Our Happy Strawberry

Many months after strawberries had been well established as Cate's favorite food, we heard babies aren't supposed to have strawberries until they are a year old. Well, all I can say to that is that I'm so glad I didn't deprive Cate of even a day of strawberry eating. We figure she eats about a pound of strawberries every 4-5 days. That's a lot when you only weigh 18 pounds. I recently bought a two-pound container and wondered if she would be able to eat them before they went bad. Answer: yes.

I can't think of a better way to celebrate Cate's first favorite thing than this:

Our Blue-Eyed Pixie

I love this picture of Cate because it shows just how blue her eyes are.

She is still so tiny, and I love that you can tell just what a pixie she is here. Sam's eyes are hazel and mine are really more greenish than blue. We figure she must have gotten those wonderful eyes from my very blue-eyed parents.

We love our little blue-eyed pixie!

Pumpkin Picking!

Last week we went to pick out our pumpkins!

I had big plans to find us someplace with pick-your-own-fruit, hay rides, caramel apples, cider, and the whole Fall thing, but it turns out those places (at least the ones I could find around here) aren't open on Mondays. Because our weekend is Sunday/Monday instead of the usual Saturday/Sunday, Monday was the day for picking. Oh well, I figure we'll all have more fun at a Fall Fest place next year when C's a little older anyway.

We found a pumpkin patch at a Methodist church near our house, and the proceeds from the pumpkin sale supported the youth choir's trip to Cuba. I have some mixed feelings about the ol' youth choir trip to Cuba, but where I've made it this long without injecting politics into the family blog I'll stick with talking about how adorable Cate was getting ready for her first Halloween.

Cate loved the wagon:

But it did take her a minute to warm up to the idea:

Some Photos

So I've finally managed to take some photos of Cate! Here they are, first at the Children's Museum, then at the park, then at home. Thanks for checking in!

Just one quick note on living in Houston: It is so crazy to hear people having conversations about "how great it is that it is getting nice enough to do things outside." Everyone's talking about it--in the grocery store, walking down the street, everyone! We were on a walk a few nights ago and someone just stopped us as we walked by his front yard to talk about how nice it is getting. I love this. I anticipate missing winter not. at. all.

Standing Room Only

I've found that the best way to feed Cate is with her standing up. The fact is, she can't stand up on her own and so if she's standing and eating her hands are tied up holding on to something. Which means she can't grab the pureed whatever with her hands and smear it all over us.

I know all babies are messy eaters at first, but I am telling you: you have not seen a messy eater until you have seen Catherine Lee Major with some pureed spinach. It is really amazing. Imagine one quarter teaspoon in her belly and one half cup spread between her hair, my hair, the inside of her nose, the inside of my ear, her arpits, my shirt, her knees and my elbow. Feeding her standing up doesn't prevent the smearing altogether, but it does improve the ratio of food in her belly to food on us significantly.

Of course, you might be thinking what I would have thought had I not been feeding this child for just over eight months. If you don't let her feed herself, how will she learn? Seriously? Think about that for a minute.

Yeah, that's why I've decided not to worry about it.

So while standing, Cate's absolute favorite thing to eat is Ella's baby food. I started off making all Cate's food myself, but that lasted for about three weeks. Then I found Ella's. It's all natural (no preservatives, no sugar, not even water added). It comes in crazy combinations, including C's two favorites: carrots, apples and parsnips and sweet potatoes, pumpkin, apples, and blueberries. The best thing about Ella's is that it comes in packages like Capri Sun with a handy screw off top and a little nozzle. Meaning you can just squeeze the Ella's right in to the little one's mouth. When I mentioned this technique to one friend she said it had never occurred to her do do that. Clearly, she is more refined than I am. Her baby eats with a spoon. Or his fingers. So sophisticated, you'd think he's the one whose dad is a chef at a fancy pants restaurant.

But the fact is, while our Cate is on the verge of walking she still has never held her own bottle, much less fed herself. (I imagine the experts would diagnose her with "delayed self-feeding disorder") Every now and then she manages to get a piece of food into her own pie hole, but for the most part she'd really just as soon have her people do it for her.

Oh, and did I mention: she refuses to wear a bib. Ever. She can get any kind of bib off faster than Houdini could get out of a straight jacket. Velcro, snaps, t-shirt neck, whatever. She can get it off.

