Fine Young Fauves

This has been one of those weeks so rich in material I don't know where to start. Here are some of the headlines:

1) Baby stricken with bladder infection; runs fever of 104; hid painful urination from devoted mom

2) Clark Kent wears glasses; Isaac might need glasses: coincidence?

3) Husband blighted by gray spot at center of vision; couple spends four hours separately contemplating brain tumor; dad stuns son with orange pee after day of invasive medical testing

4) Couple signs life away to get new house; mortgage reaches well into dotage

5) Dog needs surgery under general anesthesia to correct bad pedicure

6) Youngster observes that sparkly label on Ice Breaker Sours, "Shines with divine light!"; mom renews concern about religious component at preschool

7) Lone family member survives week without medical/veterinary intervention

So that's the executive summary. It's been one big, pardon my French, clusterfuck of house and medical crises. This morning, though, we closed on the house! Tomorrow morning, we'll go down and get the keys. So exciting! I think it's safe to predict that the next two months are going to be exhausting and challenging in myriad ways, but: eyes on the prize. When the dust settles, we'll be rolling around in the grass on that limitless expanse of green. 

Of all the crises this week, the baby situation yesterday was by far the worst part. He'd had a fever at night for a few nights in a row, but I honestly chalked it up to teething. So too the occasional outburst of pain-crying. Gas, teething, whatever. It would only last five minutes or so and then he'd be his normal glowingly wonderful jolly self. At night I would sometimes give him a little Tylenol. But the teeth were a red herring, it turns out. Yes, he is teething. AND suffering from a bladder infection. I really didn't see that one coming.

I guess two nights ago it did worry me that sleeping with him, in my sleep, his little body felt like a heating pad. Also in my sleep I gave him Tylenol, but thought guiltily that I should get up and take his temperature before slumping into dreamland again. But I didn't. Yesterday morning he seemed rather out of it. When I dropped Isaac off at school he looked downright glassy-eyed. I met my friend Barbara for coffee after dropping our kids off, and while we were sitting there at the cafe, the baby's listlessness and sweltering heat were impossible to miss. Amazingly in my magic diaper bag I found a digital thermometer and took his temp. At about 9 a.m. it was about 100, ancillary (in his armpit) which meant 101 for real. I thought that was high, because he'd had Tylenol not too long beforehand. After another hour or so, I got worried enough to call the dr and make an appt for 1 p.m. The another hour elapsed. (We were talking away and also waiting to pick up the kids at 11:30.) He really felt like he was hot enough to cook an egg on. I took his armpit temp again: 103. Ancillary, with Tylenol! That means, really 104. 

At that point, I got really worried. SUPER worried. I called the dr back to see if I could get in earlier, but no. So I said I was thinking about taking him to the ER, because this was over the top. The nurse suggested a tepid bath, but said that if I was really that worried I should just go. When I mentioned that I couldn't give him a tepid bath right then because I was in a cafe, I could tell that she was appalled. This is an uncomfortable part of having two children! In doing right by one (planning on a short day for Isaac because that was our agreement), I was neglecting the other. Anyway, I decided that the baby was somehow incredibly sick and needed immediate medical attention, and that Isaac would have to stay at school until 3:15. Barbara grabbed something for Isaac to eat for lunch and we stepped out to implement the plan. However, at that very moment the skies opened with a truly blinding rainstorm. 

After dropping off lunch and telling Isaac the bad news that he would have to stay (he cried and it broke my heart, but I had to go!) I drove to the ER. All the way I was debating– should I wait the hour and a half til his appointment with his own doctor, or does he need to go in right now? How sick is he? How fast will he actually see a doctor at the ER anyway? How harmful is fever? What the hell is causing it? Does he have meningitis? etc. I pulled into the ER parking lot and then sat there in the pouring rain trying to figure out the best course of action. Since the rain was quite paralyzing anyway, I brought the baby into the front seat with me to evaluate the direness of the situation. But it seemed the dousing with cold water (although I had him bundled the rain was unavoidable) revived him a bit. He seemed almost normal for that moment. I took his temp again, this time rectal digital, the gold standard. Only 103.2! At that point I decided that he was unlikely to die in the next hour, and that going to see his own pediatrician would be better service and probably even faster in the long run. I paid a $10 fee for wrongfully entering the ER parking lot, and drove two blocks to the proper parking lot for my needs. 

