Kaylee and I were playing on the stairs last night, when she initiated me into a game she’s been playing with her dad. (Did you get a sinking feeling when you read “stairs” and “game” in the same sentence?)

I was kneeling at the bottom of the stairs and she climbed about six or seven steps up — out of my reach, by quite a bit. Then she threw Kitty at me. I caught the cat, flipped it in the air a little to make Kaylee giggle, and then tossed it back to her. “This is a fun little game,” I thought. Then Kaylee threw Kitty at me again, and in the four-tenths of a second I was looking down at Kitty, Kaylee dove down the stairs.

I think the neighbors four houses away probably heard me yell “OH MY GOD” when I looked up and realized my daughter was falling through the air, completely trusting me to catch her.

Also, I think my heart stopped a little bit.

It restarted just in time for me to catch her right as her head started to hit the wall and just before she would have smacked her face on the bottom step. She made it through the incident completely unscathed, if a little whiny because I’d scared her with all my yelling. I am pretty sure that I, however, will have lasting psychological scars.

I think she and her dad need to come up with a different game.

In the weeks after Kaylee was born, I discovered that I don’t do very well when I’m not allowed to sleep. With a newborn waking me up every two hours, I found that the easiest way to get through the day was to cry a lot. And so I did, at least until we started figuring out the sleep thing and came up with a system that worked for us.

And it has worked well for us, to the point that now we don’t really worry that Kaylee’s going to torture us all night and we generally assume that we’ll get a decent night’s sleep every night.

I think you see where this is going.

Kaylee is not sleeping. At least not much. For the past two nights, she’s gone to bed at her normal time and slept well enough for a little while. But then she wakes up at 2 or 3 a.m. and does not want to be put back in her bed. We can rock her back to sleep, but the second her head touches her crib mattress, she’s awake and screeching at us for cruelly abandoning her. The only way she’ll sleep is if someone is holding her. Which explains why I spent a portion of the early morning today dozing with Kaylee in our living room recliner.

I’ve been indulging her because I feel like maybe something is wrong. She’s never acted like this before, so I don’t want to assume she’s just suddenly decided to become a spoiled kid who wants Mommy to coddle her at all times. I just can’t figure it out, because she’s pretty normal in the daytime.

Here are my theories:

— She’s having nightmares.

— A ghost is sneaking into her room and poking her.

— Her tummy hurts.

— Her gums hurt.

— There’s a monster under her bed or in the closet, and it keeps freaking her out.

— She hates me.

— She really, really wants to go live with the gypsies.

And that’s all I’ve got. Sigh.

I was playing on the back patio with Kaylee yesterday when she picked up a plastic bottle that had at one time held soap for blowing bubbles. It is now empty, but Kaylee insists that there is still soap to be found in this bottle, and yesterday she wanted me to use it to blow bubbles for her entertainment.

I held the bottle up to the sunlight and showed her that it was empty, and then dramatically turned it upside down while saying, “Empty!” in the hopes that she would let the issue drop. She did not.

She found the cup that had served as both a lid for the bottle and a reservoir for dipping the wand into a little soap lake, and held it out to me. I pretended I didn’t know what she wanted, so she pointed to the bottle and then to the cup, as in, “Duh, Mommy, you’re supposed to pour the soap into the cup. We’ve been over this a THOUSAND TIMES.”

While I continued to feign confusion, she wandered off and found the bubble wand, and then pointed to the bottle and the cup, then held out her wand in a desperate attempt to get her mother to understand that it was time to blow bubbles.

Finally, with a sigh, I pretended to pour soap into the cup and held it out for her inspection. Brow furrowed, she peered into the empty cup, trying to figure out whether I had really filled the cup with invisible soap, or if her mom had finally gone insane.

Then she gave me a withering glare, and it dawned on me that my daughter is not so easy to fool anymore.

Last week, Rob and I decided that we just don’t torture ourselves enough. It’s been a long time since we intentionally caused ourselves hours of intense misery, so we decided it was high time we took Kaylee on a road trip.

