Lil' Baryshnikov

Just doin' some morning stretches in the chair before he moved to the barre.

Worst Monday Ever Award

A month or two ago, I blogged about a stray cat that had adopted us.  He slept by our dryer vent when the weather was still cool, and then ventured all around the outside of our house, taking cat-naps on our front stoop, the welcome mat by our side door, under our cars, out on our back deck.  He also developed the extraordinary and idiosyncratic habit of taking walks with me and the dog.  That's right: he took walks with us.  And not just two or three houses down.  He went on a pretty wide loop with us multiple times a day, cutting through bushes and over people's front walks to avoid traffic; the neighbors started to notice and to mention it.  He would rub up against Olivia as she was taking a pee; he'd stop and scratch his ear while she chewed on a blade of grass.

I would take little breaks during the day to go outside and cuddle with him.  He would sit on my lap and purr and let me totally manhandle him.  Anytime my hand was near his mouth, he would lick me.  I took him to the vet to get him vaccinated, and he charmed the heck out of the vet techs and everybody.  I got him a little collar with a bell on it (which probably totally sabotaged his hunting), and made a tag with our address and phone number on it -- and his name, Desmond -- until we found a home for him, so that if, God forbid, something happened to him, someone could contact us.  I think I thought we could keep up this routine through the warm months, by which time I would've made the case beyond a shadow of a doubt for us adopting him.

What I didn't do, was let him into the house, even though he clearly wanted to be part of our family, and I wanted him to be a part of ours -- really, had already come to think of him as part of ours -- and so not letting him into the house feels like the biggest mistake I've ever made.

If you can't stand hearing about intensely shitty things happening to sweet, quirky, warm-hearted, vulnerable animals, you should probably stop reading now, because everything went totally to hell on Monday, and I've shed more than a few tears over it.

Desmond and I went to the vet in the morning while my mother-in-law babysat for Milo so that the cat could get a second round of a booster shot.  He was awesome and easy-going.  I ran a couple of errands on the way home, even bought two new doormats, hoping that he would find them comfortable.  Milo and I went on a stroll later in the day, and Desmond greeted us by the front door when we came home, weaving around my legs.  I said, "Hi, handsome," and I was talking to the cat as much as to Milo.

We went inside, I put Milo down for a nap and was fixing myself some lunch when I looked through the kitchen window and saw a woman in the street next to Desmond's body.  I ran outside, and it was ugly.  In fact, it was the ugliest thing I've ever seen in reality, and was horrifying in a way that it isn't when you see things in a movie and you can tell yourself that it's just corn syrup.  There was a lot of blood, and I'm not going to describe the really terrible state of poor Desmond's beautiful face.  But he wasn't dead.  He was clearly in shock, looked like it and sounded like it.  The woman -- not the person who hit him and drove away, but a person who had probably swerved around the cat after he was hit and stopped, like any fucking decent human being would do -- was down on her knees near him but didn't know what to do.  I ran inside and got my phone and called the cops, and then I lifted him onto our lawn.  Probably ill-advised, but he was so far gone it didn't do him any more harm.

I think I was probably having a panic attack by the time the cops arrived, but I told the other woman to go and instead of saying thank you, I think I told her, "And you're even wearing white jeans!"  And I didn't have an adequate answer for the cop's question, "Is this your cat?"  I think the state I was in suggested yes.

The cops were gentle and very kind, and they told me the cat had lost a lot of blood and wasn't going to make it, and that they would take care of it, and that I should go inside for a few minutes.  I did.  I was standing on the stairs so I wouldn't be near the window when I heard the gunshots.  Milo, ironically taking a great nap, cried out at the noise and then went back to sleep.  I went outside with a box and laid Desmond in it, even though the officer said he would do it.  I felt like it was my responsibility.  The cops made sure I was alright -- I wasn't, but what're you going to do? -- and later that day, Ben dug a hole in the front yard, and we buried Desmond.

I've never been with a dying animal before.  And certainly never one who took leave of this world in so violent and undignified a way.  Desmond didn't deserve it.  No animal or human does.  I am so full of sadness and guilt and the relentless desire to be able to turn back the clock.  Even though I've had people close to me die and have grieved for them, this experience was somehow so fraught with and so proximate to the despair that survivors feel after a loved one departs.

