Things I Found While Cleaning Pixie’s Room

If you were following me on Twitter today, you might have noticed the list of things I posted as I shoveled out Pixie’s room this afternoon. For a two-year-old, that kid owns a lot of crap. It’s not my fault, I swear. I don’t buy that much stuff for her or her sister. But my mother on the other hand… Grandmama is not happy that she lives so far away from the grandkids, and she compensates by sending them loads of packages full of toys and clothing, and she even sends the prizes she gets from kids’ meals at the fast food joints she eats at (not kidding on this one; we currently have more Rally’s toys than an actually Rally’s restaurant has at any give time).

With the changing of the seasons, I had to clear out the old winter clothes from Pixie’s closet and put in the stuff we saved from Princess’ wardrobe. That’s a huge headache for me. I know it saves a ton of money, but I have having to sort and store all that clothing. We simply don’t have enough boxes for it all. And remember, my mom buys these kids clothing in BULK! We used to get a package a week, filled with little dresses and outfits, until I made her cut back.

Anyway, I decided to spend today cleaning out both kids’ closets, only I got into Pixie’s room and realized I also needed to sort through her toys and clean up a few messes, so I ended up only doing her room. And while I was cleaning and swapping out clothes, I found a few interesting things, like…

An old maternity top of mine. It’s a lime green t-shirt from Old Navy. I owned several of them when I was pregnant with Pixie, and thought I had gotten rid of all but one, that one being the one I was wearing on the day I went into labor. I kept that one for sentimental reasons. Now that we’re contemplating child #3, I wish I had kept them all.

The knitted yellow hat Pixie got at the hospital when she was born. It was the first article of clothing that kid ever wore, and it suited her. She had a touch of jaundice and was about as yellow as the hat. We had to lay her naked little butt on a blanket and scoot her from one sunny spot to another around the house for the first week she was home. She didn’t like that, and she announced her displeasure with a lot of explosive, projectile poops.

Several small brushes and combs for baby hair. Neither of my girls had hair when they were born, so these have never really been used.

One pair of nursing pads. I used to own a ton of those things too, and will need to stock up for child #3. God I hated wearing those things, and I hated wearing nursing bras, but now I want all that stuff back!

My breast feeding log for Princess. I put Pixie’s in the cedar chest in my bedroom. I didn’t realize the notebook I’d used to record all of Princess’ feedings was still in the dresser in the nursery. Now that really brings back some memories — late nights, trying to stay awake, swollen boobs, falling asleep in the glider, twelve feedings or more a day, a lot of those feedings spent scribbling madly in a notebook or typing stories on a computer. And yes, I’ll do it again gladly with child #3.

A dozen flannel baby blankets. Word of warning to new and expectant mom — you cannot have enough flannel blankets. Between leaky diapers, spit up, and other mishaps, new babies go through about five a day. You will do laundry constantly! I never gave away any of the flannel blankies I got during Princess’ first months, and I’m very glad I still have them. However, I did give away…

Cloth diapers used as burp clothes. That was stupid. The only thing we went through faster than the blankets was the burp clothes. I can still recall how they smelled, that slightly sour odor of spit up and the slightly sweet odor of fresh breast milk. I over-expressed with both kids, and stopped more than a few spray-a-thons by slapping a burp cloth over the offending boobie.

In the toy department, I found some interesting odds and ends. Namely, I discovered that Pixie and Princess own enough Barbies and Little People to repopulate the entire world should the Apocalypse ever occur and we are all wiped out. Please for love of God, if you have any intentions of giving my children a gift, do NOT give them Barbies, Barbie clothing, or any Little People. We’re full up.

In the Barbie basket, I did find a couple of badly tattooed dolls. Pixie loves to color on her dolls with magic marker, and unfortunately, even the washable stuff is permanent on Barbie dolls. She also got into her sister’s Style and Curl Barbie head, and did a real number on that…

However, I noticed some of those markings are a little too well made, and I suspect Princess may have helped out with this makeover. I don’t care though. This damned thing has been a thorn in my side since the day we got it, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to toss it. I keep finding all the little rhinestones and barrettes all over the house, and honestly, a six-year-old does not need to apply makeup to anything. Nor can she really style the hair. Except for the marker makeover, this thing has mostly sat on the floor and collected dust. So today it was, “Hasta la vista, you painted tart!”

Speaking of tarts, I also found this in Pixie’s room…

Poor Steve. That dress really doesn’t fit him. But at least he has pants. None of Pixie’s other male dolls are that lucky. Most have a shirt, but no drawers, and some only get a pair of high heels.

Once I got past the toys, I was able to start moving boxes of clothing off the spare bed we keep in Pixie’s room. That’s when I discovered Pixie’s latest adventures in art…

Yeah, it’s marker. I spent so much time doing everything else today that I did not have time to scrub it yet, so I don’t know if it’s permanent or not. But I’m thinking either way, it’s time to take away the markers from Pixie again.

