Fine Young Fauves

I think it was roughly three months ago that Isaac began talking about and planning his McGregor costume for Halloween. Long before anyone else was thinking about it, he was practicing. He loved chasing his victim (usually me) throughout the house, yelling “Stop Thief!” And “Wee beasty! Wee pest! Wee varmint!”

So gradually over the last month or so I began putting the costume together. I scrutinized the faded watercolors of Beatrix Potter’s books. I even looked at different editions to see if I could pull out any more details. I noticed the McGregor appears in several stories other than just Peter Rabbit. In “The Flopsy Bunnies” for instance, he’s wearing a jacket.

But my goal was to basically capture the Mr. McGregor of Peter Rabbit, the one who Isaac first encountered in very good British animated version. This McGregor terrified Isaac and yet attracted him so strongly that he would beg to watch it and then watch it while standing safely in the other room, peering around the corner.

I started out with the basics: a blue button down shirt, khaki pants, plain brown shoes, and a vest. I wasn’t sure where I would a size 3T tweed vest, and pictured myself cutting up a second-hand shirt, but I found one on my first try, at a local consignment shop. As it turned out, there were several vests there, including one complete size 3T pin-striped three-piece suit! The vest was brown and tweedy and came with a lame synthetic shirt. $3 for the set. Then Ben brought home a long white beard from a novelty shop. Perfect. I was trying to picture how I would make it out of batting and a piece of flannel, but just buying one was much easier. I found a pair wire-rimmed kids’ glasses at Target, a tweedy hat at the Gap.

Unfortunately, the beard scared him. I mean, really scared him. Ben put it on to show that it was not harmful, but he made the mistake of roaring while he wore it and then Isaac ran away in fright. He wouldn’t even touch the tiniest edge of it and shied from it where it sat on the table.

This worried me, but I turned my attention to the piece de la resistance: the rake.

The rake held a special place in Isaac’s mind when he thought of this costume. “And I’ll have a RAKE!” he would daydream aloud. We were at a toy store a couple weeks ago and there was a bucket full of kid sized rakes by Brio. There were two choices: one of those softer rakes with the long plastic tines for sweeping leaves off grass, and the short, blunt right angle kind-with metal tines. Of course he scorned the softer kind and went right for the deadly one. He began running around the toy store wielding it with great enthusiasm-and making me incredibly nervous that someone would lose an eye.

I didn’t buy it that day, which was not easy.

But I thought about it– It WAS the one most like the rake McGregor had, and yet, would he kill someone with it? Was that really practical? A week or two went by and we were in another toy store, and there it was again. I brought out a small plastic hand rake, thinking hopelessly that maybe he would go for it. No-no way. He looked up from his train set and said simply, “That’s not a rake. That’s a toy.” He was right. I decided to get him a proper rake, one that he could use later to actually RAKE with outside.

But soon I regretted this decision.

Later that day, the UPS man came. Isaac greeted him at the door, shaking his rake at him and hissing through clenched teeth, “Wee PEST! Wee PEST!” Amazingly enough, the UPS man was not anywhere near as charmed by this performance as I was. Even when I explained, “He’s practicing for Halloween,” the UPS man did not smile.

The next day Isaac threw the rake at me, sending it sailing through the air across the room, where it nearly bludgeoned me on the head. I reflexively protected myself with my arms and the rake went clattering against the wall. You see, McGregor really does throw his rake! And so Isaac reasoned that to be true to the role, he would also have to throw HIS rake. But I don’t think he meant to throw it really quite that hard. It was one of those moments where method acting meets limited dexterity with disastrous results. I took the rake away and put it high up in a closet, and Isaac howled on and on at the injustice of that. “My RAAAAAAAKE!” he screamed. “I need my rake!”

I let him scream. He needed to learn that throwing the rake was 100% out of the question, and that if he was going to get the rake ever again he had to demonstrate that he had the maturity to handle it.

Several hours later we were at the Science Center and Isaac really really REALLY wanted this sort of 6-foot-tall Styrofoam rocket that would really go 150 feet in the air. I mean, REALLY wanted it. But then just as he was about to fling himself on the ground in a tantrum, he stopped himself. I saw him STOP. He put the thing back in its holder and walked away. “I’m ready to go now,” he announced. When we were going down the escalator he looked up at me and said, “I can have my rake back because I was SO GOOD!”

I had to admit– he was really good, and it was the sort of goodness and self discipline that is the hardest kind for him to master. I decided that several hours rake free was long enough for him to get the message, and that keeping it away forever, no matter how good he was, would be unjust. I mean, is there no redemption?

So we got home and I gave it back to him and yes, since then he has never thrown it again. He still has a way of running with it in a threatening manner, but he understands, I think, what will happen if he loses control of himself– or of it.

Anyway, on to Halloween. I got him dressed in his shirt, pants, shoes, and vest. Then what happened was perhaps that a recent trip to Boston, Oct 26-29, caught up with him suddenly on the 31st. After a thoroughly normal and even low-key day, he suddenly conked out on the couch about 15 minutes before the festivities were to begin. Humph. So I let him sleep for a half hour or so, but then guests were arriving (we ended up having an impromptu Halloween party), and the trick-or-treaters were coming on fast. So I decided to try to wake him up, lubricating the process with candy as needed. He screamed. He was miserable. He refused to go anywhere near his costume. He removed his vest and shoes and wanted also to remove his shirt and pants, so thoroughly did he reject the whole concept of being Mr. McGregor. He was a complete pill for an hour or so and then finally settled in to the party. He let kids play with his new train set!! Which for him, was an act of boundless generosity. He tried on a little girl’s fairy wings even– and they did look quite nice.

So, in the end, we had a McGregor-free Halloween after all. Oh well. More items to throw into his costume box. And at least he still has his rake, which he’s outside passionately raking with as we speak.

Isaac began his birthday today at about 4:45 a.m. He woke up and called me to his room. I stumbled in and found him quite alert, sitting on his bed. “I wanna play my excavator!” he explained. I said no. I said… it’s not morning yet. It’s still night. The Earth has not turned to face the sun yet, and we are diurnal. We had a brief scuffle as I tried to insist that he return to bed and continue sleeping. But that’s the thing: you can make someone lie down. You can make someone be quiet. But you can’t make someone sleep. Especially a backhoe-obsessed three-year-old birthday boy who has a new digger.

We sort of forged a compromise. I would provide the basic services of carrying in his new digger and turning on the light. Then I would curl up in his bed. He would play while I walked the fine line between sleeping and supervising the construction project.

The new toy, “The Big Dig” it’s called, arrived yesterday in a boldly illustrated and impressive box. It offers the real benefits of a backhoe with none of the drawbacks. It’s basically a kid-sized office chair, with a long beautiful boom, a dipper arm, a bucket with teeth, and of course, LEVERS. The kid can sit upon it and do the levers, picking up things, rotating and then dumping. What more can you want or need from your digging equipment?

Last night Isaac wanted it IN his bath. It’s way too big for that. So we compromised. He could have it in the bathroom, next to his bath. Thus he could nakedly leap from the tub at will, and drive the thing and do the levers for a little while with his little wet bum sliding around on the plastic seat. Then, when chilly, could return to bathing. A perfectly splendid arrangement for all. However, his bath was cut short when he repeatedly splashed me with his rubber goldfish, Golda. I took Golda away and then he leapt from the tub, protesting vigorously that “she can’t breathe in the air! She needs to be in the water! She has gills!” etc. And then to punctuate his dismay, marched over and slugged me in the leg. So then I put him in his room in a timeout and calmly drained the bath. I didn’t intend the bath-draining as an additional punishment. I just figured he was clean and it was time for bed. But Isaac didn’t see it that way. His screaming went to the next level of intensity, along with fragmented mention of “my bath! not all done!” etc. By the time I realized how upset he was about it, the bath was already gone. Should I fill it up again? I wondered. But no… that made no sense. The bath was done and that’s all there was to it.

A few days ago he screamed himself into such a frenzy that he actually vomited (toy store incident…) so this option crossed my mind, too. I put lotion on him and diapers and jammies and held him close. I wondered whether the clean jammies would soon be vomit-soaked. We practiced deep breathing. After a while I convinced him to watch the planet show with me and while watching it he slipped off to sleep.

It occurred to me this morning that “we” are three. I am three years old at being his mother; Ben is three years old at being his father; he is three years old at being himself. We’re all young at it. But we’ve all learned a lot so far, too.