The doctor ran through all the obvious causes of such a fever. No ears, no throat, no vomiting, no cough, no runny nose, no NOTHIN'. This is why I thought it was teething in the first place! He said it could be roseola, which had actually crossed my mind. Isaac had that one time– just a plain unadorned baking fever, followed by a rash some days later. But then he said there was another thing they had to rule out: bladder issues. Okay, gulp. I knew that meant a catheter, which didn't sound like a nice idea at all. And indeed it wasn't! Horrible. Just the iodine swabs were painful to watch. And then he was dry as the Sahara. There simply was nary a DROP of pee in there to be had. And the pushing and prodding and twisting to confirm this was painful to watch. The poor baby!!! I nursed him in a gymnastic position while he was going through it, and that helped a lot. But when the nurse left the room with me doubled over the examining table, my lower back beginning to smart, and the cath still in the poor wee thing, I wondered how long she planned to leave us like that. But she returned promptly with the doctor, showing him the stunning barren dryness therein. No option but to tape a sad little plastic bag to his baby boy parts and wait, wait, wait until he went of his own accord. (He had had a wet diaper on, so we weren't worried about dehydration.)

And wait. And wait. I called Ben and told him to drop everything because I couldn't get Isaac in time. He began rushing up to us. My phone was nearly dead. But in my magic diaper bag I found not only water and a cookie, but the complete NY Times from that morning, pristine and untouched. So that's how I passed the hours with my hot, fussy boy. Trying to get him to nurse or drink Pedialyte from a bottle. When he finally peed it was excruciating and his screams almost unendurable. But pee he did. A quick test showed he was positive for a bladder infection and the mystery was solved. 

Still, such a thing is strange in one so tiny. In a few weeks he will have to have some additional tests, an ultrasound of his kidneys and a dye test of his bladder to make sure he doesn't have some structural defect of some kind. we'll cross that bridge, etc. 

I dragged my sorry and bedraggled self home right though rush hour. We were supposed to close on the house at 6:30! But Ben had cancelled it, thank god.  

Today Elias has been overall better. He has hard core antibiotics, which may explain the bout of projectile vomiting and extreme diarrhea. His fever has been coming and going. I checked at 4:00 or so and found it to be around 102. But then a short time later he delivered a long and complex speech on ending tyranny that would have made Churchill proud. All in Urdu, alas. And he has had interludes of good cheer. He's much better than yesterday. the doctor says the infection was/is pretty bad and will take several days to resolve, but we're on the right track, anyway. 

Tomorrow, Isaac and I are going to get up early and go watch the blowing up of a large bridge. Then we're all going down to get the keys to the new house and then just go wallow in it for a while. Many logistics between living here and living there, but step one: get the house: has been completed.

The rest of the medical/veterinary/vision related issues are not seeming as important right now. 

8) Baby okay; new house awaits.  

   Thursday afternoon Isaac dropped a shovel, blade down, on his toe. I suppose there's never a good time to do something like that, but the afternoon before a predawn flight to New York, now that would be a bad time. 

   Earlier that day I was just leaving Isaac's hair cutting place, where he had been trimmed into wonderful shape (striking a balance between Ben's aesthetic, AKA "Eisenhower" and mine, which he coldly terms "Leif Garrett.") when my friend Martha called. She had a small personal crisis in that her husband was in the emergency room with causes that were unclear (turned out to just be flu-related dehydration). I offered to watch Noeli while she sorted that out and we rendezvoused at my house. During a very brief interlude, Isaac and Noeli out by themselves working in the yard. (It was almost fifty degrees after all.) I was upstairs, planning to make Isaac's bed while parking the baby nearby and watching the children through the window. However when I looked out, what I saw alarmed me. In ten short minutes they had both removed their shirts and reverted to a feral state. They had discovered a problem– that the car wasn't dirty enough to need washing and they wanted to wash it. And a solution– they had made a wheelbarrow full of mud and were launching it at the car with Isaac's catapult.