At last I got to the closet, where I pulled out a ton of old winter clothing, all of it 2T. In addition to her sister’s hand-me-downs, Pixie also got new clothing from Grandmama, so I had to do a culling of the clothes. Anything with a stain went, as well as anything I recalled Pixie would never wear. She’s big on comfort, so if she wouldn’t wear it, I doubt the next child will either. Then I got rid of a few things that were just ugly. Yeah, I’m picky, but with so many clothes to store, I needed to be. I got everything down to just three boxes, one of which was nothing but frilly little dresses Pixie will never wear again. I remember those dresses. Her sister wore them too. They were a big part of Princess’ wardrobe when I was pregnant with her sister. I’m sad to see them go.

There were new dresses to put in though, lots of pretty, colorful summer dresses, enough to keep Pixie happy no matter how many times a day she tries to change clothes. As I put those in the closet, I cleared out some tchotchkies that were lying around on the top shelf — wall plaques with Sweet Memories sayings and stuff like that. I know they were gifts and keepsakes, but I don’t hang on to stuff like that, and never did put any of that stuff up in either child’s room. So those went in the give-away bag. May they find a good home! Then I found the stuff I would keep no matter what — the christening dresses my mom made for each girl; the matching blankets she crocheted for their baptisms; a doll with a crocheted witch’s costume, also made by my mom; my old doll house, given to me by my grandmother when I was about Princess’ age; a Gimbel’s box full of Louis Marx Wild Animal toys, again a gift to me from my grandmother when I was very small. Those things stayed. Then while I was finishing putting stuff away, I found one last treasure.

A set of hospital bracelets. Two were mine. One was labeled, “Madden, BG… 2003.”

Pixie turns three in a few more weeks. I looked at that tiny little bracelet, remembered how small she used to be, and I cried.

Made it damned hard to finish cleaning up, I tell you.

Who’s Divorce Is It Anyway?

I found this article on Web MD today, about how someone’s divorce can affect their friends’ marriages. I have to say, I’ve only read the first few pages, but so far this article is spot on. Michael and I have been through this more than a couple of times, where a couple we know and hang out with suddenly end up divorced. In fact, it’s happened to us so often that I am no longer allowed to look through our wedding album, because I sit there and pick out all the people we know in the photos who are no longer together. These days, I can also pick out the people in our wedding album who are now dead, which is another reason why I’m not allowed to look through our wedding album anymore; Michael says it’s just too ghoulish.

And he’s right, it is ghoulish to sit there and look at the pictures and talk about what went wrong, like I’m performing some sort of verbal autopsy on a long-dead relationship, but that’s how I handle these things. I look at what the people around me did wrong and I want to discuss it, to learn from it, to make sure I don’t end up repeating their mistakes. As badly as I felt for my neighbor down the street who’s husband died suddenly of a heart attack, I couldn’t help but want to analyze about the aftermath she went through. She couldn’t get into her late husband’s computer to pay the bills; she wasn’t sure how to handle the insurance claim; she didn’t know how to deal with certain financial aspects of her home business because her husband had always handled it. I have to discuss these things with Michael to make sure I won’t end up in the same bad situation.

I’ve done the same thing with divorces, picking apart what might have gone wrong and then comparing my findings to what’s happening in my own marriage. It’s armchair quarterbacking for sure, but when someone you know has been married for 10 years and you just went camping with them the weekend before and now suddenly the wife is moving out and they’re getting a divorce, it does make you stop in your tracks and go, “WTF?! How’d that happen? Didn’t we just go camping with them last week? Uh, honey? We’re not headed for divorce, are we?”

To reassure all my friends, I do not study your lives under a microscope. Half the time, when you make a mistake, I have no idea; I’m too busy fighting off my own alligators to notice yours. And the closer I am to someone, the more likely I am not to need to analyze what’s gone on in their lives. Those folks tell me everything anyway.

But some days I’ve got to be the ghoul. Some days I have to sit and try to learn from other’s mistakes. It ain’t pretty, but at least you know that because I’m a stay-at-home mom, I can’t hang around the water cooler at work and gossip about it.

Arkansas day 02 – What to do in Arkansas

There’s lots to do in Arkansas. Seriously! Lots and lots of stuff to do!

Except we were too wiped out after a day of travel to do much the first day.

We woke up the first day to the angelic sound of braying donkeys. Yeah. My folks own two Sicilian donkeys, one male and one constantly pregnant female. Their names are Jonah and Jill, or as Mom likes to call them, that horney bastard and her poor girl.

Jill, on the left (man is she pregnant), aand Jonah , grazing on the right.

Let me tell ya, you don’t need an alarm clock when you’ve got donkeys. But my folks also have two horses, a mare named Cheyenne and a gelding named Smokey Joe.

Cheyenne, on the right, and Smokey Joe’s rear end on the left (I don’t think I got a head shot of him all week)

Anyway, we slowly dragged ourselves out of bed to the braying of the donkeys… Okay, I dragged myself out of bed; everyone else was just too damned chipper for words… and we had a huge breakfast of eggs, potatoes, pancakes, and fruit and I knew right then and there that Wii Fit is going to be cussing me out when I get home because there’s no way I can’t not eat my mom’s cooking, and she cooks a lot when we’re home. She also takes us out to eat a lot too. In fact, these trips seem to consist of three activities – cooking, eating, and shopping for more food to cook and eat. And that’s pretty much what we did all that first day of our trip. But we did manage to get out to see one of the local sites – Walmart.