He’s really into astronomy these days. The other night we were on a nice walk to see the moon. As we walked down the street, a friendly young woman came by and asked about our dog. We chatted with her for a little while as we walked. Then Isaac and the woman pulled slightly ahead. He began to tell her, in great detail, with much drama, about the formation of the moon. “A big rock come from outer space and HIT the Earth! And they went around and around like this [demonstrating passionately with his hands] and then the moon just FLIED OFF! And there’s no sound in outer space!” The woman was clearly dazzled by all the emotion and hand gestures involved, but I’m not 100% sure that she could understand his accent.
“Well! Really?” she said, looking at me just slightly baffled.
“He’s describing the formation of the moon,” I explained as unobtrusively as possible.
“Oh!” she said. “I’m impressed!”

The other day we were in the library. Isaac is very bold and forthright in his dealings with the librarians, who have gotten to know him fairly well. Isaac marched up to the desk, which the top of his head barely surpasses, and said, “’Cuse me. … ‘cuse me!” The librarians were talking but one of them took up the challenge of discerning what he wanted.
“Yes?” she said.
“Why does a sword…. Sword … sword…” he struggled for the words, groping with his hands and looking up at her intently. “Why do swordfish kill whales?”
“You want a book about a swordfish and a killer whale?”
“Why do the swordfish KILL …WHALES?” He said this just as plain as he possibly could, but the problem was that his question was so unexpected and obscure that she couldn’t really get it. She looked at me.
“He wants to know why swordfish kill whales. We read in a book that they all gang up together and stab a whale until it’s dead, and this idea really upset him, and he wants a book that explains why they do that.”
“Oh!” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I’ll see what I can find.”

We entertained ourselves while she looked. Isaac likes to play the game that he’s doing his important work at the computer and then I ask to use it. Unfortunately, he’s forced to say no. I wait briefly and ask again, hopeful, and he restates the disappointing fact that his work is important and I will have to wait. After a while the librarian came back.
“Sorry,” she said. I can only find a book that shows a swordfish, and another book that shows a whale, but I can’t answer his question. I even looked around on the internet…”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I can’t answer his questions either, half the time.”

A little while later Isaac approached another librarian, a man, who had witnessed the whole swordfish/whale exploration. “’Cuse me,” said Isaac.
“Yes, Isaac?” said the librarian– he’s the one who some months ago Isaac corrected about whether octopuses have “legs” or “tentacles.”
“Why do stars collapse?”
“What?”
“Why does a star burn out and collapse?”
“You want to know, why does a star burn out and collapse?”
“Yes. And a cartoon of it.”
The librarian looked at me. I said, “I think what he’s after here is some sort of computer animation showing how a star looks when it’s collapsing, along with an explanation as to why they collapse in the first place.”
He shook his head. “You’ll have to go upstairs to technology. MAYBE they can help with that. But we have nothing like that here in Children’s. And can I tell you that this kid is really scaring me?? I have much older kids who are not asking me questions this complex.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.

Another library moment comes to mind, perhaps more age-appropriate. The other day our babysitter Sheila had Isaac at the library. For reasons perhaps best left unexplored, she wondered whether he had a poopy diaper. She touched the back of his pants to check. He responded in a nice loud clear scolding voice, “No Sheila… MY TESTACLES ARE VERY PRIVATE!”

Which leads me to a recent moment combining some of Isaac’s favorite things: nakedness, American flags, parades, and the musical stylings of John Phillip Sousa. The other day, just as my friend Martha dropped in, Isaac combined all these interests in a moment of supreme patriotism. He was already naked. He asked for “Stars and Stripes Forever” to be played. I put it on and he began parading around the house, marching, waving his American flag (left over from the Fourth of July) in time to the music. It was really quite a sight. Martha said, “WHY, WHY do you not have a video camera?”

Just then the phone rang. It was Ben. I said hello to him, and then a blood-curdling scream issued from the other room. I set the phone down and found Isaac flat on the floor in a state that really scared me for a moment. He was screaming to such a degree that his back was arched completely off the floor. His eyes were crossing and rolling up into his head. My first thought was that the flag had impaled his eye. My second thought was that it was a seizure. But soon I noticed the wound on his stomach. Isaac had in effect fallen on his sword. Somehow he had stumbled and the flag had poked him in the belly. It bruised and sort of broke the skin. I think it really hurt, and also was such a shock in the midst of the wonderful parade! As soon as the extent of the damage was clear to me, I went back to the phone carrying the screaming boy in my arms. I said, “There’s an injury. It’s not life-threatening. I’ll call you back.”

I comforted him and he clung to me, naked as the day he was born, his desperate sobbing very like that of a speechless newborn. He always seems so much smaller when he’s hurt. After a while he calmed down and started pretending he was a baby. “Ba!” he said. “Ba-ba!”
“Do you want some juice?” I asked.
“Ba-ba!” he said nodding.
I got him the juice, but by the time I came back with it he was already a cat and scampering away on his four paws.

Today Isaac lifted a piece of sidewalk chalk out of the bucket and exclaimed, “Pink is my best!” Yes, pink is now his favorite color. I mentioned this to his 94-year-old great-grandmother and she replied, “Then he should have pink pajamas.” This is good idea. I ordered him some. But what he really wants is pink shoes. I was looking at this web site preschoolians to buy him some fall shoes recently (the innovation they have is that they have a clear window in the sole of the shoe, so you can see how the tiny feet fit for sure– having heard more than one story of a little person whose feet were curled under and crushed and yet did not say so, this seems like a good idea) and I thought I’d ask him for input about the style. I was looking at the navy ones, with or without a running shoe look, or with or without red trim. Isaac sat on my lap and looked at the options. shortly he fixated on a pair of basically light brown shoes with lots of pink trim and detailing on them.

“Pink ones! Pink is my best!” he said excitedly. So I said, “Hmm… how about these?” showing some very handsome red ones.

“NOOOO! No! Those! Pink! My best!”

I set the topic aside without comment to consider how I felt about this. Do I care if he wants pink shoes? Why or why not? Would it be a nuisance to have everyone in the grocery store thinking he was a girl? Would it bother HIM? Would he be teased? Even though he’s three? What about the whole Free-to-Be-You-and-Me gender equality thing I was reared on? “William Wants a Doll!” comes to mind– and of course the point of that was that there was no reason whatsoever that William should not have a doll. (Isaac does have a wonderful doll…) So I mentioned to Ben, “Isaac wants pink shoes.” To which Ben’s reply was swift and unequivocal: “No.”

I polled other mothers. “What would you do if your son wanted pink shoes?” I asked. All of them said calmly, “Oh… sure. Why not? The kid is three.”

Another mom went a step further, saying, “The more you say no to something, the more they want it. I would say if he wants pink shoes it will be better to have him wearing them now than when he’s sixteen.”

And excellent point, I thought. Also I thought about John Gotti, the teflon don. He always wore those pink shirts, because he was a cold blooded mobster and no one really dared question his manliness. In fact he was secure enough in his masculinity to pull of the pink shirts and make them look downright tough. Isaac is, everyone tells me, “All Boy.” I think he could pull off the shoes with aplomb.

But my polling of local dads was equally uniform.
Dad # 1: “Hmmm… no.”
dad #2: “Um… well… no.”
dad # 3: “Uh, that would be a NO.”
Dad # 4: “No way.”
etc.

So … and this is still pending… what I did was order the navy and red ones that I truly thought would be best all told, and avoid controversy. But the test is, when I take them out of the box, will Isaac wail and scream, “MYYY PIIIINK ONES!!!” Or will he forget the whole conversation? If he does wail and scream, how will I reconcile this with Ben? Will I send them back and get the pink ones? I don’t know. My plan is that he will like the shoes and will forget the whole thing. And I did buy him the pink pajamas, a fine way for him to express his love of pink within the safe and non-judgemental confines of the house.

Tonight he asked why I get to paint my toenails and why he doesn’t. (It’s not so much that he doesn’t get to. It’s just frowned upon. But maybe we’ll do it anyway– I don’t know. Should I guide him in the gender norms or shield him from them?)