    What creative children!

    It really was working, too, as the front end of the car was already quite filthy, covered with large splats and the windshield running with grit.

    I leaned out the  window to register my, um, disapproval of this project. Isaac was saying, "But MOM…!" and then he dropped the shovel and began to scream.  I rushed downstairs with baby on my hip and somehow carried Isaac in to the kitchen. He was really screaming full tilt and the toenail was filling with blood immediately. The impact was right at the base of his big toenail on his left foot. I got an ice pack and gave him a big glug of children's Motrin, carted him upstairs to see if watching the Muppet Show would help. He screamed and screamed and screamed. Meanwhile, there was still Noeli and the baby to tend to also. But I got the baby to ride in his swing and managed to occupy Noeli with the project of chewing her way through an entire pack of gum. Isaac screamed on and on, while I variously hugged him, read first aid on the internet, spoke to the nurse on call, adjusted his ice pack, explained the situation to Ben who was en route home in the car, got a pillow to elevate it, etc., etc., etc. Multitasking at its finest. 

    The fact that he and Ben were scheduled to leave for New York well before sunrise was adding a layer of urgency to the project. the nurse on call said that I really should bring him in, and suggested the new pediatric ER– for kids only. I covered the toe in baby oragel– this topical novocaine type stuff for teething babies. That seemed to work. Martha picked up Noeli and Isaac drifted off to an exhausted and sweaty sleep. 

    As the evening wore on, Ben and I tried to wake him to see whether he could walk on it or not. We needed to decide whether to take him to the ER or whether he could go to New York, or what. For me, too, the stake were high. A three day weekend as a single parent of two, followed by two more days as Ben has a business trip also, looked a lot less attractive than a three-day weekend sorting and packing with just the baby to care for. Finally around 9:00 at night it was obvious that the toe was cripplingly painful and the trip was highly at risk. It seemed that the best hope for Isaac to still go to New York would be to take him to the ER and see if they could help him. I packed a bag with snacks and books and prepared to be there for hours.

    But amazingly, the children's ER was (at least that night) a wonderful experience! They got us in right away and more importantly they were actually able to fix the toe quite a bit! What the doctor did was bring in this little gadget, like a filament of metal at the end of a fat plastic handle. He told Isaac to look away (never a good sign) and didn't seem to have any local anesthetic on hand. This worried me, but I didn't want to raise the concern in front of Isaac. I just held him on my lap and covered his eyes. The doctor zapped a hole into the toenail itself, the room filled with the smell of burning hair, and blood began to gush out like crazy. It soaked through a couple iterations of gauze and then doctor got me to hold it and said that in a few minutes it would feel a lot better. It kept bleeding prolifically, but Isaac calmed down. I read him his arachnid book while holding the gauze on there and he was fine as long as he didn't actually see the florid bloody mess.  

    After a while, they came to x-ray it, which Isaac hated and cried all the way through. Turns out it did have a small fracture from the impact. A nurse came and bandaged up the whole mess. The doctor came back and said that this sort of thing can turn into a nasty infection, and with the fracture under it the infection can go into the bone, too, so he was prescribing an antibiotic to fend that off. Also strong pain medication because it was likely to throb at night and keep him awake. But as for New York, he said, "Oh, sure, he can go. Now that the blood is drained off it will feel a lot better."

    Recently, since Uncle Will's death, Isaac has decided to add "Uncle Will" to his name. He has repeatedly mentioned that his new name is Isaac Uncle Will Jonathan [Blank]. So when the insurance lady came in and asked him his name, he first spelled Isaac and then said his middle name was Uncle Will. So I said, "Well, tell her your OTHER middle name too." And he said, "Jonathan…. my name is Isaac Uncle Will Jonathan [Blank]." She looked at me questioningly. I explained, "Well his uncle Will died recently and he's decided to add 'Uncle Will' to his name. But his birth name is just Isaac Jonathan." She smiled wanly and went tappity tap on her keyboard. 