Hey, we have to go somewhere to buy more food to eat all week! And Walmart is the place to go in this part of Arkansas. In fact, I think we went to Walmart every single day of our visit. But this trip was special, because on this trip we bought fishing rods for the kids!

I don’t know why, but my dad decided we absolutely had to go fishing. I don’t recall my dad being any great shakes at fishing, but apparently he was determined that the girls get the full country experience during this trip, so we hit the sporting goods section of Walmart to pick out fishing poles. Of course, the first pole Dad reached for was a pro level fishing pole that was twice the Princess’ height. I nixed that and suggested we actually look for a kid’s fishing pole. So we turned the corner and whaddaya know! We found Barbie and Dora fishing poles!

I thougth my dad was going to have an apoplexy. But the girls fell in love with those fishing poles the moment they saw them, so you know we had to get at least one. I convinced Princess to get a real kids’ fishing pole, not a toy one, if she wanted to have any hope of catching fish. Meanwhile, we let Pixie have the Dora the Explorer pole, complete with everything except hook. And then we made our purchases and headed out to the tourist sight in the area – Wood’s Pharmacy and Soda Shop.

Wood’s Pharmacy and Soda Shop (and home of the best sandwich EVER!)

Wood’s Pharmacy and Soda Shop is exactly what it says it is, an old (but still working) pharmacy with a soda shop built inside. This is the the only place in the world where I can get the delicacy known as a grilled pimento cheese sandwich. I love this sandwich. I would marry this sandwich and have its’ cheesy babies if I could. The cooks at Wood’s use three cheeses to make it, and if I ever figure out what the other two cheeses are aside from pimento, my arteries are in a lot of trouble because I’ll be making this sandwich two and three times a day,every day, until the day I die of massive heart failure from all the dairy product and greese I have consumed by eating all those sandwiches. Unlike the cheese burger from Hell we had at Checker’s, this is fried treat I can actually enjoy! Michael also got his favorite delicacy, a malted, which once again is something we can only seem to find at Wood’s.

After lunch, we still had plenty of daylight left, so we headed out to the other big tourist site in the area – the caverns at Blanchard’s Springs.

The Caverns of Blanchard’s Springs

This picture hasn’t been run through Photoshop yet, so you can’t really see all the wonderful details, but trust me, these caverns are impressive. Maybe not as big as Lurray Caverns in Virginia, but still quite stunning with all those stalactites and stalacmites and helectites (formations that sprout out sideways from the wall, instead of straight up and down; didn’t know about that one, didya? See, you learned something from reading all my vacation drivel). The caverns are actually just one part of Blanchard Springs. There’s also the actual spring itself and the nearby lake and hiking trails. The place is huge, and you can’t explore it all in one day, so we didn’t. We took two days to do it instead.

I’ve got a whole slew of pictures from the caverns, but again, they need to be run through Photoshop to bring out the details, so I’ll post those in a later entry. But after the caverns, we headed home to explore a little closer to home, and we ran across a few items of interest. The first was a closet full of my sister’s old majorette costumes, which the girls went absolutely crazy over. I was able to find a couple that sort of fit, so the girls spent the rest of the day prancing around in tutus and fringe and sequins.

Princess and Pixie strut their stuff.

While the kids danced around the house, Michael and I went for a walk, and I found all sorts of interesting things to photograph, like these…

I don’t know why, but I’m lichen this picture (har har har!)

The road to my parent’s house (it’s a mile walk to their mail box, and another four miles of dirt and rocks until you get to the highway).

The dogwoods are in bloom…

But most of the local area still looks like it was bombed to smithereens after this winter’s tornadoes and ice storms.

I wonder who’s jaw that is? (You know you’re out in the middle of nowhere when you can find bones just lying all over the place.)

After our two mile hike to get the mail, we came home to devour more of Mom’s cooking, and then there was dessert (there is ALWAYS dessert at Mom’s), and then everybody else watched a movie while I went to soak in the tub, and then bury myself in a good book (the book in question was Twilight, by the way; yes I liked it, no it’s not perfect, but it definitely kept me entertained for a few days).

And that was the second day of our trip.

Arkansas day 01 – Getting there is half the misery

Well, for the first time in a couple years, Michael and the kids and I made it out to my folks’ house waaaaaaaay out in the boonies in Arkansas. I am not from Arkansas; neither are my parents. But they moved there 10 years ago, so if I want to see them, I have to make the trek into the wilds to get out there. Here is a journal of one such adventure.

Day 1 – Getting there is half the misery…

It’s a long trip from Virginia to Arkansas. How long is it, you ask? Sunday morning, we got up at oh-dark-thirty to scarf down breakfast, pile into the car, and make the hour-and-a-half-long drive to the Richmond airport. There are airports closer to us, but this one gave us the best price on a flight to Arkansas. The drive there wasn’t a big deal. I’ve driven to and around Richmond so many times, it seems like nothing to me.

