Names

Today Catie walked in to the living room and asked, "Where's Brian?"

She must have heard a lot of people calling her Daddy "Brian" over the holidays, and caught on to the fact that "Brian" is his name! We tried to explain that she needs to call him Daddy, so we'll see what happens... :)

Other cute Catie phrases:
No worries!
Oh, man!
What's that noise?
I r'member that!
Oh, no!
Is that you, Mommy?
(while dragging you by your finger) You go play!

Repertoire

Here's a list of songs Catie sings (that we've been able to identify):

The Itsy Bitsy Spider
The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round
Veggie Tales Theme
Busy, Busy - from Veggie Tales
Patty Cake
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
Ring Around the Rosie
Jingle Bells
Jesus Loves Me
If You're Happy and You Know It

I just asked Catie if there's any songs I'm missing. She looked at me and burped. Gross kid... :)

Christmas Ornaments

Catie is fascinated with the Christmas tree, and really with the whole idea of Christmas in general (what kid isn't?).

A few days ago, she went in the kitchen and pulled the ball of rubber bands out of the drawer. I didn't think much of it, because she likes to play with it now and then. Later that night, Brian called me over and said, "Look at the bottom of the tree." Multi-colored rubber bands had been carefully placed on the tips of several branches around the bottom of the tree!

Sometimes I wish I could see her little thought processes. Her logic astounds me!

Snacks

A couple of days ago Catie put her bowl of dry Cheerios on the floor for a minute to pick something else up. The cat immediately came to check it out (I guess Cheerios look a lot like cat food). Anyway, Catie snatched up the bowl and chewed the cat out, saying, "NOT YOURS! Catie's snack! Not yours!"

Poor kitty...

From San Francisco...

We are in San Francisco! Very cool city. Well, Brian may beg to differ, since he's been the one doing the driving...

Anyway, we flew out on Saturday. Other than a 2 hour delay (on the plane) in Dallas, everything went well. We were absolutely exhausted by the time we arrived, but Catie did wonderful! She loves airplanes, and I think it was about halfway through the Dallas to San Francisco flight when it finally sank in that she was actually riding on one. Of course she slept through our delay period and woke up for the flight, but still did ok up until the last 30 minutes or so, when she got really bored and restless. Thank goodness for Veggie Tales and iPods!

Yesterday we drove to downtown San Francisco and took a tour of Alcatraz. Very, VERY cool! Brian and I both love historical places and things, so we thoroughly enjoyed it. I took lots and lots of pictures! Catie sat in her stroller and took it all in, made friends with people and talked about the birds and lighthouse (things a two year old thinks are cool).

Brian is in his conference for the next two days, so we're hanging out at the hotel.

Songs

This morning during our drive to work/daycare, I noticed that Catie was singing in her carseat. I turned the radio down and just listened for a minute.

She was singing, "Yeah, Jesus ahh meee!!! Yeah, Jesus ahh mee! Biboo tell mee soooo!"



(Translated: Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so!)

Play Kitchen

Today I was working on my computer and Catie was just around the corner playing with her little kitchen. Suddenly I heard "glub, glub, splash."

"Catie?" I called.

She looked around the corner with her big, innocent, not-gonna-fool-Mommy eyes. So I got up and walked over to see what was going on.

Apparently Catie got tired of boiling fake water because she went and stole the bottle of water from my bedside and poured it into her little pots and pans and sink (and the floor...)

:) Cute stuff!

Birthday

Last Saturday we had Catie's 2nd birthday party. Wow - what a day!

Preparations started that morning with the baking and decorating of the cake, decorating the house, fixing finger foods, etc... Thankfully some of our family was here so we all pitched in and got it done. Catie started getting excited as she saw all the hubbub and presents and cake!

Just before 2 pm, I took Catie to her room to get her dressed and prettied up. She even let me fix her hair pretty and everything. I could hear guests arriving and hurried to get her finished up, then we ran down to hall to the living room. The first person Catie saw was her GG (adoptive grandma) who babysits her sometimes. Catie burst into tears!!! The only thing we can figure is that she thought GG was going to take her away. Ohh, it broke both my and GG's hearts to have Catie so excited and then hit by extreme, though un-needed, disappointment! Thankfully she soon realized that she would actually be attending her own party and became happy again. :)

We had tons of fun with cake and friends and presents and even a piñata! Later that evening we surprised her Uncle Pete with a birthday party for him, also, since his birthday is in a few days. And at about 8:30 pm, after a day of excitement and lots of sugar, Catie lost all reason and went to bed in a pile of tears. She woke up happy and perky on Sunday.

Ahhh, all in all it was a good birthday!

Sick Day

Catie has been very congested for the past two weeks, finally turning into a rough cough and fever.  So I called the doc yesterday morning and got her a 2:30 pm appointment.