    A guy brought Isaac out to the car in a wheelchair. As we drove away, Isaac observed, "I liked that doctor. He was very well trained."  

    We had to stop on the way home to get his prescriptions and all told it was about midnight when we got home. Isaac was very wound up by then and couldn't sleep until about 2 a.m. He and Ben had to get up at 4 a.m. to leave for their 6:15 a.m. flight (ugh). And in the meantime the power went out. So poor Ben had to get Isaac ready and sort out the details in the pitch dark. I was on two hours of sleep, too, tending the baby. Ben kept walking through the room carrying a lantern.

    But they got off to NY without a hitch to attend a 50th wedding anniversary party for Ben's aunt and uncle. I'm home holding down the fort and trying to grapple with the reality of moving everything we own from this house to the new house and all that that entails.

    Lena got into the act also. Not wanting to be outdone, she tore off HER toenail and made a bloody mess all over the place, needing first aid and a call to the vet. I really need at least a two-year nursing degree at this point.  

Boyz in the hood woods…

After lo these nearly nine years of inner city living, we are moving to what can almost be called the country. Lady luck smiled upon us a few weeks ago when someone mentioned to Ben that we should look in Bath, Ohio. He drove around and came upon a for sale sign on a main road, with the house back there out of sight. He took a look around and peeked in the windows. He liked it enough that that weekend he brought me down there too. 

I stepped out of the car, and even on a miserable gray day in March… the LAND. It just took my breath away. Are you sitting down? It's almost 8 acres! Do you know how big an acre is? I didn't have the slightest idea how to grasp it, but have learned on line that it's like about a football field– slightly less and sans endzones. Okay… seven of those. There's a big grassy expanse fringed by woods. In the woods you have a nice creek, decent sized, that I gather is popular with the paddling set and even has white water parts somewhere along the line. (Looks pretty sleepy on our part but great for catchin crawdad, etc.)

The house has a center from 1831, even with a plaque saying so. Then along the way there's been some expansion. Not all the changes make sense, and here and there you come across a "huh?" moment. The siding needs repair, and indeed needs to NOT BE aluminum siding, but I digress. Anyway, there are some good points about the house and some so-so points, but it's overall totally workable. THe house is only slightly larger than our current house, but will definitely be fine. And then you look outside and say to yourself… LOOK AT THIS LAND.  

Due to scheduling whatnot, yesterday was the first time Ben got to see the inside of the house. Isaac and I wandered over hill and dale, finding a cute little garter snake and "an arachnid!" (as Isaac termed it), and seeing many birds, and sitting on a thinking rock, and finding a path down to the creek after we went the hard way through the woods, and lying on the grass (slightly damp) to see the clouds. There's a play structure there and Isaac has already decided who of his friends will get what swing.  "it's like having my own park!" he exclaimed. And indeed, this is way bigger than his usual city park.  

But first we had to get it. Last night we sat down with the realtor and went through the process of putting together an offer.  I was very disturbed to see another realtor there with another smiling couple yesterday. I really wanted to grab a pitch fork and tell them to "git off m'land!" and "no trespassin'!" But instead I had to make due with giving them the fish eye. Anyway, he who hesitates is lost. We put in our offer this morning, just ahead of two other also in this morning– and we got it! 

So now… it's going to be a busy couple weeks/months here. We've got to get the financing done. I spent half the morning on the phone with the mortgage people… writing with one hand while nursing a baby with the other… multitasking as always. And we've got to meet with the inspector on Wednesday, and go through all the various details. Then we'll close at the end of April and move some time after that, depending on a lot of factors. But we can overlap the houses for a couple months so it's not high pressure. We can get this house ready to sell… and then. Live down there.

I've been thinking of "hello-goodbye" pairings. Living in the city has a lot to offer, and living out in the sticks (although this is just a stone's throw from all the shopping in the world) has some detractors. I know it's not all roses and pie. But mostly!!