But anyway, we got to Richmond early that morning and hopped on a flight to Atlanta, the funnest airport in the world!! Okay, maybe not the funnest airport in the world, but I kind of like it because it has more food choices than most other airports I’ve been in. Unfortunately, we were traveling with the kids, and they didn’t want to eat at Au Bon Pain or Moe’s Tacos or even Sbarro’s. Noooooooo, they had to eat at Checker’s, which is really Rally’s in disguise, and the burgers we got from there were D-I-S-G-U-S-T-I-N-G. I mean, the cheeseburgers were just dripping with grease. I picked up my burger and I could see the fat spatter on the paper beneath. GROSS! Even the kids didn’t finish their meals, although to be fair, the Princess had a temperature of 102 degrees.

Oh yeah, did I mention we were travelling with a sick kid? Fortunately, she didn’t puke during the trip, but she had me worried the entire time. I had me worried, too. We rode a puddle-jumper from Richmond to Atlanta, and an even smaller puddle-jumper (or should I call it a piddle-jumper, it was so small?) from Atlanta to Little Rock. Neither flight was good for me. You see, I have this thing about small planes. It’s not that I’m afraid they’re going to crash – I’m not. It’s just that I’m concerned about spewing the contents of my stomach every time we hit turbulence. And the flight from Richmond to Atlanta was a bit… turbulent.

So I was queasy getting off the plane in Atlanta. And then I ate the grease burger from Hell. And then I got on the piddle-jumper. And there was more turbulence. Not a lot. Just enough to make me green around the gills. But then we got off the plane, met my parents, got into their car and…

Made the two-and-a-half hour drive from the Little Rock Airpot to my parents’ house in the boonies…

Only we drove at a heart-stopping 70 miles-per-hour along the windiest, twistiest roads ever built in the history of civilization, so we could make it home even faster…

But first we had to stop in Conway and have dinner at the worst Japanese hibachi restaurant known to mankind.

How bad was this restaurant? Well, let me say this. I normally find hibachi food to be a light and refreshing repast. It’s usually lean cuts of meat grilled with fresh vegetables and served with rice. But this hibachi was cooked with LARD, lots and lots of LARD, and the chef (if you could call him that) was a nut case who threw bits of food at us while he cooked. Not only that, but he hosed down the flaming onion volcano (if you’ve ever been to a hibachi place, you know what I’m talking about here – the chef cuts up the onion into thick slices, stacks them largest to smallest, fills them with some sort of flamable liquid and ignites it)… anyway, the chef hosed down the flaming onion volcano with a (get this) squirter shaped like a little boy WITH NO PANTS ON. You can guess where the water came out of. It was classy I tell ya. Really, really classy.

Not.

So I was on two tiny planes flying in gut-churning turbulence, I ate a grease burger from Hell, I ate hibachi from some place even worse than Hell, and I rode in the passenger’s seat for a two-and-a-half hour drive on the highway to Hell (only Mom was speeding, so we got there a lot faster). Just in case you were wondering, the highway to Hell is not paved with good intentions. In fact, in some places, it is not paved at all. We were okay on the narrow two-lane highway that ran from Conway to Mountain View, except for the roller-coaster-style twists and turns, but then we got to my parents’ neighborhood (and I use that term very loosely, because their closest neighbor lives a mile away) and it was all dirt road. Except for the spots where it was chunks of rock. Or exposed tree roots. Or mud. And don’t ask me exactly which parts were dirt or tree roots or rocks or mud, because I had my eyes closed the whole way, to ensure I didn’t add vomit to the list of surface materials for that road.

Anyway, after all that, we finally ended up at my parents’ place, and I was never so glad to get out of the car and actually be in Arkansas, as opposed to being on my way to Arkansas.

And that was the entire first day of our trip.

My parents’ place, Gallowglass House in Arkansas (that’s my dad in the foreground)

Poetry? The Walk

I make no claims to being a poet. This is simply what came to me yesterday as the Pixie and I walked through our neighborhood in the rain.

The Walk

The world is mine today
Empty, abandoned
In the wake of some apocalypse
I must have slept through this morning

Dull little houses line
Oil-slicked streets
Blank windows, locked doors
Sing a requiem
for Suburbia

The ground is black
And bitter as used coffee grounds
The sky is gray
As my mood
Or the hair I found
This morning

One wiry antennae
Sticking straight up
From my skull
Receiving all messages of
Doom and gloom

Doom and gloom
Gloom and doom
Mist wraps around me
A second, clammy coat
My bat black umbrella
Flaps overhead
The leaden sky bleeds acid rain
Forcing all the sugar mamas
To stay inside
And gawk as I shuffle by

They’ll melt, they’ll melt
My god, they’d melt!
If they ever set foot outside

But I don’t have
That concern today
I’m old and sour
As a basket
Of assholes
And the rain, the rain
Fits me like a glove

Doom and gloom
Gloom and doom
The world is mine
The world is grey
And I shuffle through it
A zombie at home

In the damp, in the dead
In the swampy mists
Only one thing seems amiss
One small detail out of place
The little Pixie who dances
At my side

Her tiny pink coat
Is a shocking wound
In all this glorious misery gray
It rips me
Out of my stupor and into
A world where squirrels
Natter and birds
Shriek and shrill and puddles
Wait to be stomped

Splash and dash!
Dash and splash!
She flits around
The little busy buzzy bee
Tearing my world apart

Her high pitched giggle
Like a sword-thrust
To my senses
Simply kills my good bad mood
Like holy water on vampires
I am forced to step out of my
Steaming gothic remains
Into the world of the living
Again

Splash and dash!
Dash and splash!
Look Mama
A bird!
A squirrel!
Another puddle!