Rob, Grandma and I visited our friend Tom and his mom in Fort Collins on Saturday, meaning that we spent all of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with our fingers crossed that Kaylee would manage a two-and-a-half-hour road trip without rendering us deaf from all the screaming. (She does not always appreciate her car seat.) As we buckled her in for the ride, we promised she would see a KITTY! And another KITTY! And maybe even a third KITTY! Then we hoped her excitement would sustain her for the next two hours. Fortunately, she fell asleep for the first half of the trip and was kept in good spirits for the second half through the magic of Lucky Charms marshmallows.

After we made it to Fort Collins (and just as we ran out of marshmallows), Kaylee completely forgot that she was starving when she was introduced to an animal that not only SNUGGLED with her but was also a CAT. Then — joy of joys — another cat appeared for snuggles. And then, Kaylee got to play with cat toys. I’m pretty sure this was her best day ever.

Kaylee continued to not torture us for the rest of the day, through trips to two different restaurants, and through a walk around my alma mater’s campus. Then, she was kind enough to fall asleep for the ride home. No one lost their hearing, and no one even briefly mentioned the gypsies.

There is some sad news, though: As long as she lives with me, Kaylee probably can’t have a cat. While we were still at our friend’s mom’s house, I found myself having a mild allergic reaction, but by the time I went to bed that night, I had a rash all over my face. I’m sure that Kaylee would be perfectly happy to grow up with a red- and lumpy-faced mother if it meant she could have a kitty, but fortunately she won’t be making my household decisions for at least a few more decades.

Just out of curiosity, though, I did look online to see how much it would cost to get a genetically engineered hypoallergenic cat. (And no, I do not mean a hairless cat.) Turns out, I could get one for Kaylee for the low, low price of $8,000.

Um, let’s see, do I want to buy a cat for my daughter, or do I want to someday buy another car? Decisions, decisions.

Hey, did you all know that an old cell phone with no SIM card and no phone number attached to it can still make an emergency phone call, presumably to 911?

I did not know that until this weekend, when Kaylee kindly figured it out for us.

Rob let her play with my old phone, which still had a charge, while I was taking a shower on Saturday.  Kaylee likes to pace the floor and babble into the phone, and we let her because it’s very cute, and because we assumed that the phone didn’t work anyway.  Everything was fine until he heard someone on the phone saying, “Is your mommy there?”

Assuming she’d somehow dialed a random number, Rob hung up the phone without realizing that she’d reached an emergency dispatcher.

I hope the authorities aren’t still scouring the city for the little girl who’s having an emergency involving “Dabado!”  and “Meow!”

I have a pair of pajamas that says, “I love sleeping” on the shirt.  It is the single most honest piece of clothing that I own.

I do love sleeping.  In fact, because of sleep, I don’t have time to put on makeup, do my hair or eat breakfast before I leave for work in the mornings.  I do without makeup, I stick with a low-maintenance hairstyle, and I eat a cereal bar at my desk after I get to work.  All so I can sleep an extra 20 minutes in the morning.  It’s very important to me.  (Or I’m really lazy, whichever.)

I’m telling you this so you understand this new, deep sacrifice that Rob and I have decided to make for our daughter.  (Rob loves sleep as much as, if not more than, I do.)

In light of the news that Kaylee needs to take in more calories, we’ve decided that we need a more structured morning in which all three of us sit down to breakfast together.  We think it’ll be easier to get Kaylee to eat breakfast, as she doesn’t much care to stop for pancakes when she could be running circles around the coffee table while Super Why plays in the background.  We always give her breakfast, but it’s been in a disorganized, here-eat-this-muffin kind of way.  If we all sit down together like we do at dinner, maybe some of her food will actually make its way to her stomach.

Of course, that means everyone has to wake up a little earlier, because there’s no way to carve time out of our normal rushing-out-the-door-with-seconds-to-spare morning routine.  Which means Mommy has to give up some of her sleeping time.  Woe is me.

I hope Kaylee appreciates my sacrifice.