Goodbye car alarms, hello owls…

Goodbye being able to walk to five restaurants in a one-block radius, hello being snowed in at the end of a long driveway… (in the interest of fairness)

Goodbye homeless-person urine, hello coyote urine…

Goodbye mostly irrational fear of abduction, hello mostly irrational fear of rabid raccoon attack…

Goodbye broken glass and chain link, hello wildflowers…

Goodbye vermin (squirrels, mice, voles), hello different vermin… 

Goodbye no space, hello SPACE… 

A conversation:

Isaac: we should learn to be farmers and grow crops!

Me: what sort of crops would you like to grow?

Isaac: Pigs.

Me: hm, I like pork, it's tasty. But what about the killing part?

Isaac: I'd just take my gun. Boom. Real quick. And the pig would feel no pain.

A vegetarian he is not. 

About Bath. It's a tiny community on the northern fringe of Akron, but roughly midway from Cleveland to Ben's job– to which he has been driving two and a half hours round trip for twelve years. And yet it's only 30 minutes from Cleveland, so I can still go on with my life with basic normalcy. Okay, I drove around "Bath Center" which had a sign indicating that it was indeed there. It seems to consist of a fire/ambulance department, a school, and a city hall. That's really all I could see there. The rest is just residential. There are some hideous McMansions nearby. It's on the fringes too of this massive national park. Indeed my project for the summer with Isaac, before this house was even a thought, was to learn that park, to walk all over it and work on our birding and other flora/fauna skills– and now– right on our backyard!

And also, as you may know, Bath was put on the map by serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. When we first looked at the house, and then at the price (which is stunningly cheap– I know my friends on the coasts are going to faint) I figured, "Oh sure: the Dahmer house." But no. I waded grimly through some horrible police records until I found the exact address of the house where he lived from age 8 to 18 or so, and where he killed his first person. I google-mapped it. No. This is NOT the Dahmer house. I know you're as relieved as I am. And now, looking at the whole picture I can say, hey, this town is pre-disastered. I mean, what are the chances that ANOTHER psychopathic serial killer will show up there? Must be a billion to one at least. I feel very secure that we will be safe there. The house doesn't even seem haunted. It just seems cheerful and warm and quirky. 

So my head is spinning. It's giddy delight. I have really loved our house and our life here in Ohio City. But there's a lot that I'm tired of too– like crack-heads breaking into cars just to get a little bit of change from the ash tray. Like loud music from the passersby, and lots of sirens. Like drunken St. Patrick's Day partiers needing to be asked to please not have sex on the curly slide so our little boy can play on it. Like the postage stamp yard (grass area, literally ten by ten feet) and the boy in the house bouncing off the walls like a super ball. Now I'll have that much needed ability to say simply, "Go out and play." Just go OUT and PLAY. Give the kid a soccer ball and let him run up and down or something. Here, I have to be with him every minute, making sure he's safe. Which is one thing when he's four… And did I mention that I have another boy who too will soon start to bounce off the walls like a super ball? Go out and play, you kids! This is truly a gift. I'm excited. I'm so excited that even the hell of moving seems like, eh. Whatever. We'll deal with it.

Non-stalkers drop me a note and I will send you the realtor link so you can look at some photos for yourself. 

Goodbye known, hello unknown…  

It's been rather momentous around here, what with all the milestones. I think it was about two weeks ago that Isaac suddenly sat down and wrote his name. Well, before that he wrote "zoo." But other than zoo and a capital I, he didn't write intelligibly at all. He claimed he could write, though. One time he filled a page with mysterious scribbles to demonstrate his writing ability. I said, "Oh, that's lovely. What does it say?" To which he indignantly replied, "You know I can't read!"

Well. Now he can. He can read all sorts of things. I got these little flash cards as a part of a leap frog package, and so I've been making little 3-letter words for him out of the cards. Like, hop, pet, hen, sun, that type of thing. He sits and sounds them out and, well, READS them! There are no pictures or clues as to what the words are. He just flat-out reads them. I still can't get over it.

 So then yesterday I was sitting in the living room nursing the baby. In the dining room, Isaac was having a snack– freeze dried strawberries. I heard him in there reading the label: "Juh. Uh. Ss. Tuh. Jjjuuuusssst. Just. Just. Okay. JUST. Or. Guh. AAA. NN. ic. Orrrrrrggggaaaannnnic. Ic. Organic. Org? Just Organic Strawberries!" 