The world is hers
Not mine
I hope I can surrender it
With grace

Beetlejuice, 1991-2009

It has taken me two weeks to get around to writing this. I can’t say if it’s because I have grown to hate writing these eulogies for my pets or if it’s because I’m so damned tired and worn out these days. Maybe both.

Beetlejuice, the oldest of the three cats who lived with me during the last 17 years, passed away two weeks ago in the beginning of March. I knew his time was coming soon. He was old, older than any other cat I can recall hearing of, and he had begun to slow down so much the last few weeks. This time wasn’t like it was with Lydia or Fritti. There didn’t seem to be any suffering until the very end, and even that seemed more like fatigue than actual pain or misery.

I was actually there when BJ was born. He’s from the first litter of my mother’s cat, Bonnie. Bonnie is a registered Himalayan, still prowling around my folk’s place at the grand age of 18 or 19. Mom had her breed when she was around a year and a half old, and BJ was one of the results of that. He was born with five other kittens on a day I’ll never forget. I was attending Officer Basic Course at Fort Eustis that year, and staying with my parents rather than staying on post. I had been out all night working as staff duty officer. I was beat and ready to collapse in bed when I walked through the door and saw Bonnie walking around the den meowing and dragging something behind her. That something turned out to be a new born kitten still connected to her by the umbilical cord. I woke up my mom and she and I delivered the next couple of kitten. Then my dad came home to help out. He and mom pulled out the last two kittens because they were breech and Bonnie was too exhausted to push any more while I toweled off the others, thinking to myself, “God these things look ugly!”

They did look ugly, like little yellow rats, but that phase only lasted a few days and pretty soon they were fluffy blind moles squeaking and scuffling to get at their mother’s milk. It became my job to rotate the kittens, making sure each tiny ball of fluff got a chance at the back nipples where the milk was better. We had a couple of nipple hogs in that group who actively fought my attempts to move them away from the prime feeding spots, but somehow I managed to keep all the babies fed.

I stayed a few more months at my folk’s, rotating kittens and finishing up OBC. We made one trip over the Christmas holidays to my grandmother and took the kittens and my then-fiance Michael with us. The kittens adored Michael and turned him into a giant jungle gym, climbing all over him and pouncing on him. He seemed to adore them as well, which was good since I knew eventually one of the little fuzz butts was going to be mine. I didn’t know which one though until my mother gave him to me. He was a male blue point Himalayan with the biggest blue eyes I’d ever seen. I was addicted to the cartoon ‘Beetlejuice’ then, so I named him Beetlejuice, and even had him registered as ‘Beetlejuice, Prince of Neitherworld.’

BJ came to live with me in Blacksburg when he was old enough, first in the Terrace View apartment I shared with two roommates, and then in the apartment on Washington Street that I had to myself. I didn’t want him to be alone all day while I was at classes, so I adopted a scrawny orange tabby to keep him company. That crazy critter was Fritti, who grew up to be a big lug of orange not-quite-tom-cat (I had all my cats fixed as soon as they were old enough). And then of course a few weeks later, someone asked me if I would adopt a third cat that they couldn’t keep themselves and that’s how I got a cuddly black and brown tabby I named Lydia.

Life with three cats was always an adventure. BJ was probably the calmest of the three, although you couldn’t tell it from the picture above. He liked to play, but tended to let the other two cats take the lead. He would sometimes chase Lydia around the house, forcing her to vault to the top of the china cabinet in our dining room where she would then puke up a bunch of cat treats and leave them there for me to discover weeks later. But I think the strangest behavior BJ ever exhibited was his interest in human sexual relations. Michael and I could not have sex without him watching, unless we shut him out of the room. In fact, BJ liked to sit on our feet when we were making love, and would complain a bit if he got shoved about. When we were done with our activities, he liked to walk all over us, sniffing. Michael called him ‘the Sex Inspector,’ saying BJ obviously had to check and see if we had done things right, and of course we were never done with sex unless we had his seal of approval.

BJ acquired a lot of nicknames over the years. There was BJ, of course, and Beej. Also BeeGee, Boojoo, Booper, Mr. Booper, Mr. Buddy, Mr. Bloomers (because of the way his rear end looked with all that fluffy fur), and Fuzz Butt. He adored Michael and could not stand to be locked out of the office when Michael was working. In fact, if I opened the door to the office while Michael was working, BJ would take the opportunity to dart up the stairs and launch himself into Michael’s lap, where he would demand to be petted.

There were other cute/odd behaviors. He liked to walk around the house in the middle of the night yowling at the top of his lungs, always waking me up. This happened more and more after Fritti died. Fritti was our original opera cat, who loved to yodel at all hours. BJ also loved to lie in the tub during the summer, to cool off. I took him to the vet some summers to have him groomed, and the other cats always stared and snickered whenever BJ came back. I have to admit, he did look funny with all his fur clipped, though they never shaved his tail. That was always full, grey and gorgeous.

