A Lifetime Dream Achieved...if the cat isn't terminally ill

On one of our early dates, my husband-to-be and I discussed some of our goals in life.  I planned to someday own a cat.  Before you make fun, think of what it takes to own a cat that I had not achieved yet.  You need to live in a stable environment (since cats do not do well with frequent moves) and you have to live in a place where you are allowed to choose a pet other than a goldfish.  At the time, I was moving about two or three times a year for various semester changes and summer employment opportunities and from one no-pets-allowed apartment or dorm to another.

Getting married did not change that, since I married someone who was starting a PhD program and we promptly moved into married student campus housing.  But when we did purchase our first condo, we tried to make my dream come true.  We adopted a beautiful cat named Kita from the humane society, not knowing that Kita suffered from a terminal illness that would end her life soon thereafter.

We were only in the condo for a short time when we had the "opportunity" to acquire the construction project we currently reside in.  Once again, I found myself in life circumstances unfitting for cat ownership.  Cats do not do well in construction.  (Case in point: One of my childhood pets hid from the construction workers under the unfinished tub during a bathroom remodeling project and they entombed her when they tiled it up.  She did survive the incident, but ran away not long after that trauma.)

However, when my aunt needed to find a new family for her cat, Callie, and thought of us and our recently de-petted situation, we couldn't say no.  Callie was a charming animal, until she took ill a few weeks later.  The vet assured us that her imminent demise had nothing to do with us or even the plenitude of construction materials in the poor animal's final living quarters.  Although my aunt had not known, she had been terminally ill for sometime.

 So I decided that my dream would have to wait, both until the construction project became a suitable home and until I recovered from my newfound fear that a future as my pet would doom any cat to a short life expectancy.

About a month ago, my husband called from work.  He works at a rest home that had a "therapy cat" (i.e. a cat whose purpose is to cheer up sick people).  However, the director of physical therapy and her boss had a tiff which resulted in eviction orders for the innocent animal.  My husband wanted to adopt her; after all, I still hadn't achieved that lifelong goal, the kids would love a pet, and this was one cheap way to achieve that goal, since the pet would come to us with lots of free pet supplies and all its veterinary work accomplished.

Our house is still under construction, but I made the cat her own tranquil bedroom in the closet under the stairs, like Harry Potter.  Soon after adopting her, my husband forgot that the new pet was his idea and complained about her frequently, although I caught him talking baby talk to the sweet kitty when he thought no one was looking.  My children, on the other hand, were exuberant pet owners from the start. My two-year-old was delighted with everything the cat did and brought me frequent, enthusiastic reports, most of which were, "Cat!  Night-night! Cat!"  The first time he saw the cat bathe, he grabbed my arm and dragged me over to see the big event, talking rapid jibberish the whole way.  I told him the cat was bathing.  "Nummy bath?" he asked, having never seen a bath that involved licking before. 

The kids are such exuberant pet owners, in fact, that I am shocked that I have never heard the cat hiss and that she has not clawed either one. She's a good cat.  I hope she isn't terminally ill.

Speaking of which, she came to us with the name, "Callie,"  just like our last doomed cat. I immediately suggested that my daughter rename her.  She is now Lolly, the same name my daughter gives most of her dolls and imaginary friends.

May she have nine very long lives.

When Spousal Indiscretion Serves the Greater Good

There have been many casualties in this brutal war against my unfinished house, but the one I mourned most was the loss of my daughter's baby pictures.

I hate printing.  It kills trees.  And it yields papers, which must be filed.  I hate filing.  So the first year of my daughter's life was recorded only in pixels.  And we talked about backing up those electronic pictures onto a CD or something, but we didn't.

And then our computer, along with a guitar and a video camera, were gone.  This happened before we ran out of money for contractors and we believe one of two things happened:

1.  The construction workers left the door unlocked and a lucky thief happened to notice.

2.  One of the construction workers was a lucky thief.

I cried.  Several times.  Have you seen those commercials where the woman who failed to back up her photos dresses her 9 year-old in his baby clothes in a mad attempt to recreate his baby pictures?  On some desperate occasions, I considered dressing my son (who happens to be a clone of his big sister, if it weren't for his gender) in my daughter's baby dresses to fake some nice mementos.

Fast forward three years.  A couple of weeks ago, my mother-in-law calls with news.  She spent Thanksgiving at her daughter's house and guess what she found there?

Apparently, back when my daughter was a baby, she requested photos of her granddaughter from my husband.  That blessedly lazy man, instead of choosing some nice ones to send her, simply copied off our whole photo album onto a CD and sent it off.  She soon lost the CD, but not until after she had copied it and sent CDs to all of my in-laws.  And one of those in-laws still had it!  A few days later, I got my very own copy of my own photos in the mail!

