I often joke that I am grumpy, like being grumpy isn’t just a feeling or mood but an actual character trait. It is kind of true. I am not a glass-is-half-full person. I would certainly never describe myself as an optimist. People have described me as a bit of a pessimist, which is more accurate, though I prefer to call it “being a realist.”

Because here is the thing: I am under no illusions that we live in a bright and shiny and happy world. This isn’t really experience talking so much as it is cynicism. And a little bit of self-protection. I tend to be grumpy about the state of the world, but also about stuff in my personal life. Like I always complain about going to a party because what if I don’t know anyone and what if I don’t have any fun? Then it will have been a complete waste of my time and I will just go home feeling like a loser! Waah! But then usually I end up going anyway and having a good time, and — this is key — am pleasantly surprised I had a good time. Isn’t that better than getting excited for something, only to be let down?

Well, now you see how my mind works. I tend to be fun at parties. I think.

Catherine is, how shall we say… the complete opposite of me in this respect. Nowhere has this become more evident than in the words she’s forming out of babbling. “YES!” is her favorite word. Not the old toddler mainstay of “no.” Sure, she shakes her head if she doesn’t want something, but she rarely even says “no” or “nah.” It has thrown me for a loop because I really thought toddlers went around all day saying “no” to stuff. Do you want to finish your dinner? NO! Do you want to take a bath? NO! Do you want to read a story? NO!

But with Catherine, it’s totally the opposite, even if she says YES when she probably doesn’t mean it. Like: Do you want to go to bed? YES! (lies!) Do you want to finish your spinach? YES! (more lies!) Do you want to watch some Yo Gabba Gabba? YES! Do you want to take a bath? YES! I even asked her, just to see, if she wanted to go jump off the front porch with me and she enthusiastically said YES!

I was prepared to have a kid who was not like me. I was fully prepared to have a daughter who was more into the girly stuff than I am, to be obsessed with princesses and/or ponies, who would want to be a cheerleader, who would have different hopes and dreams than I did at her age. I did not prepare myself for the fact that I might have a kid whose personality was a lot different than mine, who had a different — and dare I say, more positive — viewpoint on the world.

I’m glad I was pleasantly surprised.

While pregnant with Catherine, I had a lot of ideas about what kind of mother I was going to be. I was going to be kind and patient, yet firm. I was going to make all of her baby food. She wasn’t going to watch a single minute of TV until her second birthday. I was going to be the kind of mom that doesn’t judge and is always there to take her daughter to the doctor for birth control pills, all the while saying, “Honey, I’m just glad you’re taking precautions and being safe.”

Oh, the best laid plans!

This is where I confess to the Internet something I’m not especially proud of: We let Catherine watch TV. A lot. Not 8 hours a day or anything, just… more than a kid her age should be watching.

We were so good about it until she turned 1. She never paid it much attention, anyway, so it was pretty easy to turn it on and not feel guilty about it, so we could play with her on the floor and continue to watch The Simpsons. Then she started paying attention, and I thought, “Well, she should probably watch a show that is more appropriate for her than endless Futurama reruns,” so I started TiVoing Sesame Street and Yo Gabba Gabba and every couple of days, if she was cranky or needed to be occupied so someone could make dinner, we’d put on an episode and she would get very excited and start dancing as soon as the theme song started up.

Then Rob lost his job, I started working from home, and we were all just there, all the time, and it was SO hot outside and some days, I will be honest, there was a lot of TV-watching going on.

Now that Rob is working again, and she’s back to full-time daycare, we’ve cut back and are trying to limit it to one half-hour a day, and that’s mostly going well, but sometimes I just laze out and let her watch a few YGG episodes in a row. She can ask for it now, too, specifically, wandering up to the TV and turning on the receiver and saying, “Gaga? Gaga?”

The guilt that I often feel surrounding her TV-watching is not so much the recommendation about not letting the under-2 crowd watch much TV, though that is something I do think about. It’s that we are not living the kind of life that I would like us to. I would LIKE us to be outdoorsy, sporty, hale and hearty types, but we are really the nerdy, pasty, indoors on the computer types. Before Catherine was born, there were weekends where Rob and I would just plant our asses on the couch and only move to use the bathroom or get more food. I mean, we weren’t sitting there with our mouths agape, just cramming food down our maws, but it wasn’t very athletic, either. We bemoan the fact very often that we are both lazy, and that we wish we weren’t, but it’s rare that we actually DO anything about it. We have bikes, yes, but mine hasn’t been outside since May and Rob’s is still in the attic. We both belong to the gym, but only I go, and that is about twice a week.