I always thought that BJ would be the first to pass away, because we’d had more health problems with him than the other two. He nearly died while I was pregnant with Sam. In fact, all three cats were hit with some sort of illness that year that involved me spending lots of time nursing them and giving them subcutaneous fluids until they got well enough to fight me off. But Fritti went first, and then Lydia a year later. I knew with BJ it was only a matter of time.

After Fritti died, BJ seemed to enter a sort of renaissance, suddenly strutting around the house, playing like he hadn’t in years, and acting like the cock of the walk. Though I know he and Fritti loved each other (they constantly groomed each other and acted like lovers), I always thought that BJ was a bit intimidated by Fritti. Without the alpha cat in the house, I guess BJ felt he was now large and in charge. It was nice to see him act so lively and healthy. His slow down at the end was so gradual, I really didn’t notice what was going on until the last month.

His eating tapered off first. He was always a picky eater, most likely to snub his meals in favor of treats, and likely to suddenly snub them too when the mood hit. But we reached a point where neither treats nor any sort of wet food would do. Then he stopped drinking water. I was able to coax him to take a few sips if I refilled the bowl in his site, but after a while even that stopped. Eventually we reached a point where all BJ would do was stare at his food and water bowls and then meander off somewhere to sleep.

During the last month, he came to see me while I was taking a bath. I don’t know what inspired him to do this, but he jumped up onto the side of the tub and then tried to leap across. He missed and landed in the water and on top of me. He didn’t fly into a full blown panic like I would have expected, but he did scratch up my foot pretty good. I still have a mark there. But that was the first indication to me that he was starting to go. If he couldn’t leap from one side of the tub to the other, his days were numbered. Eventually, I began to hear occasional thumps and thuds and crashes throughout the house – all attempted and failed leaps that BJ was making. On the last day, these sounds were the worst. He wanted into the bath tubs, so he could lie on a cool surface, but he couldn’t seem to get into the tubs without falling over the side and landing in a heap. He hurt his leg trying, and limped through the last day of his life, but he wouldn’t let me help him get into or out of any place. He limped from one spot to another – my tub, the kids’ tub, the floor in front of my bathroom sink, a spot behind the toilet. I did managed to get him onto my bed at one point, and I thought he would die there. He fell asleep, and his breathing grew so slow. But then every now and then he’d wake up and yowl. Eventually, he tried to leave the bed when I wasn’t looking, and there was another crash and a thump. I ran into the room to see him limp away to another spot.

All that day, it snowed. The kids played outside with Michael, making a snowman, while I folded laundry and tried to pack for my trip to Vegas. I called the vet around 2PM, determined to see BJ taken care of before I left. I was not going to let him linger and suffer while I flew off to a conference, and I was not going to shift that responsibility onto Michael. However, around 9PM, after the kids had gone to bed, taking care of BJ became a moot point. He tottered into the girls’ bathroom one last time and slumped on the floor. His breathing was so labored at that point, each intake was a gasp followed by a lengthy silence. I knew he was in his final hour, and yet once again, I found myself torn between trying to tend to him and prepare for the conference I was attending in two days. I decided to leave BJ alone. He had wandered away from all my other attempts to take care of him, and I think he just didn’t want to be bothered anymore. Sometime while I was putting the finishing touches on some notes and sending out e-mails in the bedroom down the hall, he passed away. Michael and I had to spend several minutes to make sure he was gone; it was so hard to tell toward the end. But he had finally passed away, and I’m not even sure if I heard his last gasp as I left to finish my packing or if he had lasted a few minutes longer.

We took BJ in to be cremated the next day. Cassie hadn’t quite understood the day before what was going on. She knew BJ was dying, but to her that meant we’d be getting a new cat soon, and that was all she could think of. It wasn’t until I tried to explain to her, and then blew up when she refused to stop talking about a new cat, that she finally realized BJ was not going to be around any more. I don’t make any excuses for losing my temper, nor do I offer any regrets. I tried my best to explain that a cat I loved was dying but it took a time out and some yelling to get the point to sink into the Princess’ brain. As for Pixie, she only knows that BJ died, but not what that means. I think it confused her that we took his body into the vet’s the next day, but when we came back the next week, we only walked out with a small white box. I tried to explain that BJ’s ashes were in the box, but it made no sense to her.

So my three cats are now all gone. They were good, loving, loyal companions for many years. Now they all share the same shelf in my bed room, three little white boxes lined up in front of my favorite books. At times it feels so horrifically unfair, but what other end did I expect? They were old. This is what happens. And life goes on.

We will not be getting another cat any time soon. Michael and I plan to try for a third baby this summer, and as Michael points out, a new cat presents certain health concerns for a pregnant mother. And even after the baby is born, we’ll still wait a few months. It wouldn’t be fair to any animal to come into a house with an infant. I’d be so sleep deprived and cranky, I know I wouldn’t be in any shape to care for two new additions to the family.

Until the times comes for a new cat, I will have my memories of these three – Fritti, Lydia and BJ. Good cats all, crazy as hell, and the best companions I could ever have asked for. You guys will be sorely missed.