Which means I typically feed her standing up, straight from the nozzle on the baby food container ... whilst she wears nothing but a diaper.

What can I say? She's a classy girl.

Rookie

Tonight I made dinner for a couple we know from church who just had a baby girl. Because Sam was working and Cate and I had no other plans, I made a fairly elaborate dinner. Nothing fancy--but it required a lot of chopping and a sizable collection of pots and pans. My sous chef is still not much for slicing and dicing and as a result I typically pull the Pack n Play in to the kitchen where she hangs out while I prepare dinner.

The immobile Cate of old actually seemed to like spending a few minutes in the Pack n Play each day. The turbo-mobile Cate of today does not. Never has that been more apparent than tonight.

For better or worse, the third prong of my very sophisticated parenting strategy (see previous post about first two prongs: speak to her like she understands English and give her lots of kisses) is: Do not respond to hysteria by caving. Never has that been tested like tonight.

Cate cried her little head off for longer than I'd like to admit while I prepared dinner. In my head, I imagined myself giving her a pep talk: "I know you don't like it in there. Sometimes we have to do things we don't like to do. You have your favorite toys and I am right here. You can choose to be miserable or you can choose to manage how you feel about this hard thing. I love you." But there was no pep talk. I just continued preparing dinner.

I finished dinner. We both survived. I swear she was glaring at me for an hour. We delivered our dinner and admired the new baby and the new baby's nursery. We stopped by the store, which is basically Cate's favorite thing in life, so I think I earned some points back there. We came home. And it was time to do the dishes.

To clarify, once she's in the Pack n Play I am all about her toughing it out. But I have a brain (and a heart). When we got home, I put her down on the floor in the room adjacent to the kitchen and got to the dishes. Within about 10 seconds she and a toy she had managed to lug along were in the kitchen at my feet.

And you know what? She crawled around in there checking stuff out the whole time I was doing the dishes.

And she's still alive.

She didn't open the door of the fridge, crawl in, and close the door on herself.

She didn't climb into the dishwasher, grab a knife, and cut herself.

She didn't find some quarter-sized piece of something on the floor, put it in her mouth, and choke on it.

She didn't claw her way on to the counter top, turn on the stove, and burn herself.

She didn't open the cupboard, unscrew the Windex, and drink it.

Shocker.

What a rookie I am.

Happy Anniversary!

It's been two years!

Us, newly minted as Mr. and Mrs.

We still remember the big day like it was yesterday. Apparently our photographer didn't realize how long it's been either, because we just got our wedding album this week.

Anyway, hoorah for marriage! Hooray for love! Sam's my favorite! I'm his! (He told me.)

I wondered a long time ago (before Sam and definitely before Cate) what I would say when my future children would inevitably ask me who my favorite was. I decided on my answer long before I met Sam: "Daddy's my favorite," I would tell them. Of course, I've thought a lot about this since Miss Cate came along. I love her oodles. Feeding her and changing her and bathing her and reading to her and snuggling her and playing with her and clapping for her is an unparalleled blessing and privilege. She is the cutest thing I've ever seen.

But even now I am so aware that Sam and I have each other forever and her only for now--that some day she will grow up and she will leave us. I think of her as a future grown up, I imagine her going to kindergarten and then to junior high and off to high school and college, and I believe my friends who tell me it will happen in the blink of an eye. I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes when I think about it (I know, she can't even walk yet), but the fact is she will grow up, and get married, and it will all start again, as it always has. And it seems to me that there are only a few things I can really give her along the way. And one of them--the confidence and certainty and security that will come with knowing she and her future siblings are decidedly tied for my second favorite--seems like the one to think about on the occasion of our anniversary.

How, you might ask, can Sam compete with this little bundle of cuteness:

It's not easy, but he does it. Day after day after day, he does it.

For our anniversary, Cate and I went on a tour of six Houston bakeries. We picked up a few treats from each of them, brought them home, and made this display to welcome Sam home from work:

Here are some close-ups:

Let me assure you that none of these treats came close to comparing to my Sam's treats. But we ate them anyway.

Sam gave me this Norman Rockwell print I've had my eye on for a while:

Don't you think that, in another era, this is how Sam and I could have met?

I love you, Sam. You mean the world to me. And Cate, you mean at least 9 billion planets to us both.