picky picky

Often on weekdays we make a quick scrambled egg for the kids, topped with cheese. Elizabeth often views the scrambled egg as a delivery vehicle for melted cheese, but she also mostly likes eggs, too, though she vastly prefers the scrambled eggs made by our babysitter to those made my me or Daddy.

On weekends, we have more elaborate breakfasts, and sometimes we have scrambled eggs with ham, onions, other vegetables, plus cheese.

So on Saturday, Elizabeth requested eggs for breakfast, but quickly added some instructions:

"But don't put any food in the eggs, Daddy!"

Count by 5s!

There's lots of singing in school, and this is a favorite song. You might have to turn volume way way up as the iphone doesn't do sound well. Ignore the stage mother prompts in the background. Who was that?

She freaking loves that head thing I got her for her birthday, but in her mind, it is equal to her other headbands, meaning she thinks she can wear it to school while daddy and I disagree. So it's an after school option. And the sunglasses? Well, she is a star.

I could do an entire post on what she's doing when she falls asleep. I cannot resist pulling out my iphone and snapping pictures. Maybe next week I'll put them all together in one post, but this is her later that night.

stories

Like all families, my family has its share of stories that are told and retold, passed down for years. My favorite ones, of course, involve me.

So, 40 years ago, on December 12, 1970, my grandmother, my aunt, my mother and I were Christmas shopping in Salisbury. As I discuss endlessly, I am from Pocomoke, and you really need to get out of Pocomoke if you want to buy a variety of items. There's a walmart now, but people still head to the mall in Salisbury when they need to go shopping.

After a full day of shopping, my mother, who was 9 months pregnant, turned to my aunt and said, I think you should drop mother and me off at the hospital and take Susan home, please. Because I've been in labor all day and it's probably time I check in.

My aunt, who was childless at the time, was reportedly furious with my mom for shopping all day while in labor, but my mom was by all accounts fine and the plan went off. My dad was working in Australia at the time, and my mom and I were living with my grandparents, so my grandmother stayed with my mom and my aunt drove me back to Pocomoke.

I was 2 years and 4 months old. On the drive home, my aunt reportedly asked me if I wanted my mom to bring home a brother or sister from the hospital.

And my reply, repeated often to great laughter, was: "Well, what I really want is a kitten!"

And instead of a kitten, my brother Michael was born on December 13. So happy 40th birthday to my brother.

But back to the story. Here's the thing. I am in daily contact with a pretty chatty little guy who is 2 years and 1 month old. And it wasn't that long ago that I spent a lot of time with a highly verbal girl when she was 2.33 years old. It's not, exactly, that I doubt my aunt's veracity. Kids do say the darnedest things, and non sequitors are fairly routine. But, let's just say that I've wondered about this story for the past few years. Sadly, the other participants, besides my mom who was fairly occupied at the time, are no longer here to confirm details.

I like precision. Did my aunt ask, do you want a brother or sister? And I replied, no, a kitten? Or did she say something more vague, like what do you want your mother to bring home? And then I more logically replied a kitten? It's just that when you examine this story more closely, more details are required.

The truly happy ending part of the story is that my mother came home from the hospital with my brother, and then my father came home from Australia, and then we moved into the cutest little pink house (I was in heaven living in a pink house!) on Holiday Drive, and THEN we got a kitten. A very cute female Siamese kitten who was named Scooby Doo. And here again, I'm going to call foul. Because, the story has been that my brother and I named the kitten after our favorite show and of course my parents didn't plan to name our cat after the popular cartoon dog but we insisted. But look! I was just over 2.5 at the time, and my brother was a newborn!

Recently, we've started watching old Scooby Doo cartoons, which are shown on the Cartoon Network. Andrew calls it Dooby-doo, and he and Elizabeth loooove the show, even if (or maybe because) it's just ever so slightly scary and the dog talks.

So I've got all these threads here and no plan to tie them all together. I suppose the moral of the story is 40 year old family stories should be repeated, often, at the family table, preferably with aunts and uncles and cousins and generations gathered, rather than examined in detail in writing.

And second, happy 40th birthday Michael!

(And yes, there was another 40th birthday recently in the family, and there are some pictures that were planned to be added to the blog, but blah blah blah kidney infection camera cord....and we'll either get to it or not!).

Ele-fun

I need to get the camera cable and upload photos, so a video from my iphone for now.


Perhaps I need to add this game to the Little Guy's Christmas list!

Smart

Well, that whole NaBloPoMo thing was a total bust, huh? I just never was able to get back into the swing of posting once I felt better. But I did keep up with reading my blogroll, and it is fun to catch up with bloggers on a more regular basis. So with any luck and perseverance (something that is not my strong suit), I'll be a more frequent poster in December, and my blog readers will be so happy to have some content I'll get a ton of comments, right? I am going to backdate posts on Awwwclutter as I still am sorting through my shoes and did manage to wear (and buy!) shoes, so much to write there.

So I'll leave you with a little story I was planning to post right before I got sick.

Elizabeth had a soccer class Wednesdays at 5pm during September and October. Two rain dates meant two makeup days after Daylight Savings Time ended, which meant they played in the dark - literally in the dark - for the two makeups. The night before the first makeup, I thought I had a learning moment when we could discuss the change in seasons, length of daylight, and daylight savings time. Elizabeth, of course, had another idea.