Fritti – 1992-2007

Lydia – 1992-2008

Beetlejuice, 1991-2009

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Homemade Holidays

I’ve had a lousy week do to work issues, and I’m so fed up and frustrated that I can’t seem to stop snapping at my kids. I hate being the Grinch, so I decided to take a little time off from my obsessing about stuff that I can do absolutely nothing to fix and spend an evening just enjoying my girls instead. Cassie needed to make a Christmas ornament for her bus driver and Sam was in a pissy mood because Cass has all the good play jewelry and she wanted something new. So I broke out all my old beading stuff and this is what we made.

Cassie’s holiday ornament. She did most of this herself. I helped by bending the wires after she beaded them and then finishing things off by making the final loop for the hook. Otherwise, everything else is all her work.

Sam’s new necklace. I used memory wire, which holds its shape forever. That way I didn’t have to add a clasp to the ends or tie anything off. She can just slip it around her neck, but it still has an opening so the necklace will come off if it gets caught on anything. Sam picked out the beads and handed them to me. I did the stringing and finished off the ends with some needlenose pliers.

There was a lot of fussing and fighting over beads and who got Mommy’s help when, but all of that taught me a very important lesson. Doing any sort of craft thing with kids can be frustrating and stressful, but not nearly as frustrating and stressful as what some adults (who should know better) do to others. I’ll take my girls over most adults any day of the week.

Funny How Things Change

Before I had kids, I used to go to the bookstore all the time. Seriously, I lived there. I even dreamed that I owned a house that was a bookstore, complete with a fancy cafe and all the cappuccino I could drink.

After having my first child, I quit going to bookstores for a while. It was just too hard. I couldn’t browse for books while handling a screaming baby. It got a little easier as Cassie got older and developed an interest in books, but even then I frequently found myself trapped in the kids’ section of the store, watching my daughter tear around the place and wishing I could somehow magically transport myself to the magazines, science fiction, mystery, non-fiction… Any part of the store that didn’t involve Disney Princess books and Thomas the Tank Engine.

Now that Cassie is in kindergarten and Sam is almost ready for preschool, I’d begun to look forward to the day when I’d be able to hit the bookstore alone. I could browse for hours without listening to someone whine “I’m boooooored!” I could order a piece of cheesecake at the cafe and not worry about someone dropping it on the floor before I could get a bite. I could have coffee and not have to argue with a small tot over why they can’t have another sip of my delicious and highly caffeinated beverage. Then came today.

I needed to get some gift cards for Cassie’s teachers. The bookstore seemed like the best bet for a teacher gift. I grabbed my wallet, coat and keys and turned to Sam.

“Okay, let’s go to the bookstore!”

“No! I don wanna go bookstore! I stay home with Dada!”

“Huh? Uh… I’m going to the bookstore, sweetie. You know, books? Thomas the Tank Engine? Disney Princess stories? Cookies and brownies and treats? Let’s get your coat on, okay?”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I stay HOME with DADA!”

I looked at my husband. He looked back at me and shrugged. “Go ahead. She can stay here with me.”

So I went. And I hated it. I didn’t have anyone to sit with me at the cafe. I didn’t have anyone to chat with as I browsed for books. I didn’t have anyone to ask if we could please buy a princess book. I was so damned lonely I almost cried.

Next time I go to the bookstore, Sam doesn’t get a choice. That little fart is going with me. It’s just no fun on my own anymore.

My Husband, My Hero

My in-laws have a series of plaques hanging in their dining room. Each plaque is painted with a cartoon of family member done up as a saint. There’s Saint Jerry, patron saint of husbands and protector of wives and children; Saint Carmen, patron saint of housekeeping and child-rearing; and then there’s one for each of the five boys in the family.

My husband, the oldest son, has a plaque that says “Saint Michael, the Magnificent.” Sometimes, I find this epiteph absolutely hysterical. Like whenever I have to get up in the middle of the night and I trip over the shoes he’s left in a huge pile all over the bedroom floor. And why am I getting up in the middle of the night? Because one of the kids is screaming for us, but Saint Michael the Magnificent suffers tragically from nocturnal deafness, meaning he doesn’t hear a damn thing once his head hits the pillow. He also suffers from “I’ll-get-to-it-itus,” a debilitating disease which causes him to forget to do things like clear the kitchen table or vacuum the floor or get the kids to pick up after themselves. These are all chores I normally do, but on nights when I take karate class, he’s supposed to do them. Yet I always come home to find toys strewn everywhere, dirty dishes still on the table, and our youngest daughter’s dinner scattered all over the dining room carpet. When I ask Saint Michael the Magnificent when he plans to get to these things, he always answers, “I’ll get to it,” which in our house translates as “I’m going to forget all about these chores and leave them until **you** do them dear, because my giant brain is just so busy with other things!”

And speaking of giant brains, Michael does have one of the biggest. That man has not one but two degrees in aerospace engineering. He makes his living programming flight simulators for commercial aircraft. He’s fluent in C++, Fortran, Java and fifty other computer languages I know nothing about. He reads physics books… for fun. He can explain at length the difference is between gravity and gravitation, and has done so many times at the dinner table but my brain is a little too small to handle that conversation. His hobbies include building computers and fixing bug-riddled software, and he has become so intimate with our computers that I sometimes think I ought to sew a few microprocessors into my lingerie so I can get his attention. He is, in short, a geek god.

