Had a good evening, but a rough night. Baby was in a fine mood and went to bed early, I got to eat German things for dinner, and I got to bed at a reasonable hour. 

Then in the middle of the night I woke up suddenly because it felt like I had inhaled some sort of angry particle. It felt just like when you inhale a piece of spicy food, and it started a coughing fit which, somehow, did not wake the baby. I stumbled to the bathroom, coughing so hard it made me eventually throw up a few times. -_- So that was fun. It eventually passed, and I still have no idea what it was.

The rest of the night I was either too hot or too cold, so I slept fitfully and woke up exhausted. Blah.

No big plans for today, or for the rest of the week really. We're sort of coasting right now, which is kind of nice. 

The weekend ended up being a mostly good one. Friday I left work early for Kate's speech therapy appointment. The therapist was pleased with her progress and recommended some more toys that could help with encouraging speech. We did some structured play so she could see how Kate picked things up, which went very well. We scheduled out the appointments for the whole of October, so we're finally going to be getting into the actual weekly meetings that we originally discussed. 

I took the rest of the day off of work, and spent the afternoon making a batch of pumpkin bread, which made the entire house smell good. We picked up tacos for dinner, and all of us got to bed a little too late in the evening, but eh, whatever.

I woke up on Saturday feeling both mentally and physically good, which hasn't happened in a hot minute. The baby was also in a good mood, so I took advantage of it all to get some chores done. I conquered dish mountain, the baby watched Ms. Rachel, I made us both breakfast. M got up around noon to the news that the background check for New Job was finally complete and accepted, and he was good to start on the 29th. Hooray! He put his notice in at Old Job immediately, and felt much relief.

The plan for Saturday had been that I'd take the baby with me in the morning to do some German food shopping at Aldi, but when I got up I realized just how long it'd been since I'd showered, so that didn't happen. New plan was to shower while the baby napped, but she kept fighting her nap every time I tried to put her down. She eventually was so tired that she ended up falling asleep on my lap at around 3:30, so I gently moved her to her crib and I finally got in some time to wash. 

Then it was a quick trip to Aldi to scope out German foods, and I was pretty disappointed with their offerings this year. I picked up a couple of packs of pastaroni-style spaetzle, a package of dried spaetzle, some frozen strudel and cakes, and some cookies, and that was about it. It also felt very disorganized - items were scattered all over the store and not put together in any sort of display, or even marked with any signage. I finally asked someone where all the German stuff was and they said it was "just sort of all over." 

I stopped at home to unload the frozen stuff so it wouldn't melt in the car, with the plan to then go on to Central Market for their German Passport offerings, but M requested that we go as a family on Sunday instead since there were some things he wanted to pick up, too. So, I called it a night and started on dinner, which was just ham, green beans, and a box of fettuccini alfredo. M went out with friends to go try and new wing place that his foodie group was raving about.

Sunday wasn't as good as day, mostly because I was extremely light-headed and achy all over. Blah. I tried not to do too much in the morning since I was pretty woozy, so it was just an easy breakfast for me and Kate. Everyone sort of faffed around the house most of the day, and thankfully, Kate finally took a decent nap. It seems that sleep regression is common at around the 2 year mark since there's just so much going on at that age, and Kate's going through all of it - language acquisition, molars coming in, potty training, the works. So she's fighting bedtime, fighting her naps, and waking up all through the night. This all means that she slept for nearly 4 hours during her nap on Sunday, since she was so exhausted.

Once she was finally up, we packed up the car and headed to Central Market, which was an absolute madhouse. They were leaning much harder into the German Passport theme than Aldi was, which was fun to see. They had carved wooden signage over all their different departments with the German names for those departments in big bright letters, paper signage pointing out all the German products, and displays of the German items within each department so they were easy to find. We ended up bringing home so much more than we went in for, and M declared that the spending limit was gone, let's just have fun and pick up what we want, so we got a big bienenstich cake from the bakery, lots of good bread, lots of good meat and sausages and cheese, some marzipan and other sweets, and some imported sodas. We spent about double the budget we had originally set but we had a good time and now we have many yummy things in the house. 

Kate did very well on the shopping trip, though she started getting restless toward the end, which, so was I honestly. Too many people, too much chaos, no one seems to know how to follow the flow of traffic, everyone blocking lanes with their carts, it was all a bit much. It was enough of an adventure that she was ready for bed not long after we got home, so it was a quick dinner of some leftovers, then right into bed, where she fought sleep for a good hour before finally passing out. 

I can't believe that October starts next week. It looks like it's going to be a busy month for us. Lots of speech therapy appointments for Kate, M has a trip to Chicago for a friend's wedding, Kate's 2nd birthday, OB appointments, just the works. 

Just two more months of being pregnant. I simultaneously can't wait to not be pregnant anymore, and am nervous about having two kids. Definitely not something I ever saw happening in my life.