not for me. But even just having her in the same room as Dave and me – I thought that we would do that for the first month, maybe six weeks at the most. Ha.

I guess I’ve just been thinking that this pattern has been working ok for us, so why mess with it? I was worried that if I put her in the nursery, we’d go back to waking up every two hours, and I’m just barely starting to feel like I’m recovering my sanity. I’ve been working on the crib idea with her – I put her there for naps sometimes, and occasionally I’ll just put her in there when she’s in a mellow mood and turn on the mobile, which she seems to like. I wanted her to be a little more familiar with it so she wouldn’t wake up in a strange place and freak out. But I hadn’t put her down for the night there, I guess because I wasn’t ready for it more than anything.

Last night, Dave and I talked about it and decided it was time to try the nursery again. And? Nothing really happened. She slept for about 5 hours, woke up, we did our routine, and then she slept for another 3 hours. Same as usual. Huh. Whaddya know.

Cate turned three months old on Friday. To recap all of our girl’s latest skills:

* She’s trying really hard to roll over. It took me a while to figure out what on earth she was doing, because at first it looked like she was trying to pull some kind of Linda Blair/Exorcist stunt with her head. She’s now at the point where she can turn her head and most of her torso onto her side, she just can’t seem to get her hips and legs to follow. I have a feeling she’s going to master that skill sooner rather than later.

* Probably because she wants to turn over so badly, she’s a little more interested in “tummy time” these days. As long as I lie down where she can see my face, she’ll tolerate it for several minutes before she starts to get mad. And she seems to like sitting in the Bumbo chair, but she isn’t quite strong enough for it yet. She just kind of slumps over to the side after a minute or two.

* The smiles and laughs are a lot more frequent and consistent than they were a month ago, and they continue to be my absolute favorite thing in the world. I suppose it isn’t quite a genuine laugh yet, but she does a really big open-mouth smile, squinches her nose up and makes this sort of “kakk!” noise. Honestly, the laughs make it a heck of a lot easier to be woken up at 5 a.m. every day.

* Cate also seems generally more aware of her surroundings, and I’ve noticed that on days when she doesn’t leave the house, she gets very cranky. Yesterday she was a screaming terror, so I took her for a walk around the yard. We have two acres, so there’s plenty of room to explore. The second we stepped outside, she stopped crying. [Thanks to my aunt Susie for mentioning that, because I probably would’ve never thought to try it otherwise.]

* I’ve mentioned the Baby Einstein thing, right? Because good lord in heaven, that ROCKS. Twenty happy-baby minutes so I can wash dishes, eat a snack, read a blog, whatever. I am eternally grateful to the creator of that series.

* She doesn’t reach for toys and other things yet, but if I put a rattle or something near her hand, she’ll grab onto it. I’ll be interested to see how much those motor skills develop over the next month or two.

* The pacifier is still hit-or-miss, but if I can get her to latch onto it, it really does seem to calm her down when she’s fussy.

* In the past week or so, she’s suddenly gotten a lot more “talky”. She makes all kinds of sounds, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell when she’s just happy and babbling to herself from when she’s really mad. Example: “ah-bah-eye-nyeh?” versus “AH-BAH-EYE-NYEH!!!” It’s all in the tone. Although, honestly, I find both of them completely hilarious, which makes it sort of rough, since I probably shouldn’t be laughing at her when she’s upset.

There are tons of other things too, but I am wiped out from our trip to the Tulip Festival today. So here are a couple of my favorite recent pictures.

First, proof of her Mississippi heritage:

Poor little redneck baby. She’s going to hate me for that photo someday.

And my favorite shot of the two of us in the tulips today:

The rest of the tulip festival pictures are here. Happy Monday, everyone.