Katie is a SUPERSTAR!

My kid.  My wonderful kid who was too shy to dance more than one dance at last year's recital, danced all three dances with her class today. She laughed with her friends, she followed the teacher's moves, she smiled... she was wonderful. I am so proud of her. Proud of her for having the guts to get up in front of a bunch of people with cameras in the first place! I'm not sure I could have done that but she didn't let stage fright get to her.

Then we went to her classroom and we got her five MILLION coloring pages and her very first SCHOOL FRIEND birthday party invitation! My kid. She's got a school friend party to attend next month! (Just don't ask me if I'm more excited about the party or the fact that it's "no gifts please"...)

My kid. My little helper rushes to see what's wrong with Jackson before I can get to him. She puts his nuk back in, she picks out his onesie, she finds the burp cloth and blankets... she's planning to have 16 kids so I guess she has to get in lots of practice.

My kid. My sweet and sassy kid has started to ask for things instead of demand them (mostly). She says, "Mommy, could I have more milk please?" and she gets her own fork or spoon instead of saying "Moooom, you forgot something!" (in a sing song voice). I see her growing up right before my eyes!

She's my favorite little girl.

Urgent care is for wimps... the emergency room is where it's at!

Fun evening on Friday. Me and Katie and a friend and her two kids went shopping at a GREAT sale (seriously good deals) then to DSW, then to a pizza place for dinner, THEN to Walmart. 

I bought the pants I mentioned in my post from a few days ago (at $10, not the $2 I hoped to spend... but I think they're worth it...) and Katie got $5 to spend on whatever.

She bought a ballerina princess barbie.  Of course.

It seems like in the past year she's gathered a collection of barbie/princess dolls. We even had our first guy barbie join the group on Thursday (a birthday gift from Grandma and Grandpa) and Katie loves him. You might have heard of him... his name is Ken. He's in that new Toy Story movie?

Katie is pretty generous with her dolls... Jake introduced Ken to Woody, Sponge Bob, and Buzz and now they're buds. It's so good for Ken to get out with the guys sometimes... He's seriously outnumbered by the princesses. Those girls won't leave him alone!

So we finally head home at about 10 pm and it was time. We used Grandpa's truck for our transportation and I think it brought back memories of all of the times she's gone somewhere with Grandpa... which made her miss grandpa (TEARS on her face and her sad voice telling me "Mommy, I miss Grandpa soooo much.") and we were both tired.

We finally get home. I headed to the bathroom, and on my way I heard Jake cough in his room. A cough that sounded like a seal bark. Really bad.

John picked him up and he just didn't seem like his usual self (I know... middle of the night, of course he'll be tired, but it seemed different) and he was breathing funny but hadn't been sick or anything.

Katie was her usual helpful self by mentioning that Jake "might have" swallowed a tiny toy. She never said he actually swallowed this toy but she said that he had a tiny little ball or something and now she doesn't know where it is. Helpful, right? Just enough info to freak us out. Thanks sweetie.

Soooo, off I go to the ER at 10:30 at night.

Jake was tired and his nose was really snotty. Pretty gross... all of that snot. John does better with body fluids than I do but I do better with emergency care. I guess it's a given that I take one for the team this time.

(As a side note, John has been puked on WAY more than I have in our parenting career so we're probably still not even... although Jake DID pee on me during my c-section... right as he was being pulled out of my stomach which is pretty gross. Maybe we are even after all.)
Waited about 20 minutes to be called into the first room with the triage nurse. Oxygen levels were fine. Huge sigh of relief. A bit of a fever, lots of snot, and lots of nurse charming later and we were back in the waiting room. For about 45 minutes.

Not too bad so far. Hospital waiting rooms can be interesting.

Got called back to an exam room with a bed so we snuggled in and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Doc came. Gave Jake a quick once over but he didn't find anything scary. He ordered an x-ray and left to see other patients. 

Oh, a random guy pushing a computer walked into our room just before the doctor came in.  He typed away but didn't say anything to me.  Looks like it's this guys job to wheel his computer around with the doc, taking notes. He didn't look around, didn't say hello, didn't acknowlege us at all.  It was pretty funny.  Not very funny now that I'm typing this out, but at the time it gave me a chuckle.

Waited for the x-ray guy.

Waited.

Waited.

Dozed off snuggling with Jake till a nurse stopped by to ask if he wanted to color. He said yes in his cute voice. She brought in a table and colors and a book for him.

I dozed off again with him sitting in front of me, coloring away.