I was thrilled!  Until I noticed how thorough that album was, and then I was quite embarrassed to realize that all of my in-laws had been privy to these photos.  My sweet hubby had not taken any time to censor the album before copying it.  There were several pictures of myself in a bikini showing off my expanding pregnant belly.  Worse, there were pictures of my daughter (and a not-so-flattering part of myself)  as she entered the world during her vaginal delivery.

Oh well. The humiliation is worth having that lost year of photos back.  Here are some recently recovered highlights from my daughter's first year of life:

Our First Family Photo (my daughter is the one in the ultrasound, 6 weeks gestation)

Within Minutes of Her Birth


My First Mother's Day


Meeting Great Grandma


With Daddy and Grandma


At Her First Parade


No First's Here, but isn't she cute?

Merry Christmas!

Birthday Pics

The angelic face captured through skill and trickery...

His actual expression through most of the session...

On his birthday, Grandma and Grandpa took him and some cousins on a train ride and to a children's museum exhibit. He grinned the whole way. The train was certainly a hit.

His aunt and uncle gave him this cool ride for his birthday. Within about an hour or two of ownership, he was performing daring stunts like this...

Colors and Commitment

I have been painting my basement rec room lately. White. This is a very unusual color choice for me. I like colorful colors. However, the room in question has purple carpet installed by the previous owners and a green sofa inherited from my husband's grandparents that is much nicer than anything we could afford, so we had to go neutral on the walls.

My husband and I put considerable effort into choosing the perfect shade of white. My parents gifted us the services of a professional faux painter to texture and top coat the walls. (She traded them this service for the privilege of using their ideal home for her daughter's wedding.) We consulted with her about color choices that would not clash with the purple and green and would combat the dark, dungeon-like feeling of the basement room and she recommended "ivory," which she described as off-white with a yellowish hue.

We looked at lots of paint samples that were the same color as all the dingy, cinder block, quite dungeon-like student apartments and dorms of my past. We carefully avoided that exact shade, and the result was, well, white. I saw a finished white room on the painter's website, and with her finishing touches, that white room was quite lovely, so I am hoping for a beautiful and not-as-dull final product.

As I painted the white room, I was reminded of a scene from a movie I watched recently, The Accidental Husband. The heroine's boring fiance attempts to engage her in a discussion about paint samples and she tells him they all look the same. "In what sense?" He asks. "In the sense that they are all white," she responds.

Now I am about to give away the end of the movie, but it wasn't a great movie so if you haven't seen it, don't bother. The heroine leaves her fiance at the alter.

As I mused on this topic, I soon thought of several films featuring characters whose apathy toward their romantic partners is manifest as apathy toward paint samples:

(Warning: I liked these flicks, so if you haven't ever seen them, avert your eyes. Although, when you see a character shunning paint samples, you'll know what's up.)

IQ: Because she doesn't care, the heroine randomly points to the color, algea, when her fiance asks her to choose a color for their new home. She dumps him before long.

Juneau: Husband doesn't care what color they paint the nursery. By movie end, he is divorcing his wife and dabbling in pedophilia.

He's just not that into you: Husband barely humors his wife as she muses about paint colors for a new addition at their home. He is in bed with another woman a few scenes later.

Are so many screenwriters telling this story because they can't think of another metaphor for commitment problems? Or have they independantly stumbled on a universal truth?

Just in case, I am relieved that my husband actively participated in finding the perfect shade of white for the rec room.

He's a Big Boy Now

My son turned two recently, so I thought I would take a moment to highlight him.

Signs of Bigness
While his birthday was just recently, he declared his "big boy"-ness a few months back, when, almost within the same week, he refused to sit in a high chair any more, moved out of his crib into a toddler bed, and asked for a turn on the toilet for the first time where he actually succeeded at going peepee!  Shortly thereafter, we put out the toddler potty, and now he occasionally announces, "Pee-pee!  Potty!" and goes into the bathroom to sit on his potty.  On about a fourth of these occasions, he actually goes.  Usually he just hangs out naked and pretends.

Current Interests
Letters:  He has a Leapfrog toy that announces the names of letters and he studies it faithfully.  Now he remembers the names of several letters and can correctly identify his favorite:  the letter 'O'.  He pretends to read, pointing at signs and randomly calling out the names of letters.  He wows strangers by pointing at the letter 'O' and naming it.  "He can read!  How old is he?"  they exclaim.  I agree that he can read--one letter: 'O'.  My mom has a giant "NOEL" in her entryway in honor of Christmas and my letter-loving son likes to steal that big, 3D 'O', leaving only a "NEL".   Lately, he has also taken up writing.  He scribbles something, and then announces which letter he has just written. "O! B! N!" he reports.  It is a good thing he reports his writing out loud, because it is written in a scribble code only he can understand.