In the morning, she was very wilted and just wanted to lay on the floor with her night-night and mimi (blanky and pacifier).  So I put Toy Story in and she lay on the couch to watch it.  After a while, though, I guess the Tylenol kicked in because she suddenly started perking up.  And her little shoulder devil perked up, too. 

About 30 minutes before we had to leave for her appointment, I ran outside to pull the drying quilt out of the sun.  I was out there all of 15 seconds when I heard the back door slam shut and the little lock go "click!"  

Oh no!!!    I ditched the quilt, ran to the door and jiggled the knob - yep, it was locked.  And the little stinker was looking through the blinds at me, just grinning.  I walked around the house checking - front door locked, garage door closed, no cell phone on me and of course, we just removed the spare key outside last week because we were afraid of break-ins.  I weighed my remaining options. 

Before having to go to a neighbor's house and call Brian and admit to him that I let our not quite two-year-old lock me out of the house, I decided to try to reason with the child.  I went back around to the back door.  By now she was kind of distressed with her sin and calling, "Mommy!  Mommy!"  I knelt by the door and yelled, "Catie!  Play with the door!"  She jiggled the handle for a little while.  "Turn the lock!"  She fiddled with it and finally "click!" she unlocked it!!!  Yay!  I was so relieved that I didn't even scold her.

We still had 15 minutes to spare before having to leave.  I ran around getting us ready and was about to head out the door when Catie said, "Mommy, poop potty!"  Aaarrhhhh....  I knew it wasn't for real, but we need to encourage this behavior, so we went to the toilet and I just put her up on it with all her clothes on.  She was holding herself up good, going play potty, when she lost all presence of mind and let go.  Splash!  She fell in the toilet, with her top half and feet sticking straight up out of the seat.   AAAAAAHHH!!!    It was hard not to laugh, she looked so funny!

So I shuttled her to her room and changed her clothes and God looked upon us with grace and stopped time so we made it to the doctor's office at exactly 2:30 pm.  Turns out that she has a sinus infection.  Poor kid. 

A Bubble Poem

When you put your kid in the tub,

and add water,

and add Mr. Bubbles,

then turn on the jets...


... you may lose your kid.

Catie Talk

Catie is starting to put words together into short phrases/sentences. The results are really cute.

Some of our favorites:

"Yudoin?!?" (What are you doing?) She hollers this one when she finds you.

"Kitty out!" She lays on the floor and says this one to the poor cat who is hiding under the bed.

"Up plate eat!" Basically this means "put me in my high chair, give me a plate and food before I bite your hand off."

She has learned to say "my" - as in "my house", "my toys", "my Daddy", etc...

Catie also can communicate when she does not want something - "no geenbeen" (no green beans), "no night night", "no milk", etc...

She's doing really good with her Portuguese (so is Brian, for that matter). Sometimes she says the word, and many times when I say the Portuguese word, she will say the English one that corresponds. I'm working on it with her.

One of her current favorites is to go through her repertoire of animal/thing sounds: What does a cow say? How does a car go? A kitty, a dog, an airplane?

Airplanes are one of her most favorite things in the world. She can hear one coming before I do. She stops and looks at the sky and yells, "Ehpane!" Then she puts her hand out and goes, "Voom, voom!"

Rude Awakenings

On our recent vacation to North Carolina, we stayed a few days in a small cabin near the beach. The cabin had a double bed on one side of the room and bunk beds on the other. Hmmm.. Catie still sleeps in her crib at home, and we couldn't really figure out a way to make a rail on the bottom bunk. So, we decided to take the mattress off the top bunk and place it strategically on the floor, to cushion any possible falls off the bottom bunk. In retrospect, I guess we should have just put her on the mattress on the floor.

The first night she did fine, I think she was tired.

In the middle of the second night, we were suddenly awakened by a THUD - - - "WAAAAAA!!!!!" Oops. We must have nudged the floor mattress too far under the bed because she missed it altogether and landed on the wood floor. :( We comforted Catie and put her back in bed, pulled the floor mattress out further and all went back to sleep.

THUMP ---- "WAAAAAA!!!!" Brian jumped out of bed in the dark and felt around on the floor mattress for her.

"Where is she?!?" he frantically asked. "WAAAAAAA!!!!!" "She's gotta be here somewhere!" I stumbled to the wall and flipped on the light. No sign of Catie.

"WAAAAA!!!!" I dropped to the floor and looked under her bed. Oh, boy. The poor kid fell on the mattress, sure enough, then rolled right off it to under her bunk and was stuck there!

Potty

Potty training is tough stuff.