Meanwhile, he’s been watching this “Bill Nye the Science Guy” PBS science show fairly continuously, as much as the very limits of what he is allowed to do. He keeps talking about the stars. Specifically, he says, “Maybe a star burned out and collapsed.” And I say, “Yeah, maybe so… and still the light keeps coming here.” And he says, “Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe a star burned out and collapsed! And the light keeps coming anyway for years and years. Stars are VERY FAR away.”
“Yeah– I know! That’s pretty neat isn’t it?”
“I like stars don’t I?”
“You seem to!”
“Why do we live in our solar system?”

Ah, well.

So many imponderable questions. “Why is heat hot?”; “Why do we live on earth?” and yesterday in the car, “Why are we diurnal?”

Well– at least SOME of us are. Isaac I realized recently is a perfect blending of Ben and me. I’m a night owl. Ben is an early bird. Isaac is both.

Last week he was asking not so much what does noctural mean, but WHY are creatures noctural. A few days ago we reviewed what diurnal means (sleeping during the night and being away in the day), and now we’re trying to grapple with WHY are we diurnal. I can only expect that the crepusculars (awake mostly at dawn and dusk) are not far behind.

Meanwhile, his love of backhoes has not dimmed. We nearly had a knee-high brawl on our hands at the playground yesterday, when Isaac encountered another three-year-old boy as insanely passionate about backhoes as he is. The problem: there was only one backhoe. Although this backhoe lives at the playground, Isaac’s relationship with it goes way deeper than anyone else understands. He LOVES that backhoe– and not just when it’s in view. He THINKS about the backhoe day and night. He feels that it’s really his backhoe and just for some reason he can’t have it at his house and has to visit it there. (I’ve tried hard to clarify…) Imagine his anguish when he walked up and found someone else playing with it. And that the other boy had it first! And that I said the other boy could have a turn! So after some intense strife, I had to haul Isaac away in full-blown tantrum mode. Kicking and screaming bloody murder. Luckily the jaded parents at the playground barely batted an eye at this, only looked up briefly to see whether or not he was mortally wounded. We regrouped with a brief picnic in the car. A juice box, some crackers, and a discussion: how to share. When he was fully calm again, we went back into the sandbox situation to test our new sharing skills. Amazingly he did really well. This time a little girl was engrossed in the backhoe amd Isaac waited. He waited and waited very patiently. Then the girl’s parents started calling her, “Alexa! time to go! Gotta go to ballet class now!” and she ignored them. This went on for a while, until finally Isaac decided to help. Using his best imitation of an adult talking sweetly to a small child, he bent down and said, “Time to go to your mom now! Gotta go!” We all laughed, but still the girl played on, deaf to all pleas to wind it up. Finally the backhoe had to be pried forceably out of her claw-like little hands, and Isaac got possession at last. “I waited!” he said proudly. I said, “I know!! You were so good! I saw you waiting and waiting!” I gave him lots of hugs and we slapped five.

Then of course the inevitable happened– another kid showed up who looked with interest at the precious backhoe. Isaac intervened quickly, stepping between the kid and the backhoe and offering up a pretty nice dump truck. “Kid,” he said firmly. “play with this dump truck!” The kid looked at it and said, “Why?” but then scanned the situation a little bit and said, “Okay.” They sat down and played in peace.

It’s perhaps measure of how badly these last few days have sucked that a few moments ago, back in the car, when I was digging around in the glove compartment and laid my hands on a small bottle of Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer, my reaction was to inwardly exclaim, “Finally! Something has gone right!”

By contrast, here’s a list of what has gone wrong.

On Friday I had this terse e-mail exchange with the irritating makers of First Response home pregnancy tests. I more or less ripped them a new one over the fact that their test was so lame as to not register my pregnancy when other, less boastful tests had done so. They replied with a totally condescending missive about how one goes about reading such tests, (insulting my intelligence and experience in such things which sadly is vast) and the meaning of various lines, and then a cold suggestion that I see my doctor “to confirm that you are pregnant.”

This had a delayed effect, several hours later, of causing me to be gripped by sudden fear that maybe I WASN’T pregnant after all. (Never mind several positive pregnancy tests and two weeks of nausea.) It struck after dinner and then I alerted Ben to my need to rush off to Dave’s grocery store and by a new test (or two) for reassurance. Also I had to pee, so this was important timing. So he sequestered Isaac in a game of hot ramps and I rushed off, bought the test, and was home and in the bathroom (needing to pee desperately by then) when this annoying woman appeared at the door asking me to write my congress people to stop the privatization of Social Security. In fact, she wanted the letters not in five minutes, but NOW and in hard copy, not e-mail. I had given this bleached blond, pink-frosty-eye-shadowed waif $15 for the cause a few hours earlier, but this had not appeased her.

Anyway, after she was sent packing I returned to my peeing task and then found that the test was so— so— so— faint as to be almost negative. I mean, my hCG levels had DROPPED like a stone since my last test. See? This is why people compulsively continue to test even after they have a positive result. Or should I say we.

So I told Ben, who started freaking out, and then we needed to talk about it for literally like two minutes and Isaac would not let us. We put him in his room and closed the gate, where he screamed full-on the whole time and we went over the facts in the bathroom. We reasoned that maybe it was just dilute because I had been drinking water all evening and also it was late at night and the hCG is most concentrated in the morning. So we agreed to retest in the morning, first thing. In the meantime I obsessed about whether or not it was a tubal pregnancy, which gave me plenty of room to worry about tubal rupture, bleeding to death, surgery, and/or losing one half of my fertility.

I woke up at 4 a.m. having to pee so retested then and found once again a line so painfully faint it was almost invisible.

So then I lay awake for two hours listening to Isaac (who was in our bed due to night terrors) and Ben sleep. I nodded off at some point around dawn. When I woke up at 8:00 or so, Isaac and Ben were already up. I threw on some clothes and drove in the rain over to the local CVS to buy a better test, the EPT I so respect. I took it and found it positive, but maybe a bit less so than it had been on Tuesday. At this point I decided to call the doctor and at least get an hCG blood test done so we could have some accurate information. However, it was Saturday. There was no answer at the doctor’s office, which I thought was very odd, seeing as it’s a hospital. I expected at least a machine telling me who else to call, but no. So I called the Cleveland Clinic Main Campus and they sent me back to Hillcrest, the hospital that houses the OB dept. Then Hillcrest denied everything and sent me back to the Main Campus, who maintained their stance that I needed to talk to Hillcrest. Finally I got someone who would stay on the line with me to hear Hillcrest’s denials directly and this time the Hillcrest person relented and took a message for the OB on call. (They just moved the OB department a few months ago and apparently no one knows what is going on.)

The OB on call called me back after a while and was very reasonable and nice. She said that she would put an order in the computer for me to get blood drawn for an hCG test that day and also Monday (today). But she was in the process of delivering a baby and couldn’t get the test into the system until after noon. In typical fashion, the outpatient lab that would normally draw my blood closed at noon.

So there was only the question of where and who would actually draw my blood on a Saturday. You would not think that in a gigantic medical complex, spanning at least a mile in each direction, with countless huge buildings, this request would not be so odd or hard to fulfill, but it was.

The lady I finally got a hold of (again after lots of tries) said that I should simply come to the “L” building, and park in the Emergency Room parking lot. She made it sound so easy. “Just tell them you’re going to the blood bank and they will buzz you in,” she said.

It was around this time that I caught my lucky toe on an edge of carpet and dislocated it, adding intense and jolting pain to the anxiety and confusion I was already feeling. I drove over to the place the lady had said, and hobbled into this place beside the Emergency Room. In there the lady said I had to go outside and two doors down to the Emergency Room itself. It was raining and my toe was killing me and I didn’t want to go into the Emergency Room at all, knowing as I do what I could expect to find there. And indeed, as soon as I hobbled in I was treated to the sight of someone in a wheelchair vomiting into one of those paper buckets I’ve had ample opportunity to get friendly with myself in past hospital excursions.

There was no one in reception, of course, and no one else around, so I just kept walking towards what I hoped would be the right place. Soon I was walking down a darkened corridor, where two cleaning personnel were chatting. I asked them where the Blood Bank was and the guy said, “Isn’t that in the L building?” and I said, “Yes! The L building! Where is the L building?”

He said he would take me there, and I guess I should add him to the very short list (1. finding the Purell) of things that have gone right lately. He walked me (with my slowness and limp) all the way across the street, into this building, down a dark hall, past a check point thing where he had to swipe his ID card, up an elevator, down another hall to a window where this person sat. The blood bank! There it was. How in god’s name did the lady on the phone think I would ever find it? I profusely thanked the cleaning guy—I mean, come ON! A random cleaning person is the only one I could find to help me??? – and the lady in the blood bank directed me to go wait in a semi-darkened and deserted room around the corner. So I waited and after what seemed like a long, long time this little squeaky cart driven by an older lady came all the way down the hall. The lady was nice, drew my blood efficiently, said if I only have one child it’s okay because it’s God’s Will, and then refused to validate my parking.