Hallelujah! Wow. Reading! Incredible. So last night there was an altercation at bed time, in which stuffed animals were thrown and Daddy walked out of the room, refusing to put Isaac to bed any further. Much adoo, much adoo. Ultimately I set Isaac up with books, to read to himself! I gave him a couple baby books from his youth that had just one word per page. He took to the project really delightedly, and indeed shooed me out of the room. "Mom– I'm reading by myself now!" he explained. A few minutes later he came in with a hard one: bend. Yes– you can see with the mirror images of b and d why this would be hard. I told him and then he went away again for a long time.

I think it's connected with this that this morning, for the first time in ages, he was loath to say goodbye to me at school. I was lingering there because I was meeting another mom for coffee. So Isaac kept peeking back out the door at me, "Mommy! Where are you going?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm just going to do some errands and stuff." I said. He didn't seem too happy with this.

"I'm afraid for you," he said. I came back and gave him a hug.

I said, "You mean– you're afraid that something will happen to me, or you're afraid to be here at school by yourself?"

He said, "I'm afraid something will happen to you."  I reassured him that I would be fine, and back to get him soon and so on. He seemed okay and then again, just as I was leaving, came running out of class and jumped into my arms.

"I just need one more hug!" he said. 

I don't know– this could be part of the Uncle Will fall-out, fear that I might die suddenly too, that anyone could. Or it could be reading, the PLUNGE into this new huge phase of his life. Or both, maybe. I've read that these developmental leaps can take a strange toll on kids. Maybe it's part of why he's been acting like a crazy man for the last six months. Or the baby, too. Good lord. Isaac has had a lot to cope with lately.

The other day we went to his piano lesson having not practiced at all in the previous ten days. The teacher asked him to play material that he had seen once, at their last lesson. He played it– perfectly. The teacher said, "Wow! Good job! You must have been practicing a lot!" I can tell you that on the one hand I was proud of him– proud that he did well, proud that for once he could sit still for a moment and show his abilities. But on the other hand, my heart sank. Oh great, I thought, he's going to be one of these kids who breezes through everything without working at all. This is a whole different problem and challenge.

The challenge is, how to get him to actually WORK and TRY at something that's difficult. I can already see that he will give up if he doesn't get something instantly. (Except skating, which he seems very concerned to learn no matter what.) It's such a fine line, because I don't want to ride his ass constantly and seem like no matter what he does I'm never going to be happy with him. But on the other hand I know personally the trap of getting good grades with minimal effort. (Hello, Colin?) It creates mental stagnation, laziness and arrogance. Also, what if you are really smart AND work, rather than just being really smart and sitting around making everything look easy? What could you accomplish?

Well, this will be something to think about and work on his whole upbringing. But in the meantime, he's four and a half and a reading master! I'm really excited for him, because reading on his own is going to give him so much freedom. 

In other news, the baby is eating solid foods! What a splendid fellow. He has had the 90% breast milk, 10% rice cereal sort of meal each day for over a week, and now he's tried applesauce and bananas also. He loves eating! He's crazy about eating. He's such a little chunky, roly-poly little butterball. He sits on the table in his little Bumpo chair like a centerpiece and I shovel food into his adorable toothless little pie hole.

He's working on the teeth, too, gnawing on everything and seemingly every third night having a horrible time with pain management. Monday night here was awful– we were up for hours. I gave him Orajel and Tylenol and wet this and cold that and nursed and nursed and so on and so forth, but he was just miserable, fitful, crying, kicking his little feet and flailing his little fat hands. We both got about three hours sleep (meanwhile Isaac slept beautifully– if only they would do it at the same time!) and then it was time to get up for school. Arg. Staggering forth yet again. It's just brutal sometimes. But … so it goes in mamaland.

It's nice when there's some sense of progress– the reading thing has been simmering for so long, and now the pay-off is wonderful. The eating is bittersweet– my baby is growing up so quickly!! It's all a blur.  

