What More Could A Mother Ask For?
May 11, 2009 
Brace yourselves, I’m about to say something sacriligious:
I’m not terribly fond of Mother’s Day.
I don’t know why. I want to like Mother’s Day – who couldn’t like a day devoted to celebrating your life’s vocation? But it’s so very “Hallmark” and there’s so much pressure to have The Best Day Ever and everyone asks you what you did and what your kids gave you and it feels just a little like a competition to see which mom is Most Loved or has The Most Thoughtful Spouse. I know, Neurotic Much?
Anyway, with all that aside, I can honestly say this Mother’s Day exceeded my expectations. In fact, it was quite literally a dream come true. Look what my husband gave me for Mother’s Day…
Kisa’s home!!!
It was no easy task, either. She was gone 9 days. I was leaving canned food out for her every night, just a foot or so inside our garage (with the door a little bit open). She would come and eat it and then disappear again. I didn’t even know for sure it was her eating it. And then my genius husband went to Home Depot where he found a humane trap. It’s usually used for trapping raccoons and suchlike, but it said it worked for cats too. We put that right at the opening to the garage, stuck a bowl of food inside and VOILA! The next morning, there’s my kitty!! She was meowling up a storm, making it perfectly clear that she was rather put out at having spent the night in a cage. But within a few hours she was totally back to her normal happy self. In fact, she was actually more friendly than usual – and even sat on Hubby’s lap for a while! Which, ahem, might be attributed to the herbs I was sprinkling in her food… but I’m good with that. I dreamed twice last week that Husband walked into the house holding Kisa and so it was almost surreal when he actually did on Sunday morning. I can’t remember the last time I dreamed something that later came true!
Oh also he gave me roses and a really sweet card. But what I’ll remember is the cat.
After church we went for a drive in the country. Because it was MY day and we were doing what I wanted to do. And therefore I take full responsibility for driving right past all the Subway shops and landing in the middle of nowhere with no decent picnic-type food to be found at lunch time. Yeah, that was fun. The kids were really in the mood to lavish me with praise right then. Hey, everyone can use a good cry on Mother’s Day, right? No worries, Husband saved the day. He found a lovely deli at a gas station. And then we looped back to the big state park with the nice views and the appalachian trails where we had approximately 45 minutes to poke around before speeding home so we could get the house clean in time for small group. Good times. No really, we did have a good time at the park. And the weather was absolutely perfect too. See?
All in all, a pretty good day.
Skittish
May 7, 2009 
Also Flighty. Jumpy. Fugitive. Oh and Unhinged works too.
All good words to describe Miss Kisa, the Runaway.
Seems she hasn’t actually run AWAY so much as she’s run and hid. We’ve now had I think four Kisa sightings in the last week. The last two were on Monday night when she came all the way up to the front step to eat the food I put out for her. Unfortunately the cat has freakishly good hearing and darted off the very second I started to open one of the other front doors.
It is downright WEIRD how she is acting. I mean, she’s always been timid. Okay, Hubby likes to call her “Semi-Feral” but I always thought that was a stretch. The cat sleeps on my bed for heaven’s sakes. And comes mewling into the kitchen whenever I open a can of tuna. And yet. Now she thinks she is Jean Valjean and I’m Inspector Javert. She’s “Elusive” is what I’m saying. Also Wily.
But if she’s not careful, she’s going to be Fox Food. Or meet other bad ends that I do not wish to consider.
So I’m getting creative now. I have the garage door open just a little bit, and I put her food bowl just inside the garage. We also put a crate in there, with a bed in it. (Hubby seems to think he can turn the crate into a humane trap. I am skeptical.) And I read a tip online that said to put out a litter box so I did that too. And then I sprinkled cat nip everywhere, because what cat can resist that?
Also I’m spiking her food. Nothing too serious, just some herbal thing for “stressed” cats we got before the road trip last year. So far I’ve put out two bowls of spiked cat food and both were empty the next morning. So either Kisa is eating it or we’ll have some really chilled out squirrels. Or possibly a very mellow fox.
Meanwhile it keeps raining and raining and raining. And raining. Also some lightning. And some extremely loud thunder. Which, generally speaking, is not conducive to getting a skittish cat to come out of hiding. What would be good is some sunshine. The kind that makes a cat want to stretch out and relax and not run away every time they hear a door open. Sadly there isn’t any of that in the forecast until Tuesday. I swear this place has gotten itself confused with Seattle.