About an hour and a half later, doc comes to see if we've been to x-ray. I opened my eyes to a squint and told him that we hadn't. The tech came about 20 minutes later. Asked if I could be pregnant so he could ask a nurse to hold Jake during the x-ray.

Pregnant?  Ummm, yes.

Found a nurse. Did the x-ray. Jake charmed again. So cooperative and so sweet and he wasn't even afraid when I had to step away into the x-ray booth. He got 3 stickers.

Then back to the room and the same nurse asked if Jake wanted a popsicle... he said yes. And smiled at her.  Again, the little charmer.
We finally got the verdict. Nothing on x-ray (thanks again, Katie) and it looked like a virus. A contagious virus. He mentioned what to do in case of croup but the verdict was virus.

We finally got home at around 3:30 a.m. Yes, in. the. morning.

John held Jake and I went to bed.

And we decided to postpone Katie's birthday party when she ended up with a sniffly nose the next day. She wad surprisingly okay with it... once she made sure she would still get the princess cake she picked out when we did reschedule her party.

Oh, Grandpa? You might notice a blue, rectangle shaped sticker on the window of your suburban. Katie may have accidentally (or on purpose) stuck that there after our stop at the big sale. She was very upset when I mentioned that it was not a good idea to stick sticky stickers onto car windows... especially when the car window is not ours. She got very emotional when she thought that you might be mad at her. Funny, she didn't care so much about how mommy would feel when she stuck a sticker on the window of our car...

Said goodbye to Costco... it was hard.

Took Katie to Walmart this weekend because when I was there last week, I found a pair of knit pants for $2.  (Yes.  Two bucks.  The price tag said $10 but I really needed some comfy pants for work and these seemed to be okay.  Got to the checkout and they rang up as $2.  I should have gone back right then and picked up 5 more pairs but... I didn't.)  I decided I would go on Saturday after I thought about the expense a bit more.  Then I was like, what?  Think about spending $2 on pants I could wear during the rest of my pregnancy AND after? I'm kicking myself today.  Because today, the $10 pants that last week rang up at $2 actually did cost me $10.  Each.  So I took them out of the cart and just picked up the stuff I needed for Katie's birthday party.

The highly anticipated princess theme stuff.

You know... The princess plates, princess cups, princess napkins, princess tablecloth.  Princesses. everywhere.  Katie was very happy.  She was also in love with this outfit (Tinkerbell) and just exclaimed over how cute it was and that maybe she could wear it on her birthday.  It was pretty cute (in other words, it wasn't totally princess obnoxious) and it didn't cost a fortune so I told her we would buy it. 

More exclamations over how cute it was and how excited she was to wear it, I decided it was worth the $13 it cost.

However, in the excitement of finding all of my princess party stuff and this cute outfit, I managed to forget that when we were at Target a couple of weeks ago she found a dress that stopped her in her tracks.  Literally.  She stopped right in front of the rack and just stared at this dress.  And tried it on and twirled around in the dressing room and I was totally suckered into buying the "beautiful dress" for her to wear.

On her birthday.

Luckily, Katie has quite a week planned. She's got kids club on Wednesday, dinner out on Thursday, and her party on Saturday so even if she decides to add her purple Christmas dress into the outfit rotation, there are enough events to go around.  I'm thinking Tinkerbell on Wednesday and the beautiful dress on Sunday.

After Walmart we ran to Costco to eat samples pick up diapers and wipes and some other stuff I had coupons for.  And we shared a hot dog and an ice cream bar (seriously, those nut covered ice cream bars are SO good).  And then I *gulp* cancelled our membership.

Costco isn't exactly in my neck of the woods so it wasn't convenient to run over when we were low on something.  Plus, I did a little cost comparison and the stuff at Sam's Club (where my parents have a membership) and Sam's Club was actually cheaper by a dollar or two... or three for the things I buy most often in bulk!  So I cancelled.  I might have been in shock a little but I made it out of the store without any dramatic goodbye scene.

No tears allowed.  But sniffles are permitted.

Okay, so just as I was going to hit "publish" I realized that this post was getting VERY long.  So I'm ending here for the day and I'll post the rest tomorrow. 

Really, I won't forget. 

Really.  I'm going to schedule the part I copy/pasted to post tomorrow afternoon and I'm going to do it RIGHT NOW.  Otherwise I might forget.  Like two seconds from now. 

Oh, and, as always, feel free to leave a comment... I'm not sure if anyone reads this stuff anymore!