Just when I thought this Kafkaesque experience was going to end, the parking situation dragged it out a little bit longer. I realized at this point that I had no cash whatsoever, none. I walked (hobbled, in the rain…) up to the little parking attendant booth where my car was incarcerated The lady very kindly explained that if my ticket wasn’t validated it would be $10 and that she didn’t take credit cards or checks. She said that she thought there was an ATM in the Emergency Room. So, dreading what fresh hell of head wounds and such I would see in there, I ventured in again. Again there was no one at reception and no one on hand to ask such a question as where is an ATM. I found a policewoman in this little security enclosure and asked her. She said that the nearest one was over in the “A” building, a goodly hike away through a labyrinth of skyways and tunnels.

My heart sank; my toe throbbed. The thought crossed my mind, “Should I stay here and have them x-ray this toe?” But this notion was quickly rejected by an overwhelming need to escape.

Just then out of the corner of my eye I spotted a furtive worker who looked like the sort of person who would have a parking validation stamp. I showed her the bandage on my arm and begged, “I just had to come and have blood drawn and the lady wouldn’t validate my parking and I don’t have any cash on me and the ATM is way over in the A building…” She said nothing, wordlessly took my ticket, stamped it, and handed it back to me.

A goddess among women!!

Again my list of good things continues to grow into a litany!

I got back into my car and was set free by the parking lot lady.

However, my elation was dulled a few moments later in a phone conversation with Ben. Apparently his fear and anxiety about our threatened pregnancy had translated into churlishness bordering on hostility. I was in no mood for attitude and we ended up almost hanging up on each other.

The rest of the afternoon sucked too—we rushed all the way over to this special Playhouse Square festival so that I could take Isaac to this children’s concert I had been looking forward to (and Ben was suddenly on strike against—he dropped us off) only to find once there that Isaac didn’t like it one bit! He endured a few songs (Dan Zanes, who is excellent, and his wonderful colorful and friendly band, the whole audience was doing animal sounds and it was really more like an exuberant kids’ party in there, and free, and great) and at the end of each song would say brightly “It is all done now? Can we go now?” So finally I gave up and took him out of there. He was focused on the “jumpy thing” this inflated sort of trampoline with sides that kids could jump in. No one was in it and so we had a long turn all to ourselves. I say we because Isaac insisted that I come in with him because he was “too shy” to go in by himself. So I sat in it and he jumped all over the place. Occasionally I got knocked over backwards and had to wallow around like a beetle with my legs in the air. He landed on my toe at one point, which killed, but may actually have put it back into place. We both got covered in glitter from the face painting art adorning previous jumpers.

Then we waited in line for a balloon animal, only to be further annoyed by three very huge and very loud and obnoxious teens who unaccountably were waiting for balloon animals with us. They were in our personal space constantly, dancing and yelling and talking on cell phones. With that and the din of the nearby kareoke (sp?) machine I was really getting a headache. I had to hold 30-lb. Isaac in my arms the whole time because I didn’t want him to get trampled. He finally got to the front of the line and got the fish on a fishing pole made all of balloons that he has so long desired.

Why in god’s name did we decide to go shopping after all this? Ben was hell bent on gathering supplies to have a nice dinner party the following night. So from this we went to Crate and Barrel which was packed and which was extremely difficult to manage with Isaac. Like—a sea of fragile and brightly colored vases on low shelves. It was pretty near impossible to debate the merits of napkin fabric and color and the weight of various steak knives while also taking turns chasing Isaac around. (He used a cat tail from a floral display for a lance and starting jousting with other customers, for instance, and at one point rushed into an elevator by himself… the quick and spry Ben managed to run into the elevator, too, just as in time.)

I guess on the upside all this took my mind off the fact that I was probably having a miscarriage.

The next morning, yesterday, I woke up bleeding.

There was nothing to be done, of course, and I just spent the whole day yesterday laying around and feeling like crap on every level. We did have our dinner party, which Ben put together single-handedly and which was very fun and distracting. I took advantage of the fact that I’m presumably not pregnant anymore and drank some of this excellent ’94 cabernet that our friends brought.

Today the bleeding is much heavier.

I talked to the nurse this morning and she said that despite the bleeding (which I had hoped made the situation obvious enough), I would need to come in and have a second hCG test so that they could compare Saturday’s number with today’s and make sure the level is dropping as expected.

Before I went to get blood drawn, I sent an e-mail reply to my friend Pippa telling her that I didn’t come to playgroup today because I’m having a miscarriage and filling in a few of the details. This reply unaccountably went to the whole playgroup list, which is scores upon scores of people. Then I sent an oops letter out and it went twice. I feel… so stupid to be so clumsy and non-tech-savvy, which isn’t really true. And also I’m embarrassed that god knows how many people now know of my situation. In fact the e-mail glitch is sort of what has spurred me to post a blog about it. I was outed already to many people I know.

There’s something about having a miscarriage that seems sort of like a personal or even a moral failing. It’s like—well, maybe it’s the “god’s will” contingent. Like if you were worthy and good enough to deserve this child, you wouldn’t miscarry. And there’s just the smugly perfect people who have no pregnancy troubles at all. I resent them, I really do. I hesitate to wish colic upon them, because that would only give me bad karma, but I do hate it when someone comes along and is just happily pregnant with no strife surrounding it at all.

This morning Ben observed, “Well, it’s not for lack of trying that we only have one child.” And he’s right. I’ve lost track of all my total life list of pregnancies at this point. But what can we say? Four very early miscarriages, now adding a fifth, then preemie Jacob who died, and then Isaac. So what is that, seven pregnancies yielding one surviving child? Can that be right?

Today again I went over to get blood drawn. But this time, at least, the normal outpatient lab, with which I’m so painfully familiar, was open. However, this time my veins were all screwed up and I got poked twice by one guy and once by another lady before they got the sample. I have bad veins in general and I think my body is a little messed up at the moment due to bleeding, plummeting hormones, stress and sadness. Can sadness cause bad veins? I don’t know… but when I was going in for my gall bladder surgery I was suddenly gripped by fear and apparently due to this emotion all my veins disappeared right before the eyes of the nurse who had to place my IV. (Bless the man who showed up with happy drugs…)

I’m bummed that this morning the nurse also said that I need to sit out a cycle, which means that our earliest possible due date just slid from May to July. I’m bummed that we didn’t start a year ago (never mind that not one of the three of us was ready at the time, Isaac still nursing, etc.). I’m bummed that I’m 38 and that all my eggs are getting old and withered. I worry that this is the start of a trend and that I’ll have to have a whole bunch more miscarriages before we get a pregnancy to take hold and thrive.

The good things:
1) We get pregnant anytime we try, instantly, batting an even thousand.
2) It’s barely five weeks along. If it’s not going to work, finding out now is the best possible time.
3) Isaac is wonderful and if he ends up being our only child, that is still fantastic. Ben pointed out that if we looked at our life today from the vantage point of five years ago, this would have been all we wanted and more.

But here I am, drowning my sorrows in German mineral water and Swiss chocolate.

Tomorrow we’ll find out the results of today’s hCG test and will know for sure what is up. (The only reason for doubt is that with Jacob I bled profusely for a full week and ended up still pregnant.) We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Isaac has been expanding his list of nighttime fears. In addition to the dark itself, and t-rexes, he’s added dragons. Last night we lay awake on into the wee hours because of the risk of dragon attack. I started out trying logic. There are no dragons. Dragons do not exist. They are imaginary. They are pretend. Someone made them up. They are not real. Isaac listened to all this and then began once again to literally tremble, “I’m afraid a dragon’s gonna come!” he whispered hoarsely.

I tried psychology, by getting him to comfort his doll, Nils, who as chance would have it is also very worried about dragons. Isaac told Nils, “There are no dragons. They are not real,” while patting his tummy very soothingly. Then, two seconds later, Isaac said, “I’m afraid a dragon’s gonna come!”