It’s not like I don’t have a million other things to deal with right now. Teacher appreciation cookies, doctors appointments, a second night of gymnastics for R, a presentation to give in R’s class tomorrow… there’s a lot is what I’m saying. Plenty to do other than look for a lost cat who isn’t really lost. Wayward is more like it. Fugitive. On The Lam. Erratic. Or just plain Skittish.
Titles Are Not All That Important, Really.
May 2, 2009 
It’s after ten on a Saturday night and I’m writing a blog post. Oh yeah, this is the life!
Can’t really complain though, I actually had a date tonight. Hubby and I went to see 17 Again. Good movie. Take your teenagers, it’s got a great message. But if you have kids under 10, or even worse, a baby? Please, for the love of Mike, get a babysitter!! I can not even believe the number of young kids who were at the movie tonight and the number of times their parents let them be a total and annoying distraction to everyone. Down the row from us was an 8ish year old girl who (with her mother) must have walked in front of us at least 4 times, probably more. The mom kept saying “I’m so sorry.” Yeah, that’s all well and good but if you’re really that sorry, you wouldn’t keep doing it, y’know? Grow a spine and teach your kid some manners already! And then there was the baby four rows back who clearly needed to be put to bed based on the the multiple crying jags we listened to. Now, I consider myself a very understanding person and all, but we paid $14 a ticket for that movie and for that price, it ought to be the best movie-going experience of my life. It just hacks me off how many people don’t seem to give a thought or a care to anyone else but themselves. No way would I ever have let my baby cry through a movie – in fact, the one time I brought my baby to a movie, when she started to cry I walked out with her and I didn’t go back. Yes, it sucked to be me, but lesson learned. If you have a baby and you can’t get a sitter, rent a DVD!
/rant off
Speaking of parenting, today I did something that I’m pretty sure my mother never would have done. I brought my 13 year old daughter to a salon to have her hair dyed. Blue. Well, not all of it is blue. Most of it was dyed ink black and just one streak is blue.
K paid for the dye job, I just covered the haircut. But still, I think this should earn me at least a few “Cool Mom” points, no?
Transition to serious and slightly depressing topic…
One of our cats is missing. All three of our cats are totally indoor cats, meaning they never ever go outside. Except when we have freaky summer weather in April and the kids leave the back door wide open for like an hour. The bad part? We didn’t even realize she was missing for more than a day. She’s the quietest, most timid of our three cats and often flees when the kids are around so we just didn’t notice. I should have noticed. She doesn’t run away from me and she wasn’t in her usual spot on Thursday morning. But anyway. Hubby saw her sitting in the window (she on the outside, he on the inside) on Friday monring but she ran away before he could get to her. I’ve been calling to her and looking for her all over the yard ever since. Today I put up a couple of signs in our neighborhood, thinking maybe she’s wandered away from the yard altogether. I’m starting to really worry; it’s weird to me that she isn’t coming back. I really really want her to come back. So does her brother, Ichiro (the cat, not the baseball player) – they’re litter mates and every time I go out to look for her he stands at the screen door and meowls. It’s really sad.
Kisa, please come home.
Everytime It Rains It Rains Pennies From Heaven
Our cat Penny died today. And now I can’t get this old Bing Crosby song out of my mind.
All things considered, I was lucky that Penny lived so long after her prognosis in September. We gave her the medications prescribed by the vet and I did everything I could to keep her eating and drinking. And for the first week or so it seemed to be working – she seemed to be bouncing back. But then, it was like she decided that getting better wasn’t worth the effort. She fought the medicine, she wouldn’t eat… and it went down from there.