Should I have seen the signs? Should the shaved hoo-hah and lack of modesty have tipped me off? Just replace "attacking SUVs with umbrellas" with "insane peeing"; and "Promises rehab" with "crate in the laundry room" and you have yourself the cat version of Britney. It's a full fledged mental collapse. And this time, she may indeed be beyond redemption.

A few days ago I learned the dreadful news that Zane Grey had suddenly and inexplicably renewed her commitment to pee on clothes in my closet. I made it difficult for her, but she found a way. Apparently, as is so often the case, her stint in rehab didn't translate to life in the wider society. Sure, she stuck to her program for the first week or two. But then the slightest thing came along– who knows what– and she was in immediate relapse. I found out the other day when I discovered that, although I was keeping the closet floor scrupulously bare, and the lower shelf totally empty, she had been JUMPING up into a higher shelf in my closet and peeing there! Yes– another batch of clothes out to the trash, more scrubbing, Nature's Miracle, and heart ache. I volleyed back with a cat-deterring mat (in this case, an upside down plastic office chair thingy, with lots of pointy bits that feel bad on little patty paws).

But did that stop the problem? Did keeping her out of the closet completely put an end to the confusion? No, dear reader, it made it worse.

Two nights ago, I was (surprise) exhausted. It was maybe 11 p.m. or so. I climbed into bed, and soon had to get up to change a diaper and resettle the baby. I am accustomed to doing these things in the dark. When I got back into bed five minutes later I felt… yes… wet. A puddle? What? I turned on the light in horror. The cat had peed directly on the bed while I was so briefly out of it. The layers… quilt, blanket, sheet, other sheet, mattress pad, another mattress pad… all soaked. The mattress itself! A dinner-plate-sized peed puddle! Down into the padding!

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

So. I had to wake up Ben (sleeping on the dry side) and dispatch him to sleep with Isaac. Strip the bed of course and carry everything downstairs. Blot the puddle over and over and then massage it with Nature's Miracle (enzyme based cleaner for such things). Take a shower and put on clean pajamas. Relocate baby and me to the guest room, where luckily the bed was already made. And then… you won't be surprised to learn after all this excitement baby was WIDE AWAKE. Yes. For FOUR HOURS.

During those four hours I made my plans about how to capture the cat again, recrate her in the laundry room. And then what? Obviously the program had failed. So what now? How can I ever trust her again? Her little walnut brain is clearly misfiring somehow.

Options:

1) put a cat box in the bedroom closet, where she seems intent on peeing. Thus she modifies our life to suit hers and we have a nuisance to deal with. I don't want the cat box in the bedroom. Yuck. ANd now that she's bed-peeing, it might not even work.
2) keep her trapped in the laundry room from now on. Not workable because we are in and out of there all the time, and she will surely escape.
3) Keep her in the crate for the rest of her life. Like… six or seven years?
4) Find her a new home, in, say, a barn. There she can catch mice and live a reasonably happy cat life. She's spayed, healthy, and has all her claws. If I could find her a nice barn someplace… yes. Yesterday morning I sent out a distress e-mail to several parties who might be able to help. Today I have a few leads.

I caught her and put her in her crate yesterday, and there she sits. She has a new bed in there and of course a cat box and food and water. It's reasonably comfortable as a short-term solution. Loneliness. Yes. I'm sure she's suffering from loneliness. But the reality is that I don't LOVE her enough to see us through this. I don't have that unconditional almost parent-child type love that I do have for Lena dog and I did have for Mr. Cat. She's a fine cat, but this is too much! I've thrown away heaps of clothes, and now am washing piles of bedding, each batch twice with lots of borax. I'm looking into getting a new mattress– I mean, this cat and her whims are costing us money. And inconvenience, and stress, dear god above.

I never imagined that I would be such a fair-weather cat owner. But the relief with which I view being cat-free speaks for itself. How wonderful it would be to simply not have all these worries and additional tasks in my life right now. Things are complicated enough!

She can stay in her crate until I find a nice barn, and until the weather warms up. I would NOT put her scrawny bald ass out in the cold. I still, well, I'm fond of her and I care about her. In the spring, when the tasty birdies are starting to fledge, I hope that a barn will reveal itself to me.