Speaking of Scribbling:  This is another favorite activity.  It is very endearing on paper and the chalkboard, and less so on the walls.

His Woobie:  He has a favorite blanket, given to him by my parents when he was a baby.  He must sleep with it, takes it out of bed with him in the morning and walks around with it, and protests when I wash it. 

Dancing:  He is a dancing fool.  I keep trying to catch him on film, but whenever he sees a camera he stops dancing and tries to steal it.  Maybe someday I will get a video posted here if I am sneaky enough.  He has a hot pink Barbie alarm clock passed down from his cousin that plays Barbie dance music.  He carries it around the house and asks me to plug "Bobby" in.  (No, I am not going to take away his love of dance just because gender stereotypes say he shouldn't like Barbie stuff.)  He also likes to sing and dance to Blues Clues Big Music Show, which he calls, "Beep Bop Bay" after the sophisticated lyrics to one of its main songs.

Balls:  He loves balls and anything related to them, like rackets, basketball hoops, clubs and bats. See, that Barbie alarm clock isn't hurting his masculinity.

Helping:  He loves to be a helper.  He is so proud of himself when he cleans up toys and lately, he has actually developed a knack for finding things for me.  Recently, Jared and I were discussing artichokes.  I had three, but Jared thought there had been four.  It's not like we eat a lot of artichokes around here, so I don't know how he knew what we were talking about, but he came running into the room and gave us the missing vegetable.  (Yes, it was missing because he had stolen it, but it was still impressive.)

Hugging and Kissing:  He was always such an affectionate baby and he still the same as a toddler.

Halloween

My daughter had planned to dress as her hero, Curious George, for Halloween, but changed plans when Daddy got the flu and could not accompany her as the man in the yellow hat.  She was a dinosaur instead.  My son was a dog, and went around saying, "Woof."  However, he refused to wear his dog hat on his head even for photos.

As expected, trick-or-treating was a big hit. I was surprised to see the large cache even in my son's bucket, who appeared to eat every candy as he received it.

The only shaky moment was when we visited a very well-decorated house complete with animated decor like a coffin that opened up and steamed when you passed it.  My boy literally jumped up into my arms.  My daughter forged on, with my continuous assurance that it was all pretend, but she cried for a few minutes after we had left the yard. 

After that, I wanted her to be prepared for the annual Halloween visit to Grandpa, so I warned her that Grandpa would be dressed scary, but he would still be nice Grandpa.  When we arrived, I had trouble convincing her to enter, because she did not want to see Grandpa looking scary.  She finally came, but she scolded Grandpa regularly throughout the evening for being too scary.  In consideration of anyone else who might be scared, she followed him to the door whenever he answered to trick-or-treaters to inform them all that he was actually just her Grandpa in a costume.  At one point, she even came back to me with her hat off.  She explained that someone had thought she was a real dinosaur, so she had taken off her "mask" so that they would know it was just pretend and she was actually a very un-scary girl.

Grandpa's house was hoppin' with trick-or-treaters.  As he does every year, my dad kept fretting that he needed to go to the store for more candy.  Since my mom is out of town on her annual trip with her sisters, I took on her role of reminding him that it was perfectly acceptable to turn off the porch light when you run out of candy, especially if it is after nine pm and the only trick-or-treaters left are old enough to hold jobs and buy their own candy.

Meanwhile, at our house, I left a bucket of candy at the front gate with a quarantine sign so no one would catch my husband's plague.  It was an unnecessary precaution, since the neighbors all informed me that my kids and the next-door-neighbors' kids were the only ones who trick-or-treated our street all evening.  We live on a very unhospitable road without sidewalks and with very little lighting, the brightest of which lights our backyard, instead of any public area.  (It is actually very convenient for us to have the free backyard lighting, but I have no idea what the city was thinking when they put a street light there instead of at the street.)

Another big Halloween event for us is my daughter's annual Halloween preschool program, in which they sing songs and recite poems.  Last year, I was surprised at how serious and nervous my usually confident child appeared as she prepared for her first formal performance (especially in comparison to her beaming older cousin, who was in the same class).  This year, she seemed excited.  After the program, the kids trick-or-treat to the parents.  My son joined in on the action, first grabbing treats from my bucket and passing them out himself, and then jumping into the end of the line to see if anyone would give him some treats like the big kids.

My husband was devastated to miss the program because of his quarantined status, but my parents and brother came.  My mom tried to record the program for him to watch at home, but a technical problem meant that only the first song recorded.