This is not a bad thing though. In fact, yesterday it turned out to be a very good thing. One of our neighbors passed away unexpectedly this week. I stopped by to visit his wife and see how she was doing. Her family showed up right away to help with the funeral arrangements and make sure she was taken care of, but there was one problem no one could figure out — how to get into the husband’s computer to pay the bills. The widow had never been involved in handling the household finances. She only knew that her husband had everything set up on the computer and she didn’t know the password to get to the info she needed. She was looking at paying someone $85 an hour to hack into the system. I told her to wait; I was pretty certain I knew someone trustworthy who could do the job for free. I called Michael immediately.

“I need you to be a hero for someone,” I said.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Mr. Smith died, and Mrs. Smith can’t get into his computer to pay the bills. Can you help?”

After a moment of silence, he said, “Maybe. It depends on a few things.”

“Can I tell Mrs. Smith when you’re coming over?”

“Yeah, about five thirty. I need to research a few things first.”

Michael came home around five, went up to his computer and started printing some documents and burning DVDs. “I want to go over there with a full tool set and all the latest info,” he explained. He left the house shortly after that, papers and DVDs tucked under his arms. I sat down with the kids and prepared to wait. Some computer problems could take hours to fix, I knew.

Michael was home ten minutes later. “Problem solved,” he said. “The operating system had a backdoor. Mrs. Smith can get to all the files now. I told her if she needs anything else, just give a call.”

Michael went off to karate class an hour later. Mrs. Smith called while he was out. “I just wanted to tell you, that was the nicest thing anyone has done for me all week. Tell your husband I am so grateful!”

Her thanks made me want to cry. Not because of what Michael did for Mrs. Smith. A lot of others would have been just as willing to help out in the same situation, and a lot of people in our neighborhood probably will help Mrs. Smith over the course of the next few weeks. It’s just that kind of neighborhood. But it made me realize that I will never ever find myself in the situation Mrs. Smith found herself in this week. My geek god husband, he of the gigantic brain, the man who suffers from “I’ll-get-to-it-itus” has already made plans for when he dies. He’s not planning on dying anytime soon, mind you. But he knows accidents can happen, the unexpected can occur any day, and he’s got a wife and two kids to take care of, whether he’s around or not.

The man who cannot remember to clear the dirty dishes off the dining room table is the same man who made certain we both have powers-of-attorney and trusts written up. The man who leaves his shoes all over the bedroom for me to trip over is also the man who created a password reset disk for me and stored it in a safe so it’s there if I ever need to get into his computer to pay the bills, I can, and there will be enough money in the accounts to handle the bills for at least a couple months. The man who cannot hear his five-year-old daughter howling for a glass of water in the middle of the night has made damn certain that neither his kids or his wife is ever going to want for anything should the worst happen and he not be there to take care of them himself.

I could go on and on about the things Michael has done to take care of this family — the weekends he stayed home and taken care of the kids without complaint so that I could run off to the library and work; the 3AM computer glitches he crawled out of bed to fix so that I could write that oh-so-important story or record that really important podcast; the poopy diapers he changed; the late nights he spent rocking a colicky baby; etc., etc. He has always come through when I need him, and he always will. So what if he can’t pick up his socks and put them in the hamper, and he rattles on endlessly about the finer points of physics to a woman who’s biggest mental challenge is how to get her two-year-old to poop in the potty? He takes care of the important things. He takes care of his family. He helps his neighbors and friends when they need it.

He is, in short, Saint Michael the Magnificent. He’s my hero, and I’m damned glad he’s my husband.

Episode 23 – When Princess Grows Up…

People always say that Princess is just like me, only shorter. That is not true at all. For starters, Princess wears a lot of pink. Pink shirts, pink pants, pink socks, etc. And she wears dresses. Lots and lots of frilly dresses. And she loves the jewelry and the bling and all the glitter she can get her hands on. There’s a reason why we call this girly-girl Princess.

Me, I don’t do the pink thing. I look good in black. And brown. And I’m killer in red. As for the type of clothes I wear, I’m a basic t-shirt and jeans kinda gal. Dresses? Don’t own any. Well, okay, I have one or two, but they only get pulled out once every couple of years when someone gets married or dies, and those dresses are definitely not PINK. I don’t like pink and I look horrible in it. In fact, I think I’m allergic to the color. Seriously.

Anyway, I wanted to apologize for being a bit late with this week’s ep. My husband, St. Michael the Magnificent, spent all last week re-painting the downstairs and that completely disrupted my work schedule. But those rooms need painting, badly. We’ve been in the same place for the last 14 years, and things were starting to look shabby. Since I knew it would be another 14 years before we would re-paint, I made sure to pick out a color I would be happy with. I spent hours comparing paint chips, studying them in my foyer and kitchen until I finally found just the right shade. It’s a very pale sort of shell pink. Wait, no. I did not say pink. It’s really almost a warm white. You can’t tell it’s pink at all. Unless you look at the trim color which is mint green, and then you know it’s pink…

Well crud.