What I'm trying to do, as the days pass, is to replace the haunting and terrible image of the injured and dead Desmond with the image of him alive, as the endearing, individual and sweet-souled animal he was, as deserving of a loving relationship with his humans as could possibly be.  I'm trying to remember that we shared a special link in these last couple of months, and that the affection and adoration that he showed to me and Olivia was indicative of how he felt about us, and that he was the kind of person who would've told me not to blame myself -- if he had been a person.  And if he could've talked.   I miss him fiercely.

Guilty Pleasure

O, delicious act of contortion

Story of My Life

Eight toys on the floor and none on the high-chair tray.  Now how did that happen?

A Moveable Feast

A most kissable spot

You know, I expected baby-raising to be a job with a learning curve, and indeed it is, but the curve appears to be getting somewhat steeper.  Milo's behavior has mostly followed the major developmental milestones that my limited reading discusses.  That those developments happened so slowly at first now strikes me as a great gift.

In a conversation with my sister-in-law, Kim, when I was pregnant, she said something that stuck with me.  I'll try to paraphrase, but will likely lose the tone of graceful intuition and humor with which she said it at the time (no surprise that she is now motherhood-bound herself).  It seemed to her, she said, that the good thing about child-rearing was that you would learn to handle every phase as it emerged, and wasn't it lucky that the design of growing up meant that parents didn't have to tackle everything all at once.  At least we wouldn't have to have the sex talk with Milo for quite some time, she joked.

And although Milo is still indubitably in an early phase, there are little sub-phases -- small components of growth or change -- that seem to happen by the day.  Usually, the ratio is 1:1 in terms of frustrating new routines to sweet new phenomena.  So, for example, lately, Milo seems unable to nap for more than half an hour or forty minutes at a time (sometimes he'll hit the hour or hour and a half mark, but it's really rare).  If he isn't already asleep by the time I put him in his crib, he is now wont to spend a significant amount of time rolling, playing with the mirror in his crib, scratching at the bumpers or the sheet to hear the sounds his fingernails make, and making a difficult-to-ignore cooing noise that waxes and wanes in intensity.  (I often snap to attention now when I walk the dog without the baby and hear an actual dove.)  Often, he falls asleep after this routine.  Other times, not so much, despite how tired he seemed before I put him down for the "nap," and I just admit defeat and go in and get him.  He's usually pretty happy to see me.

But as exasperating as this new habit is, he's got a couple of other new things that make me laugh.  The first is that he has discovered, now that he has his two bottom teeth, that he can use them to grab his upper lip.  Kind of.  There's a baby fish-mouth look (and sound) that I find appealing, and, obviously, so does he.  Better yet, he has this new thing where he looks at you, cocks his head waaay to the side, and gives you a coquettish smile.  It's pretty freakin' cute.  Oh, and to keep the ratio intact, he has also begun to do this thing with a couple of his toys (one is Sophie the Giraffe, a squeezie teething toy, and the other is a toy that Ben has dubbed "Death Chicken") where he desperately tries to bite/gum it, but instead of soothing him, it just pisses him off and he starts screeching and turns into Frenzied Wind-Up Teeth Maniac Baby.  The screeching also happens sometimes on walks, when Milo is sans toy, and I have no choice but to pop a wheelie to see if it shuts him up.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Frustration notwithstanding, and of course Milo's age notwithstanding, I am already sometimes just flooded with these weird little montages of him -- the insanely joy-making grin that he gives when I lift him high into the air, the pink of those pinchable cheeks, the sound of his laughter when I tickle him or just tickle his funny bone, the little groove on the back of his neck under his hairline when I sit behind him, helping him practice sitting up by himself, the way his arms splay around me when he has fallen asleep on my shoulder.  They are worth the price of admission, to be sure, and sometimes I think ahead to how he'll be a grown man one day, taller than me (I hope), and living life on his own terms, and I'll have this crazy flip-book of pictures of him in my head.  It seems both utterly amazing and almost too much to bear.  I give props to all those parents out there who somehow manage to navigate this vast bittersweet ocean of feelings day after day for years.  Seriously: thumbs up.

The Blue Steel Competition

This Post Brought To You By Schadenfreude

Is it just me, or is it a little bit funny when your baby pukes on your spouse?