Me: So, have you noticed this week it's getting dark earlier? Tomorrow you will have soccer practice after school and it will be dark for practice!
E: Yes, why is it so much darker?
M (gathering thoughts, realizing am unprepared and can't decide if I want to tackle change of season, the earth's rotation and tilt, or daylight savings, or exactly where to start): Well.....you see....
E (excitedly): I know! God is SMART.
M: um, yes, yes God is smart.
E: He controls all the holidays. So, he says to........um (thinking)....Mrs God, do you want it to be cold for the holiday? And then he does it. And that's how they do it. God and Mrs God are very smart.
M (realizing I have been beat): yes, yes they are.

Radio silence

I know it's NaBloPoMo and all, and it's officially been a, well, a while since the last post. I have my excuses, and it's a pretty good one. A kidney infection will sap any NaBloPoMo inspiration right out of you, I tell you. I'm on the mend, finally, though, so things are going to pick back up. I have posts from last week, but I can't decide if I'm going to try to backfill or just pick up from here forward. I think I'll backfill over at AwwwClutter. So stay tuned, we'll be back on the air with our regularly scheduled programming.....tomorrow.

(and, now, officially, my second NaBloMo post about posting. Pathetic.)

The $10K cat

So, I was talking about Harrison, our cat, with one of my friends and I think shocked her by referring to him as our $10K rescue cat. That is a freaking large amount of money to spend on a cat, but yet, over ten years, that's my estimate of what he's cost us. I said that to Rich once and he scoffed there was no way, but once we totaled it up....well, maybe we haven't hit $10K, but we're closing in on it.

Harrison was adopted from the Siamese Cat Rescue Center. My beloved cat Andre died in December 2000, so once we moved into this house in 2001 it was time. He came to us at a year old, a little beat up from a rough life on the streets. In fact, one of his rear legs had been broken somehow, and obviously not set as he still walks with a bit of limp, though once he really settled in it became barely noticeable. One of his ears is a bit ragged, so he definitely got into it a time or two during his time in the wild.

In 2004, when my family as visiting for my sister's college graduation, Harrison developed a urinary blockage, something that is not unusual in male cats. There was a stay in the animal hospital, surgery, and follow up care, including a special diet ($$) to reduce the chance of recurrence. Harrison specializes in crises during busy times. I'm not going to get these dates right because it was all too crazy, but in the weeks after Elizabeth was born, he developed what we could only call severe lethargy, so another emergency room visit determined he had developed some sort of heart problem. We were supposed to take him to a cardiologist, but couldn't ever get there in those first few weeks and by the time we had the time, he seemed to have recovered from whatever it was (we did take him for followups at the regular vet), though he does have a heart mumur.

And I can't remember when this happened, or what event he disrupted, but the biggest ticket item was the intestinal blockage, which resulted in another long hospital stay, surgery, and extended follow up care. Oh, and a DIFFERENT special diet. Nothing has been related to anything else, it's just been a series of unrelated, unlucky events. And, each thing has been something that was easily, if expensively, fixable.

Harrison and Aggie had a complicated relationship - well, not that complicated if you simply consider that Harrison moved in and on day 1 decided it was his mission in life to terrorize our dog. But I think he had a certain fondness for Aggie. So with Aggie gone, Harrison has been lonely, and more importantly, bored. He's been an exclusive indoor cat since he came to live with us, but this summer, at the height of his boredom, I started allowing him to go outside in our fenced back area. He quickly discovered how to escape, though he mostly spent time sunning himself in our yard. I'd let him out for an hour or so in the afternoons. Given our financial investment in this cat, I should have put a stop to it, but he was so happy just hanging around outside (and that's all he mostly did) I let it continue, even when I knew he was in standoffs with a stray in the alley. It wasn't every day, and never for long, but still, he shouldn't have been going out unsupervised. It didn't help that he's learned how to open our back screen door. If it's not latched properly, he can push it open, but even when it is latched, somehow he works at the door until he jiggles it enough the latch slips.

So, two weeks ago - Harrison worked on the door while we were eating dinner and made it out. A huge no no, but he was gone before we could grab him. We expected him to just come back fairly quickly, as usual, but at 11 Rich was outside calling and calling for him. Finally, at 11:30, just as we were going to bed, I looked out the back door and there he was. But, when he came in, he was dripping blood from a wound on his neck - he had gotten into it with something. So, we got him cleaned up and put antiseptic on all his wounds. He slept most of the next day - after all he had just gotten beat up - but seemed to recover. He's been on lockdown since.

Friday night, we noticed a tuft of fur coming off his head, and realized he had a scratch there we hadn't treated, but the tuft of hair coming off generally means the scab is healing so I didn't think too much of it. Then, Saturday morning, he started cleaning, cleaning, cleaning his head. Which, again, I did'nt think too much of, until we took a good look at it and realized he had a giant oozing wound on the top of his head.

Great. Rich's parents were on their way down to celebrate Rich's 40th b-day, and the cat had a giant absess on his head. So, loaded him in the carrier and made my way to the vet for a couple of hours in the waiting room.

$225 later, it was cleaned out, he had a half-shaved head, and we had antibiotics. We'll just add it to the total. He was not happy about the vet, but they managed to clean him up even with the deep belly yowling that was going on. And now we have ten days of pills to get through.

Oh, and I'm forgetting to write about his hernia. When he had the intestinal blockage, at the follow up visit the vet who did the surgery (not at our usual vet) said, oh, I think I sewed all his fat into one area, he's got a little fat pouch. We thought that was odd, but everything seemed to heal ok, except for this bulge in his belly. It was another vet at our usual practice who said, um, he has a hernia. So I had to epxlain that to this vet, who really strongly suggested we spend another couple of grand to get that hernia fixed. Another $2-3K. For a hernia operation. Well, if we haven't hit $10K yet, we certainly will before too long.

Moral of the story - pet insurance for our next pet