They're Quadruple Teaming Me

Back when I was pregnant, I anticipated all kinds of weird issues cropping up between the animals and Luke. This anticipation was only heightened by all the fliers in my OB/GYN office that said things like "Help your pets cope with your new addition!" Hmm, I thought, apparently, pets are so routinely traumatized by the addition of a new baby that they need help COPING. And of course, I kept meaning to figure out exactly what I should do to help them cope, but in case you don't already know this about me, I procrastinate. A lot. So I kept putting it off and before I knew it, we were driving home from the hospital with a very small, angry person in the back seat.




You can imagine my surprise when we brought the small, angry person into the apartment and the Dog sniffed us, sniffed him, and then went off in search of his toy. Then, Black Cat sniffed us, looked warily at him and disappeared for two days. Then, Yellow Cat sniffed us, sat on us, sniffed us, purred, and generally acted like the high maintenance cat that he is, but other than trying to claw at the baby's head a couple of days after we got home, he adjusted fine too. In fact, he's the one who now lets Luke pet him (read: pull out handfuls of fur).



So now, seven months into this endeavor, I was feeling pretty confident that hey, babies and animals are a BREEZE. And then, a couple of days ago, I was in the shower and Luke was chilling in his little chair when I heard a growl, followed by loud screeching. My first response was, of course, to leap out of the shower, prepared to defend the baby against whatever evil was coming to get him. The evil, as it turns out, was Black Cat, who had a firm grip on the toy that Luke was playing with and was trying with all her 11 lb might to pull it away from him. He, in turn, was pulling back and screeching and making horrible, horrible faces at her.


About 20 minutes later, after averting that crisis and finishing my shower, Luke and I headed out to the living room, where I immediately noticed that the bottom of our Christmas tree had been savagely attacked. Tinsel was strewn everywhere, ornaments were littered across the floor and one ornament in particular was...dismantled. It was one of the little balls and the metal hook and string were there, but the actual ball was not. I searched high, I searched low, I interrogated the cats, but to no avail. I still haven't found it and I'm absolutely convinced that one of these days, I'm going to turn around and Luke's going to be playing with it, which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that it's glass and, you know, fragile.



So after all this, I was already doubting my whole "animals + baby = easy" equation, so it certainly didn't help that I put Luke on the floor and left the room for 30 seconds and then returned to find this:

Animals + baby might be easy, but animals + mobile baby? Not so much.