I tried pragmatism. IF (in the unlikely event) a dragon did come, Lena (the dog) would bark, and the dragon would be scared and would run away. And IF Lena couldn’t scare him away, I would be here and I would say, “Get out of my house! Leave my little boy alone!” And IF I didn’t scare him away, the poor dragon would have to tangle with Daddy. Isaac even went so far as to explain this all to Nils. Then we lay in silence for a few moments before Isaac began to tremble anew and said, “I’m afraid a dragon’s gonna come!”

I went back to the fact that they don’t exist, running through the litany again and then adding, “There are no dragons anywhere on Earth!” Then I thought that maybe the whole Earth was a little too big to grasp, so I added, “There are no dragons in Cleveland.” By then I was getting very tired of this conversation and tired in general.

Isaac said, “Why?”
“Well, they don’t like it in Cleveland.”
“Why they don’t like Cleveland?”
“Oh, it’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer and rainy in between.”
“Why they don’t like rain?”
“Their scales get wet and they don’t have umbrellas.”
“Why they don’t like it’s too hot in the summer?”
“Their scales sweat and mosquitoes go into their ears.”
“Why mosquitoes go in their ears?”
“It’s the only place they can bite because their scales are pretty much like armor.”
“Why the dragons wear armor?”
“Dragons aren’t real. Let’s pretend they have feathers, then the mosquitoes can bite them anywhere.”
“Dragons don’t have feathers!”
“Sure, why not? They are just pretend. Let’s pretend they blow bubbles instead of fire and they are very friendly.”
“Dragons aren’t friendly!”
“I’m just saying… we could make them like anything, because they aren’t real.”
“Why?”
I paused for a while and said, “Seriously. It’s time for bed. That’s enough now. You’re very safe here.” I hugged him tight and waited for a little while. He turned over and hugged his Fred Dog, who has been a source of comfort lately. It seemed that maybe we were out of the woods! Sleep! Close at hand. Then the little voice piped up again, “I’m afraid a dragon’s gonna come!”

etc.

It’s been three weeks, today, since Isaac’s weaning party. We haven’t nursed since that morning before the party. It’s been hard at times and hard differently that I expected. But it’s getting much better now for both of us.

He seemed at times to understand the concept of weaning. The day before the party, for instance, we were walking to our car and ran into a neighbor. Isaac announced very happily, “When I get bigger and bigger I don’t nurse anymore! I’m being WEANED!” But then later, of course, when the reality of it began to sink in, he was grief-stricken.

The party itself was basically like a birthday party. We had four children as guests, and their parents. We played around outside in the back yard. Ben grilled some weanies (Having a weanie roast was part of the theme). We had balloons, which we gave to the kids to take home. I made some goodie bags, one for each kid, containing a standard array of bubbles and plastic slinkies and noise makers, etc. We ate lunch and then I had a frost-your-own-cupcake station. I gave each kid a little cup of frosting and a small butter knife. Sprinkles were abundant. Also people brought Isaac cup-related presents. One was a wonderful drinking straw that went all around in the form of eyeglasses, which Isaac had a fine time playing with. Overall, Isaac loved all the attention and excitement. It helped a lot to have the party, to create a clear and defined end-point that we could refer back to.

The first day after the party actually went all right. I was surprised by that. He seemed still somewhat pleased with his party and his new presents. I had a new Caillou place-setting that I pulled out that first morning, and I also had a couple sippy cups in the form of construction-related things– a hard hat and a truck tire. These placated him for a while. But where it really got tough was day two. He woke up that morning feeling really horrible. He asked to nurse and when I said no he just began to scream and thrash like one possessed. It was like he accepted weaning for a short while, but not FOREVER. All day the slightest thing set him screaming, and he was clinging to me like a limpet. To make matters worse, my cat was dying. Every spare minute I wanted to spend with him. We had some ugly scenes– such as one point when Isaac wanted to go outside, so I brought the cat out at the same time to sit with him on my lap in the sun. Outside time, sunshine, and fresh air were I felt important to his hospice care. But as soon as we were settled outside, Isaac began to ask to go inside again. I said no and then it escalated into this horrible situation in which I was sitting there holding my dying (purring, momentarily content) cat while Isaac stood next to me screaming at the top of his lungs all the while. I can tell you that I felt no sympathy for Isaac whatsoever and if I could have leveled him with scorching rays from my eyes I would have. (Ten minutes! All I wanted was ten minutes!)

Until the cat died on that Wednesday (Aug 3), I was hopelessly torn between the two of them, frazzled and exhausted. Stealing moments to sit and cry over the cat, and tend to his many many needs, while also trying to accommodate Isaac’s intensified need for my UNDIVIDED attention. Also I was going through my own physical/emotional reaction to the weaning. The sudden plunge in happy nursing hormones gave me something like an intense PMS reaction, and I felt achy and flu-like physically too. Needless to say I became quite the connoisseur of cabbage: when it comes to packing your breasts, don’t go for the red cabbage or the curly green cabbage. What you want is the SMOOTH green cabbage with the largest, most loosely packed leaves.

Anyway, we got through it. We went away on vacation and that helped break the spell of the situation somewhat. Just the change of venue helped. He has been having some sleep disturbances off and on which seem to coincide with the weaning. A couple times he had these “night terrors” where he starts screaming in his sleep, but doesn’t really wake up. He flails around calling me, while I’m sitting right there trying to calm him down. A couple other times he’s walked in his sleep. The other night I found him (he had called me), more or less standing next to his bed, flopped over on it and sound asleep. (On the other hand, at the risk of angering the sleeping genie, the last couple nights his sleep has been incredibly long and sound and marvelous for all.) As of two days ago, Isaac still asked to nurse at bedtime and wake-up time. He still even cries about it now and then, and laments: “I don’t WANT to be a big boy! I don’t WANT to grow up!” Then I say, “Really? You don’t want to be able to walk and run, or eat cookies, or talk, or climb slides?” At which point, he has to agree that it IS good to be bigger.

Sometimes we play a game where I cuddle him and tell him he’s a tiny baby. I admire his tiny little fingers and toes and his tiny little mouth and cheeks. Of course all these parts need kissing too. For a while he will drink this in with a placid look of appreciation and pride on his face. Then he will pop up and climb out of my lap. He’ll begin to strut around, saying, “See? I can walk! I can talk! I have teeth!” And then we celebrate his bigness and all the wonderful things it brings.

Mr. Cat died yesterday after a long illness. He was 15.

Mr. Cat and I met one day in September of 1990. I had gone to the local Humane Society with a clear goal in mind: find a female, Siamese kitten. At this particular humane society (in Golden Valley, Minnesota), they had a cat room in which cats, kittens, and their potential adoptive families could mingle and get to know each other. When I walked into the room, I saw a beautiful creature up on a cat tree. He was curled up with his back facing me, and from that angle looked exactly like the coil of a python. His sleek fur looked like skin and his exotic black and gold markings seemed to bear no resemblance to anything feline.

And yet, I didn’t go to him at once. I was still looking for my kitten-I had come to replace a lynxpoint Siamese kitten, Bianca, whom I had lost a few months earlier under tragic circumstances. Then as I fixated on a small gray and white female kitten, this other cat climbed up on a table next to me and casually (as if he did this sort of thing all the time) stood on his hind feet, wrapped his front paws around my neck, and began to purr and nuzzle me. In effect, he said, “I choose you to be my human.”

Out of all the people there that day looking for cats, he picked me! How lucky I was. And how could I reject his choice simply because he was a) not female, b) not Siamese and c) not a kitten?

I took him home with me and we began a 15-year relationship that spanned four names, five addresses and three cities.

The name on his adoptive papers was “Pike”-not a bad name for him really, as from above he did also resemble a sleek and spotted fish. I changed his name to Mowgli. At nine months of age, he was neutered under that name. But it never stuck somehow, and when we moved to a new apartment in Minneapolis, I changed his name to Paolo. My problem with naming him was that he was such an extraordinary and remarkable cat that no name seemed big enough or good enough to contain him. “Paolo” never really took either, and most of the time we just called him “Cat.” He was the only cat in the house and this blunt term was one of endearment. Then in 1992, I moved to New York City to go to graduate school and there I introduced him to everyone as simply “Cat”-although on his tag I spelled it “Khat,” like those red seeds that much of the developing world chews and spits. This suited him well for a few years, but by 1995, when I moved to Cleveland, I had added the more respectful prefix “Mr.” Under this name, Mr. Cat, he lived out the rest of his long and eventful life.

Here are some of the major events of that life.