For the past couple of months we've been sporadically showing Catie the potty and getting her to sit on it. We've also tried to make her aware of what's going on in her diaper. We had a break-through two days ago when Catie ran up to me saying, "Potty! Potty!" and then actually ran to the bathroom. I checked in her diaper and she was starting to poop, so I disrobed her, sat her on the potty and cheered her on. She was really freaked out at first, I guess by the sudden unexpected draft in a usually covered area, but she managed to put poop in the potty!

Her first reaction was to get up, look in the potty and say "Eewww!" But I lavished encouragement on her and said "Yay!" over and over. Then we ceremoniously flushed the poop and Catie thought that was really cool. I think her incentive to try to go potty now is that she gets to flush. So far we've only had two successful potty episodes.

Yes, I know... It's sad... I'm really excited about this... But every other parent of a former 2-year-old understands me, I'm sure!

Toy Story

My daughter's favorite movies are Toy Story and Toy Story 2. She gets to watch one of them once a day, usually at bedtime. She never wants to see anything else. This has been going on for almost 2 months.

Sadly and interestingly, the movies still have not entirely lost their appeal to Brian and me. I guess that's the mark of a good movie, when you can watch it 60 times and still laugh at the jokes. However, we're discovering that we can spontaneously sing along with all the songs, and strangely, we know all the words... We can quote both movies almost entirely. And while our friends are cleverly inserting quotes from the latest movie releases into their daily dialogue, we find ourselves quoting Toy Storyisms like:

"There aren't enough monkeys! We need more monkeys!" (Rex, the insecure dinosaur)

"One minute you're saving the galaxy, and the next minute you find yourself sucking down Darjeeling with Marie Antoinette and her little sister!" (Buzz having a meltdown)

"This is the perfect time to panic!" (Woody overreacting)

"Nirvana is approaching! The mystic portal awaits!" (One of the cute little aliens)

"You saved their lives?!? They're so adorable - let's adopt them!" (Mrs. Potato Head to Mr. Potato Head about the cute little aliens)


And our favorite - - -

"Ooooo, the claw..." (Little aliens)

Apple

Today Catie ate an apple. The whole thing.

A friend at work handed the apple to Catie as we were leaving the office. Catie started gnawing on it in the car, and by the time we got home it was gone. Peel, core, seeds, little grassy thing at the bottom... all of it was gone. She ate the whole thing!

Just call her Catie Appleseed.

Fireworks

We took our camper and met our extended family at the lake this past week to enjoy the 4th of July holiday. While we did enjoy the traditional fireworks show over the lake, Catie decided to surprise us with her own fireworks spectacular.

I awoke on Friday morning, 4th of July, to the awful smell of poop. First I looked at my sleeping husband and thought, "Pheww - gross!" Then reality hit... Catie. Uh oh. I dashed out of bed and ran the short distance to her bunk at the other end of the camper. Words cannot describe the scene that met my eyes and nose.

The child was still asleep. But her white sheet was streaked with fairly fresh poop and globs of it were everywhere - on the sheets, on the blankies. Even the stuffed bear and her sippy cup were not spared. She apparently grazed the wall in her sleep, because there was a nice swoosh of the stuff along the wall. Catie's back, from between her toes up to her hair, were smeared with poop. Ooohhhhhh... I have a pretty tough stomach and I was gagging. I'm so glad Brian was still asleep. He does NOT handle this stuff well and I didn't want two messes to clean up.

At this point, Catie awoke and immediately realized her condition. The poor child got up and went to the corner and just stood there, watching me clean what I could of the mess. My heart broke for her! I could tell she was ashamed, but it was not her fault and I wasn't mad. I kept telling her this, but I don't think she understood. I finally just folded everything on her bed into the sheet and gave Catie a bath.

Thankfully, God is in control even in the small things! There were no laundry facilities at the lake, but we had already planned to Brian's dad's house that day. So, feeling like a college student again, I called my father-in law and meekly asked, "Can I do laundry at your house today?"

Mowing

My quasi-two year old daughter absolutely loves to take a spin on the riding mower.

So yesterday, when the yard actually did need mowing, I decided to bring her along. Armed with her Snack Trap of goldfish crackers, I sat Catie on my left knee and cranked the mower up. She sat quite still, completely fascinated with the shifting of gears by her feet, the loud noise and the precarious turns at the back ditch.

Then I realized that Catie was saying/yelling something. I leaned my head closer to hers and heard, "EI-EI--OOO! MOO MOOO here, MOO MOOO there, EI-EI-OOO!"

Noggin

Periodically Brian will gently tap his forehead on Catie's, then say "Noggin!". She thinks this is great fun and giggles.

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on the floor in the living room when Catie walked up to me, placed her hands on my shoulders, and looked sweetly in my eyes. Then she crashed her head into mine and yelled "Noggin!".