I want to make a change in our lifestyles, and sometimes I feel like I don’t know how. What is the first step to take? Will I have to be the Cruise Director, all peppy and “Come on people! Let’s go for a walk outside!” And the mere thought of that exhausts me and I haven’t even done anything yet.

When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood where kids roamed in packs, and where my mom would push us out of the house to go outside and play. I have memories of sitting on the couch, sure, but I also have memories of riding my bike to the library, stuffing my backpack and wondering if I would be able to bike it all back; of catching fireflies in jars; of playing endless games of Horse and Around the World in the driveway; of spending entire days on the beach, collecting shells and making sand castles; of pushing my sister on the swingset in the backyard; of playing flashlight tag until my dad had to drive around the neighborhood looking for me.

I want Catherine to have that kind of childhood, not one where she is inside all the time and knows everything about Elmo’s World but doesn’t know how to ride a bike. I know it is possible to do it, I know it is there. I just have to make that first step.

Last summer, as Catherine transformed from a little blob to a tiny baby who loved to sit in her Bumbo and babble and giggle, I marveled how quickly she changed. It felt like from week to week, there was something new she could do, be it smiling, laughing, holding her head up — you get the picture. It was all happening so fast and I tried to remember and savor every moment.

It slowed down a little, the progress. It was more things changing month to month instead of week to week, but it was still fascinating. She began sitting up on her own. Then crawling. Then pulling up to stand and then, of course, walking. Those were the big things, the things most visible and obvious every day.

Now at nearly 16 months old, she continues to surprise me, taking developmental leaps and bounds I didn’t know she was ready for. She’s not speaking much yet, but she signs like crazy and can sign about 20 words now. She picks up books and then sits in my lap, waiting for me to start reading to her. She picks up the remote and points it at the TV and furiously pushes all the buttons in hopes that she’ll stumble upon the “power” button. We went out to breakfast yesterday and Rob and I sat there gobsmacked as she not only drank her milk from a straw — something we had never seen her do — she also picked up a fork and fed herself some hash browns.

And I swear to God, when I took these pictures earlier this week, she turned around and posed for me because she knows what it means by now when Mama gets out the big camera with the lens.

I’m ridiculously excited to see what comes next.

Last week, after we got back from Memorial Day weekend, daycare informed us that it was going to be Catherine’s last week in the infant room, and that they’d be transferring her to the toddler room the next week (i.e., this week).

They had let us know about a month ago that they were planning on changing the set-up of both rooms so that the 12+ monthers would go in the toddler room, instead of waiting until they were 15 months, and the 2.5-year-olds would go with the preschoolers instead of staying with the toddlers.

So we knew it was coming, but it was still a bit of a shock. My baby, in the toddler room? The hell you say!

And if you had asked me last week if it was a good idea, I probably would have shrieked and ran from the room and then huddled under the bedcovers, shaking. Because last week was awful. Really, really awful. Their plan had been for her to spend part of her day with the toddlers – either morning or afternoon, after their nap – and it was just made of fail. They told me she was sobbing hysterically every time they tried to put her in there. When I went to pick her up, the relief that washed over her face was just palpable. Before, she’d amble over to me casually, almost saying with her body language, “Oh hey, Mama, let me just finish playing with this one toy and then we can go home.” Last week she would run to me, and wouldn’t let me put her down even to gather up her stuff.

I won’t lie to you – it was really hard to see her that way. The thought of her crying for a good chunk of the day made me want to cry for a good chunk of the day. And knowing that if I were there, if I just came in and hugged her and rubbed her back, that she would then be happy and want to play again… Well, frankly, it was upsetting me a lot. I thought about it constantly all day and just sat at my desk, worrying about her and hoping that she wasn’t too upset.