Minneapolis, Winter, 1991: One night I opened the back door to find Mr. Cat half frozen to death, covered with oil, reeking of gas, with one of his back legs dangling. It was about 20 below that night and he had been gone all day. I realized immediately that his leg was broken, at the very least. I put him into a box and my then-boyfriend (now husband) Ben and I drove him to the animal emergency room. I remember that when I was holding him in this box in my lap (I feel a pang now to realize that yesterday he made his last journey in a just such a box) the gas fumes were making me dizzy and ill. After some intense hours waiting and watching all the other animal traumas go by, we learned that Mr. Cat’s leg was dislocated and that the ball of the femur had been sheered off by some sharp object. The vet speculated that he had crawled inside a car engine to get warm (as cats often do in Minnesota), and that someone had turned the car on. Did the fan blade chop his femur? The next day I discovered a message on my answering machine saying that my cat was on this lady’s front steps and had been there all day. The address she gave was about three blocks away from our house, which means that in desperate pain, through bitter cold, he had somehow dragged himself all the way home.

However it happened, he needed surgery to repair it. For six weeks or so after the surgery, he went by a nickname, “Frankenkitty.” One quarter of his body was shaved and he had an enormous line of hideous black stitches going from his waist, over his hip and half way down his leg. The price tag on the surgery was $600, and it was hard to raise at the time. I remember a friend’s parents expressing shock that I did not simply put the cat to sleep. I said, “No, no, this is a GREAT investment!” And we all laughed about it. But I was right.

New York City, 1992-1995: While I was in grad school, I lived in a beautiful brownstone belonging to a wonderful woman, Patty, who was my benefactrix. The house was filled with a lot of fine art and antiques. Considering that Mr. Cat and I were guests there, the cat was really a nuisance at times. He needed to stay in one part of the house, but he learned how to reach up, standing on his tippy toes, and open doorknobs with his paws. On occasion he bit or scratched my roommates (one of whom still sports an impressive scar on his wrist). Although, of course he never bit ME and I was so in love with him that I was immune to criticism, which in retrospect I’m sure was also quite annoying. Anyway, we had this wonderful courtyard behind the house and Mr. Cat I think was happier living there than anywhere else we lived in his life. You see, the courtyard was brimming with birds. He learned how to somehow catch a bird, leaving it totally unharmed, and then wrestle it through the cat door. (Also did I mention he wore a bell and had no front claws?) Inside, you see, he could kill it at his leisure. On several occasions I awoke to find a bird sitting on top of my fridge, or flying around the room. As difficult and stressful as it was to catch and release these birds, finding them alive was still better than finding them dead. I stepped out into my foyer one morning-the white walls were streaked with blood. The carpet had huge gruesome stains on it. And there on the floor was a dead woodpecker. I felt like drawing a chalk line around it and calling in the homicide detectives.

He also killed mice, which was perhaps the only truly useful service he provided my hostess in New York. Sometimes I would find some horrible thing– like, say, the back leg and the tail of a mouse. One time he took ill and I brought him to the vet. Diagnosis: he basically had overindulged in wildlife. Some friends and I devised a mnemonic device for him: “Birds before mice: not nice. Mice before bird: word.”

New York City, 1994: Among all the wonderful objects in that house, there was a large piece of amber with a maybe 5-inch lizard trapped in it. The legend was that this had been found in the back of an old clock that once belonged to an archeologist. Patty had bought it at an antique show or traded for it, and it was something that she and everyone else, in a house brimming with valuable things, truly valued. When one of her sons broke his finger, he took the amber with him to the hospital to be x-rayed. It sat in a revered place on the mantle. One night, when Patty and I were sitting there watching T.V., Mr. Cat climbed up on the mantle and (I think intentionally) threw the amber off. It smashed on the slate hearth, breaking into two major pieces and several shards. Patty in her goodness claimed it was okay, and tried to comfort ME in my acute distress. We packed it in a zip-lock bag to protect the desiccated midriff of the lizard from exposure to the air. But she, who had calmly raised three rambunctious boys amid objets d’arts, was clearly chastened by the loss. She smoked cigarettes and her hands shook.

I resolved to somehow, somehow redeem myself by getting the amber lizard repaired. First I called this store, Maxilla and Mandible, which deals in such things. The man on the phone was as rude as you might expect. He said, “Oh, it’s a fake. Just throw it out!” What??? I protested that it was REAL and he protested that it wasn’t and we were at an impasse. So I moved on and called the amber curator at the American Museum of Natural History. This man, too, although much kinder about it, insisted that it wasn’t real. I told him about the clock and the archeologist and he said, “Oh, they always come with a legend like that.” But he was a nice man, and he could see that I was upset, so he agree to at least look at it for me. I brought it over there, and found my way through the dark unpublic regions of that incredible building. He took one look at it and said, “It’s fake.” He explained that something as large as a lizard would never get caught in amber anyway. It’s just petrified sap and sap moves too slowly to catch anything but bugs. Then he examined it under a microscope and became more intrigued. He explained that it was at least an old fake, maybe 100 years old. And then he said, “What is that in there anyway? A skink?” I didn’t know. He said, “I think it IS a skink!” This seemed to excite him. He said, “Listen, it’s a fake, but it’s an old and interesting fake. I’ve never seen a skink in one before. I’d like to include it in my fake amber exhibit, which I’m putting together now. I’ll repair it for you if you will let me use it in the show. The show will travel around the country for a year or so.” I said I would talk to the owner.

Patty wasn’t happy that it was a fake. In fact, it took sort of a while to convince her that it was. She prided herself on having the real, authentic version of everything-no knock-offs. But ultimately, having the piece repaired and having it on display at the museum, seemed to somehow compensate for the misdeed of one rather difficult and rude, bad guest of a cat.

Cleveland, 1996: Mr. Cat didn’t do well with the transition to apartment living after three years of freedom in New York. He tended to pace the rooms at night. He would come into our room and take great pains to throw items off the dresser one by one. If in the attempt to sleep we locked him out of the bedroom, he would tuck his front paws under the door, and with superfeline strength he would shake the entire door (loudly) in the doorframe, while also yowling operatically. This was rather annoying. Finally I solved this problem by purchasing a video called, “Cat T.V.” This half-hour video (would that it were longer), simply showed items of interest to cats. Birds at a birdfeeder with real audio. Fish in a fish tank. Squirrels chasing around and up a tree. Mr. Cat loved his video. And on those nights he got the mean reds (as Holly Golightly once called them), I would put the video on for him. He would sit on a chair transfixed, watching his program.

Also, since we lived in a place where he could not possibly go outside safely, I got him a harness and walked him on a leash. He was pretty good about it, actually, and loved his outings. Around the same time, he took the dog imagery to another level by learning to fetch. His specialty was fetching marbles, although a small silver bell was also a favorite. I would throw it to the opposite end of the apartment. He would chase it full-speed, capture and subdue the marble, and then trot back to me proudly and drop it at my feet.

Cleveland, 1998: On the upside, we got a house, which gave him a lot more room to patrol. On the downside, we got a puppy.

Cleveland, summer 2001: One night the aforementioned puppy chased a small kitten up a tree. Ultimately we ended up adopting this little gray fur ball, named Zane Gray, and she became Mr. Cat’s protegee. He truly loved having another feline friend in a house that was becoming all too dog-centric. He tended to the kitten with all the tenderness of any mother. He washed her and taught her all the important cat things she needed to know. She needed a parent, and Mr. Cat needed someone to care for. He washed her so much in fact that he became afflicted with hairballs for the first time in his life.

Minneapolis-New York-Cleveland, 1990-2002: For twelve straight years, Mr. Cat slept in my arms almost every night. Then one day in October of 2002, he was summarily dismissed from the bed by a small and squalling red thing– a new baby. The baby slept in my arms instead! In HIS spot! For some months he wasn’t even allowed to sleep in the same room-simply because he looked at the baby with that evil crouched and tail-lashing glare he reserved for prey, and because while the baby weighed only six pounds, he weighed twelve. Gradually we forged some sort of compromise. The baby slept in my arms. Mr. Cat slept at the foot of the bed.