The other night at dinner we were having one of our all-too-common dinner altercations. You know, Isaac whirling his napkin over his head like some kind of warrior or perhaps sports fan, refusing to eat, running laps around the table, and generally disturbing the peace. We were struggling with him, trying to get him to a) leave the room or b) behave in a civilized manner. In the heat of the moment, Isaac suddenly yelled: "I'm not affiliated with you!" Although (or because) he said this in sincere anger, this went a long way towards lightening the mood.

But sadly, he IS affiliated with us, whether he likes it or not. A recent conversation:

Father: What was the last battle of the Revolutionary War?

Son: Yorktown!

They slap five.

(At age four, he knows much more about the Revolutionary War than I do. I'd never even HEARD of the battle of Cowpens until just a few weeks ago. Hello? South High? You failed me.)

This sort of thing happens in our house a lot. That is, Isaac shares our interests, can't help but. Thus he's a pint-sized history buff and a decent amateur birder. He's happy to compare funnel webs and orb webs of spiders, and can identify quite an array of founder father types ("It's John Jay! He has quite a schnoz!") He's taken to correcting my dinosaur pronunciations. "It's not parasaura-LO-phus, Mama! It's parasaur-OL-ofphus!"

And our flaws… sigh. Between the two of us, we have most of the deadly sins covered.

I've been trying to engender more SLOTH in him lately. I used to worry about his watching too many videos, and to fret over whether what he watched was enriching enough. But since I've had the baby I've found myself so desperate, I'm basically BEGGING him, "Watch Super Friends! Please!" It's pathetic! Over the last several weeks I've asked Ben several times to bring something home that he will WATCH. I mean really have long-term eye-bonding with. But Ben keeps coming up with "the history of the London Underground" and things like that. Finally I broke down myself and got Superfriends AND the Incredibles. And yes, Superfriends worked. You mean– ALL the Superheroes, TOGETHER? Like… Batman, Robin AND Superman?? And all these other ones, like the Green Lantern and the Flash? What could be better? Well… I could wish for some basic attempt to make the dialogue half way decent, some semblance of plot and character building, less than atrocious animation, but that's just me.

Another recent conversation:

Father: Hawkman is boring.

Son: Hawkman is NOT boring! He can fly!

vigorous debate ensues…

Isaac has been making a lot of plans lately about this "Batman Flyer" he's going to have one day soon. I was telling him about the death of Princess Diana, because there's this major exhibit here with a big poster of her that we drive by twice a day. (We're going to go see her beautiful dress.. Isaac picked up a brochure about this the other day and has been carrying it around and seeming to read it with great interest.) He listened to the whole tale of her drunk driver and the paparazzi and the high-speed chase, and then replied, "I'd just get my Batman flyer, come over there. Boom. Stop them in time!" Last night he made a very impressive sketch of it. It's sort of like a hang glider. Amazingly, it doesn't need an engine of any kind. It just needs "buttons" on your arm to control it.

When I saw what he was talking about I loaded up a bunch of hang glider video from the internet and this pleased him greatly. Now he plans to be a glider bum as soon as he's old enough to have a scraggly goatee and a Peruvian hat and jump off cliffs in Utah. I don't think that Ben and I would ever go in for that sort of thing. He's affiliated with us, but he's still his own man.

This is little Zane Grey. In the first photo, she’s shown with her normal fur (the late Mr. Cat at left). Then… the haircut. Now, as you likely know, if you take your long-furred cat into a pet grooming place, they will just give her the lion cut before you can say Jack Robinson. I think it was a good move, though. Mats, under which lay dead and suffocated skin; snow drifts of shedding year round; poop getting stuck in her long flourishing tail; the ick-factor and a housewise revulsion of petting her; the recent closet horror show, perhaps resulting from the displacement of bodily functions toted along in her tail; and a stray flea or two. Now she is slate colored velvet, so touchable, so slinky and pleased with herself. And she really looks like a tiny gray lion! And she has a pink bow!

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