She was living full time in our master bathroom so we could monitor her intake and also because she didn’t always make it to the litter box. But we made her comfortable in there – she had her favorite cat condo where she could curl up and sleep. (She always loved to sleep all tucked away – I often found her burrowed under the covers of our bed; she’d creep up under the tucked sheets, so there was a nicely made bed with a Penny-sized lump in the middle of it.) Every morning for the last seven weeks I’d walk into the bathroom and wonder if Penny would still be alive. Most of the time she’d be sleeping in the condo and I’d reach my hand in to feel her breathing. And every time, without fail, she’d start purring. Just that little bit of human contact was enough to make her purr. Of course I made an effort to spend time with her – I’d take her out and sit with her on my bed for a while in the afternoons when the kids were at school. And then yesterday, Hubby decided to give our bathroom a good cleaning. (Apparently if you ignore it long enough and it hits the level of Utterly Disgusting, your husband will step up and do the job – who knew?) So anyway, he didn’t want to freak Penny out with the vaccuum so he asked me to take her out for a bit. I held her frail body in my arms and rocked with her in the rocking chair for a while. She didn’t purr. Before I put her back on her condo we stopped at the bay window in our kitchen. It was a beautiful day yesterday – the sky was a crystal blue and the big tree in our backyard is a blaze of orange. “I’ll bury you under that tree,” I told Penny. Then I remembered the dogs. Happy is tethered right nearby. “Well, maybe not that tree, but somewhere close by, and I’ll visit you. I promise.”
That was the last thing I ever said to her.
This morning I found Penny had passed sometime in the night, still tucked away in her little cat condo. It was time; she was ready to go.
When we got Penny as a kitten we had another cat, a Russian blue named Cinder. He adored Penny. He took her under his wing and was always trying to take care of her.
I remember one time when she was still tiny she climbed inside our baby grand piano. Cinder sat on the piano and mewed until we came along to see what all the racket was about. And then he had to mew some more because we weren’t that quick to realize there was a kitten in the piano. Cinder died a year later and I think Penny has been missing him ever since. It makes me happy to think that they are together again. 
I know some people don’t think pets go to heaven but I’m convinced I’ll see them there someday. After all, didn’t God create animals for our pleasure? And Penny was such a blessing. She wasn’t the bravest cat or the most outspoken. But when she climbed into bed with me every night and made herself a little nest in the blankets and then licked my hand, purring all the while, well, she gave me a real sense of peace and contentment. And what more can you ask from a pet?
No Way This Ends Good
Our cat Penny is sick. She’s our quiet shy kitty so it took me a while to notice that she was hiding more than usual. And she’s lost a lot of weight. She’s a maincoon and used to be somewhat “stout” – now she’s all bones. I hoped it was just stress from the move or something. But after a few days of watching her, I finally took her to the vet today. One wonders why I would even bother, since Hubby made it abundantly clear that we do not have extra money to spend on vet bills and he’s not particularly fond of having four cats anyway. But I really hoped they would tell me it was nothing big, maybe she just needed special food or a prescription or something.
So Penny and I went in to the vet that I picked out online and where we brought the dogs when they were poisoned. This is my first time there, Hubby did the other trips. I swear, this place is the Greys Anatomy of veteranarians. It’s a huge center – like 3 stories huge. And has like flat screen tv’s in the waiting rooms and multiple intake desks and probably more than 20 doctors… all of them young and good looking. I even heard a couple of them flirting and making lunch date plans.
Well, Miss McVet took one look at Penny and knew something was very very wrong. She said her lips, eyes and ears are all yellow. It’s probably kidney and/or liver failure. And Penny is very dehydrated. She wanted to run blood and urine tests right away. I said okay, and then sat there for half an hour waiting for her to come back and tell me what happens next. And as I sat there I realized we were officially hitting the limit of how much I could spend on Penny’s care. So short of them saying “oh it’s no big thing here’s a $50 prescription that wil make her all better” I am screwed.
Turns out I was more right than I wanted to be. Miss McVet came back with an itemized list of what she wants to do for Penny over the next 2-3 days, which is basically giving her lots of fluids and running a bunch of tests. Just those 2-3 days of figuring out what is wrong with her would cost us about $2000. Two Thousand Dollars. Just to find out what is wrong with my 8 year old cat.
And now I sit here waiting for the phone ring wondering what on earth I’m supposed to do. Miss McVet acted like the only choice was to do all the testing. What kind of monster will I be if I then say “No”? Do I just let her die because we don’t want to put out $2000? And what about the whole euthenasia thing? Honestly, I really not comfortable with the idea of deciding exactly when my pet dies. And just this morning I was holding Penny in my arms and she was purring – so clearly she isn’t in a lot of pain, right? Do I just bring her home and watch her slowly die?
And just to show what a cold and callous individual I really am, I am frustrated because this is just not a good time for a pet crisis. My very good friend is flying into town tonight for a short 2 day visit and I really don’t want to spend her entire visit crying or stressing about what to do. Not really sure how I can avoid that now though.
Apparently my streak of Frappiness is not quite up yet.