Cleveland, January 2003: I noticed Mr. Cat sitting in the middle of the floor while someone vacuumed around him. It took something this dramatic to cut through the newborn-baby haze that I was in. Mr. Cat was sick. I took him to the vet that day and they kept him over night to run tests. The next day, the vet told me the sad news that he was in liver failure and was dying. They gave his just a few days to live. I drove over to get him, sobbing, and brought him home for hospice care in his last few days of life. My mother counseled me to make this miracle substance she calls “Super Goop.” I mixed up the stuff (raw liver and many other things) and coaxed him to take a little bit, about the size of a pea, from my finger tip. I did this over and over again at all hours of the day and night (I was up with the baby anyway). Gradually I got him to move up to a teaspoon of it, then a tablespoon. Then I could just set it down in a bowl and he would eat it on his own. He was well! Cured! He went on to live another two and a half years.

Cleveland, summer 2005: He dropped weight until he looked like a fur covered skeleton. His kidneys began to fail. His ears and nose turned yellow from jaundice. He nearly died six weeks ago of dehydration, but I started giving him subcutaneous fluids on a regular basis. The vet said that sometimes cats live well for years with fluids like this. I had to overcome my dislike of needles, but I did it. He had to overcome his dislike of being poked by someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing, but he did it. We had some nice summer afternoons in the new backyard. A few weeks ago he had enough gumption to escape. We searched around for several hours and I feared that he had crept away someplace to die. But then we found him, filthy, covered with cobwebs, rolling on his back in the dust, incredibly happy and pleased with himself.

His last days were filled with all the indignities of old age and infirmity. As of Saturday, he couldn’t get out of bed, but was still hungry and thirsty and would purr when I petted him. I cleaned him and changed his bedding and took him out for fresh air. As recently as yesterday, when almost all his strength was gone, he found the will to flick his tail. Just enough to tell me that he was pissed about all this, and not giving up by any means. He maintained his fighting attitude till the end. I couldn’t bear to see him suffer anymore, and finally made an appointment for a mobile vet to come to the house today and put him to sleep. I didn’t want to do it, because he did not want to die. Yesterday he couldn’t lift his head anymore. His eyes were glazed over. I sat with him and begged him to stop fighting it. I prayed to the late Patty to come and get him, if these things work like that– and if she would even want to be with him after all his high jinx in her house.

Yesterday, sometime between 4 and 6 p.m. he lost his battle to old age and multiple organ failures. I found him cold and curled up in his bed. Although I was ready for it, I wasn’t ready for it. How could I be?

I made him a clean bed in a box and drove his body over to a pet cremation place. The people were calm and professional, but I had to wait a long time while someone finished a phone call. I had too much time to stand there, crying, and looking at this little plain cardboard box that contained his worldly remains.

From Bush 41, through all the Clinton years, and into the second term of Bush 43, he was my cat. From dating to living together, to living apart in separate cities, to being newlyweds to being new parents, to coming up on our tenth anniversary, he was our cat.

What a wonderful, unique, opinionated, tough, spirited, brilliant, loving, unusual cat he was. How I lucky I am that he chose me to be his person! Farewell, Mr. Cat. Thank you for spending your life with me. Rest in Peace.

This weekend Ben took Isaac on a weaning vacation to NYC. It’s the first time I’ve been apart from the little dude since we brought him home from the hospital in October of 02. By “apart” of course I mean apart for more than, say, ten or twelve hours. We’ve never slept apart (yes, we sleep in separate rooms usually, but never in separate cities). But I had the sense that Isaac was ready for this. He’s been going around remarking on what a big boy he is all the time. And even, lately (perhaps as a consequence of my constant cheeful chatter about the joys of weaning, and my repeated readings of this book “Maggie’s Weaning” narrated by a sage three-year-old who’s seen it all) going around saying, “I’m all done nursing! I used to nurse but now I’m a BIG BOY and I don’t nurse anymore.” He said this to me the other day straight out. I said, “Yes! You really are big now and you don’t need to nurse anymore– and tonight when you go to sleep you can do it without nursing.” This comment caused him to then issue something of a clarification: “Well… I still nurse at bedtime.”

Okay. So. Two days and two nights with Daddy in NYC. Overall, it’s worked out pretty well. They’ve been having a great adventure together and apparently there’s been no talk of nursing and only a little talk of wanting to go home. The only hitch was the inevitable stomach flu, which now seems to be an NYC-trip tradition. Ben was hit with it in the wee hours of Friday morning. I followed suit later that day. God bless my friend Martha who appeared in knight-like fashion and wisked Isaac away on an outing all afternoon. … Caring for a young child is hard from a horizontal position. Sure, he tried to be nice because he could see that I was really incredibly ill. He would say, very sweetly, “Mama, you’re not feeling well. Can I help you Mama?” And then just when my guard was down his inner eel would emerge and he would see me suddenly as a complacent passing octopus and attack with all his claws and teeth and limbs.

At first it seemed to be one of those fast-but-cruel sorts of flus. And it was… except not all that fast. They left yesterday morning at the crack of dawn. Isaac didn’t get sick at all, and Ben managed to do a mind-over-matter and carry on boldly as he always does. After a short nap, I got up to start the day with enthusiasm, thinking it had been a 24-hour bug and I was now fine. I had SO many things on the “if I only had time” list. All the cleaning and sorting, the intensive long overdue dusting that our dottering old cleaning lady can’t see or reach or deal with. But after a few short minutes of it and a very ill-advised attempt to eat a sandwich (I was starving after my 24-hour purge and fast…) I soon found myself pinned to the couch as if by a great weight and watching hours and hours of mindless T.V. I wore a path to the bathroom and basically feared even a walk around the block with the doggy lest there be some hideous outcome.

It was a lost day entirely. I watched more about Britney and Kevin, more make-over shows (both home and fashion) more wild animal shows, more comedy, more endless news cycling than really I would ever have thought physically possible. Especially with so little previous training. I’m out of shape for a T.V. binge like that. But my head and my body hurt so miserably I couldn’t possibly read (let alone Faulkner, which I’m trying to read with Oprah). Even my HAIR hurt! (In fact my hair still sort of hurts for some reason.)

Anyway. Today I’m feeling much better and did in fact sort of put a dent in the cleaning situation. I took a stab at the buried desk and washed many a slip cover. I ate food cautiously — and so it turned out, with impunity. I’m well! But as the day wore on my breasts began to register the 36-hour non-nursing stint, which since I estimate Christmas of 02 has not happened before. What started out as a dull hint of trouble began to blossom. They started to really… shall we say… throb? Ache? Experience little jolts of shooting pain, especially when an errant thought of Isaac would cross my mind…? So I took the step of walking down to the store and buying some cabbage, a well-known and documented folk remedy for excessive milk production. Something about those cool leathery leaves… I don’t know if it’s the texture or whether they sort of off-gas some chemical, or both. But it’s a fact recognized by many… it really helps. (Simply pack leaves in bra until they get too warm. Then replace with new leaves from the fridge. And enjoy!)

Then as the heat around here became insufferable and the cleaning was getting a little irritating, I decided to take a break and go see a film. Well, not a FILM. A movie. My choice, the Wedding Crashers, starring Owen Wilson. I could go on about my secret love for Owen Wilson, for his broken nose and perfectly tousled beach bum hair, for his strangely articulate style of speech, eye crinkles and six pack. I could go on all day. But I won’t. Suffice it to say that despite the fact that he can’t technically ACT– he plays the exact same person every time (which I have to assume is himself in real life), whether he’s supposed to be a cowboy in the wild west or a suburbanite teen trying to learn to heist jewels, his timing, his accent, even his word choices are IDENTICAL– he’s sublime. I’m in love with him and I find it all very endearing.

My friend Nina once described “The Nutty Professor” starring Eddie Murphy thus: she said, making this explosive gesture with her fingertips and outstretched arms, “It was MAGNIFICENT!!” I’ll use the same term for the Wedding Crashers: magnificent. Every one of the 119 minutes of running time was sheer bliss. It’s the acme of the summer romantic comedy genre. I sat there in the chilly air-conditioned dark, my aching breasts packed in cabbage, watching Owen Wilson on the big screen performing his signature stammering and yet graceful verbal ballet, and I thought, “Now THIS is a true vacation!”

Tomorrow dad and lad return. I’ve missed them but it’s been good. I’ve scheduled a weaning party for Isaac for next Saturday– and invited people, so now it’s real. I’ve bought him a couple construction-themed new cups and a complete Caillou place setting. We’re going to have kids over, decorate cups, eat weenies, frost cupcakes, and generally celebrate his passage into the non-nursing community.

Wish us luck.