Rob and I talked about it over the weekend and we decided that he would bring her in for drop-off, and I would pick her up. For whatever reason, she is fine to wave bye to me at home without any tears, and she is fine to leave him without any tears at daycare (but she sobs and flings herself against the front door when he leaves the apartment, so I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on in her mind). I was crazy with worry on Monday so we both dropped her off and that was a mistake. She did her little leg kicky-thing that she does when she doesn’t want me to put her down (she stiffens up, kicks her legs and then acts like the floor is on fire, basically) and sobbed and sobbed and so I handed her to a teacher and nearly ran out of the room, her wails permeating down the hallway, breaking my heart into a million pieces. I thought leaving her at daycare for the first time ever when she was three months old was hard, but this was so much harder. So much.

“That was a mistake,” I told Rob, sniffing back my tears as we drove home. “From now on, you’re doing drop-offs.”

Except for yesterday, when I had to drop her off because Rob’s schedule wouldn’t allow it, she has been fine. Really, really fine. All the doors at daycare have huge windows on them, so if you’re careful you can see your kid without her seeing you. The toddler kids are a bit more rough-and-tumble than the babies, obviously, but she’s been doing really well. She’s right there in the mix, playing and clapping and waving her arms excitedly. Her teachers tell me she doesn’t cry too much, no more than most kids do, and that she’s acclimating to the schedule really well.

She still runs to me when I get there, but it’s OK. She burst into tears on Monday when she saw me but hasn’t since. I wouldn’t say everything is perfect, but we’re getting there. Mostly, I am really proud of her for rolling with the punches this week. She is a little trouper, my little mischievous tumblebaby.

It’s not something I’m ever really proud to admit, but I am not a patient person. Do you have a surprise for me? That’s awesome! But your surprise had better be revealed about 5 seconds after you tell me you have a surprise, because otherwise I will be consumed with impatience and toe-tapping and damnit, why don’t I have my surprise yet?!

As you can imagine, parenting and impatience are not compatible. First you have to wait nine insanely long months to even have your baby, and then you have to wait wait wait for everything. You have to wait for the first smile, for the first sounds, for the first time they sit up or stand or step or talk.

When Catherine was a small baby, my impatience kind of melted away. She was so tiny, so helpless — how could I ever get impatient with this little snuggly thing? Sure, she would cry, and sure, it was hard to deal with sometimes, but we were lucky she didn’t have colic and we were lucky that she really didn’t cry unless she wanted something (food, a diaper, etc.) I could smile beatifically because it was easy! Her needs were simple and it was easy to figure out what she wanted. We were in a good groove, even when I went back to work and wasn’t with her all day.

Now, now where she is teetering on the edge of talking, figuring out what she wants is becoming a guessing game. Or an exercise in frustration, because while she might want to hurtle herself into the oven, I’m certainly not going to let that happen. We’ve been teaching her sign language, but when she starts to get upset, she doesn’t have a good handle on it. And she is much better with signs for concrete things (dog, ball, mommy, daddy) than for abstract things (hungry, sad, tired). An easy bedtime routine has turned into a struggle, as she arches her back and cries and shouts furiously when one of us puts on her PJs.  Sometimes she walks around the apartment and cries to be picked up but arches her back if I don’t hold her in a precise way, or if I try to put her down, or if I try to sit down with her on the couch.

This has been hard for me. Did you see where I said I’m impatient? It’s been hard to step back, to take an extra breath and count to 10 and not lose my mind. There was a moment last week where I was checking my email on my phone, sitting on the floor as she played around me. And she kept screaming randomly, for no apparent reason, and kept coming over to me as to hug me but pushing me away when I went to embrace her. And a little lightbulb went off over my head and I put my phone away and I just watched her. I clapped when she put two mega blocks together and said “good job!” when she figured out how to open the fridge door of her play kitchen. I just sat there on the floor and watched her. And unlike the days before that — when she’d cry on and off from the time she got home from daycare to bedtime — she didn’t cry at all. And she only protested a little at bedtime.

I’m certainly not perfect and over the weekend, she and I had our moments where she cried and shrieked and I handed her to Rob so I could just go take a shower already, sheesh. But every time she gets upset, I try to stop. I try to count to 10. I try to think of that day last week where she had 100 percent of my full and undivided attention for a small time, and I smile.

I’m trying to do my best, and I think that’s good enough.