Ben has been teaching Isaac American History and has placed on Isaac’s wall a calendar featuring portraits of our founding fathers. Recently I overheard them having this conversation:

Ben: Who’s that? (indicating a portrait on the calendar)
Isaac: (pausing to think for a moment): Um, Jefferson?
Ben: No. Good guess! But it’s Adams.

Isaac’s latest enthusiasm is octopuses. (Yes, not “octopi”– I learned recently that that is not the correct plural. The root is Greek, not Latin. Duh.) It started a week or two ago when we were at the zoo. We were looking at the gift shop briefly to kill time while waiting for our beloved trainride around the Australian Adventure. Isaac selected a rubber octopus, maybe a little bigger than your palm, yellow with blue spots, to take home. I bought it for him. As we walked along I idly imparted what octopus facts I could think of– they have tentacles, they eat crabs, they have suction cups, they can change color, they make ink, they are shy and like to hide, they have a beak. As I mentioned the beak I began to worry that it’s the squid who has a beak… but luckily for me it turns out they both do. Isaac took this all in. A little while later, we were sitting at this “Dr. Zoolittle” live animal show, waiting for it to start, when Isaac began to tell the lady next to us all about the octopus. “It eat oysters and he is very shy, and have tentacles, and the mouth is under there, and have a beak, and make ink…” etc. etc. The lady said, “Wow! Did you learn all that today?” And I was too shy to tell her that he had learned all that in the past hour.

Later that day, Isaac was in a burning fever to learn more about the octopus (having exhausted my paltry store of facts) and we went to the library on this quest. He marched right up the librarian, as he has been doing these days with ever greater confidence, and said “Can I have an octopus video?” The librarian of course leapt to the task, and while walking along towards the video section starting chatting with Isaac, who was still clutching his rubber octopus. “So, how many legs does your octopus have?” the librarian asked. Isaac replied (rather coldly I thought): “He has TENTACLES.”

So now from the octopus, we have expanded to the moray eel, who we learned is the mortal enemy of the octopus. Did you know a moray eel can eat an entire octopus in pretty much one bite? We went to the zoo and saw the eels in person– damn creepy if you ask me, lurking in holes with their sharp needle teeth at the ready. And in another tank far away from the eels, a beautiful octopus, a rich red color at the time. What struck me about it was the incredible delicacy of the tips of the tentacles– the way the suckers taper down to tiny specks without losing any detail. Now knowing what I do about octopuses, their intelligence and shyness, I will never eat them again at a sushi bar. (I never like it anyway– too rubbery).

We’ve been playing a chase game in which one of us is the octopus and the other an eel. A variation on this is an eating game in which Isaac is an eel and a piece of food swimming by is an octopus. (This reminds me of another important chase game, Mr. MacGregor and Peter Rabbit. Isaac wants to be MacGregor for Halloween. And he does a pretty fine impression, running at top speed and yelling, “Wee beasty! Wee pest! Wee varmint!” He is fantasizing about having a rake, and a beard, and slippers, and a sieve…)

A few weeks ago we went to this “Big Bug” exhibit out at the arboretum. It’s maybe ten or twelve huge wooden sculptures of bugs set along a wooded trail. Kids are given back packs with little activities to do at each bug. At the assassin bug, they had a syringe and a film canister. Isaac (with a lot of practice) managed to fill the syringe with water, then push the water into the film canister through a tiny hole. Then draw the water out, only to see that it had changed color!! Wow! This was to demonstrate how the assassin bug injects poison into its prey and then sucks the bug out like a milkshake. Well, this impressed Isaac a great deal. The next night we were at a dinner party and he regaled the guests with all this, acting it out as he went. I understood the whole thing, but those not familiar with the assassin bug were rather baffled. I translated and explained– but still I could see that it was all a bit too esoteric for some.

Meanwhile, he’s into spiders. We went to the Natural History Museum and while we were there, I checked out several guides to spiders. Can you imagine that in my ignorance I came in asking for a guide to insects?? I didn’t even know that spiders are NOT insects! When I was buying it I was chatting with the cashier and said, “My son is pretty into spiders these days.” And she asked how old he was and I told her. Then she said, “Wow! That’s pretty good. Are you going to home school him?” I said that we’re seriously thinking about it. And she said, “That’s what you’ve got to do with a kid like that.” (Which may well be true…) Anyway, since then we’ve been out finding orb webs as compared to funnel webs. Luckily we have a lot of both these days. Isaac used to say the silk came out of the spider’s BUTT (with much snickering about butts in general). But now he says the butt thing just for a joke. He knows that the silk actually comes out of spinerets.

This reminds me, we were watching an undersea video and a manta ray came by. I said, “What’s that?” And Isaac said, “I don’t know.” Then he started to laugh. He said, “I’m just jokin’ you. It’s a ray.”

Meanwhile, of course, his interest in construction equipment has not faded. It’s only become more detailed. He has a toy backhoe (a scale Cat machine) and will tell you all the parts: bucket, teeth, dipper arm, boom, cab, step, levers, steering wheel, loader, exhaust pipe, outriggers, etc. The other day we were driving along and came upon some guys working with a skid steer loader with a strange attachment on the front. It seemed to be some sort of shallow cage that was spreading top soil evenly. I did a U-turn and came along side the guys and rolled down my window. “My son is really interested in skid steer loaders,” I told them (a true statement). “What’s this attachment called?” They were incredbily friendly and explained that it’s called a “rock hound.” It has a big wire brush inside that rolls the dirt, breaking up the clods and spreading it nice and evenly. The guys talked with Isaac for a few minutes, saying things like, “You want to work? We got a lot of work here for you!” And one guy with this really long and luxurious beard said, “Stay in school kid or you could end up like this!”

Since then I’ve been hearing a lot about the “‘kid ‘teer noader with rock hound!” I think this may be his new favorite piece of heavy machinery. Although when offered to choose anything on earth that this clown (we came upon him in a restaurant) would make out of balloons, Isaac chose a crane.

And dinosaurs are still pretty important. Isaac is very fearful of T-Rexes, but has a strong attraction to them too. The other day we were driving our cat to the vet (Mr. Cat is very old and sick) and the cat was yowling in the back seat beside Isaac. We talked about why the cat was unhappy, that he hated being in his cat carrier and he hated going to the vet. Isaac conjectured that perhaps, like himself, Mr. Cat was afraid there would be T-Rexes there. So then Isaac (in one of these heart-clenching moments of unexpressable cuteness) started trying to comfort Mr. Cat like this: “It’s okay Mr. Cat. There are no T-Rexes at the doctor. They are extinct!”

He’s also gotten really good at his bird identification. He can tell several calls by ear, and spends a lot of time in his room playing with his trucks and listening to bird calls on tape. He can identify some on our bird clock: white throated sparrow, mourning dove, black-capped chickadee, and cardinal for sure. When outside in nature he can hear them too– especially the mourning dove. If I claim that a cardinal says, “Wa-cheer, wa-cheer” he will correct me and say, “No, he says, CHEER CHEER, not wa-cheer!” He has a little collection of index cards with bird pictures on them and will flip through them identifying them all. He sometimes says “red-tailed hawk” when really it’s a “sharp shinned hawk” but then… he catches himself and corrects it.

He’s also trying to learn the alphabet in earnest. He has no interest in the alphabet song, in fact he sort of hates it, but he likes the letters themselves a lot. He loves it when I hold out, say, a letter B and say, “Isn’t this a nice Q?” and then he can say, “Noooo, that’s not a Q, that’s a B.”

Ben observed the other day, “I think he’s creating taxonomies.” I think that’s true. He’s sorting the world into trucks, dinosaurs, farm animals, zoo animals, sea animals, bugs, birds, etc. and then within each category trying to gain mastery over the information.

Oh, also he’s into maps. He has a map of the US on his wall and has learned how to accurately find where we live. He’s trying to do the same on the globe too. We play a game where he points to a random place on the globe and then I try to tell him what it’s like there. (This poses a challenge sometimes, and then we have to find out. Thank god for the internet.) He’s into outer space too. The other day we were dropping a check off at this office, and Isaac decided to share his future plans with the ladies there. “I want to be an astronaut!” he announced. “Wow!” one of the ladies said, “How many 2 and a half year olds have career aspirations?”

All in all it’s safe to say that the kid (like all kids) is a learning machine. He is a knowledge fanatic. I’m just standing back and trying to feed the beast.