And To All A Good Night

There will be a posting hiatus for the next three-ish weeks because tomorrow morning, we're packing up baby, dog, and Explorer and heading off to visit McMoose's family for the holidays. I hope everyone has a wonderful end of the year and a very happy new year. See you in 2010!

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.

Welcome To My Fragmented Mind

• This is a bullet post. (See? I'd make a great twitter-er. Tweeter? Whatever.)
• I missed my nap this morning. Those two or three blissful hours that Luke and I spend cuddling and snoozing each morning are more essential to my well-being than his because he's acting perfectly normal while I'm grumpy as can be. (Also, I just read this bullet and realized that I am seriously spoiled. Who over the age of 4 has the luxury of a daily nap?!?)
• In one week, we'll be packing up and driving 13 hours overnight to Mississippi and as usual, I am BUZZING with excitement. Except, unlike usual, I can't plan to take a day or two off next week to pack and clean so that'll be an interesting task.
• The. Rotten. Stinkin'. Plant. Is. Still. Budding.
• Yellow cat was spotted drinking out of the toilet this morning. I thought cats had more self-respect than that. Shame on you, Yellow Cat, shame.

The Missing Link

I don't have as many pictures to post as I would like, but here's one that proves that my son probably has an ancestral chimp or two:

Seven!

I feel like I just wrote Luke's six month post, so I had to double check the calendar to make sure, but sure enough, he's seven months old today. (As a side note, he's the same age that my friend's baby was when Luke was 2 months old and her baby seemed SO HUGE to me.) He has mastered the art of sitting now so he no longer flops over after a couple of minutes. He does, however, intentionally THROW himself to the ground if he has decided that he has had enough of the whole sitting business. And then, he invariably hits his head on the nearest piece of furniture. And then, he screams. And his screams are of such a screamy nature that more than once, I've checked the back of his head for bleeding head wounds, but no blood yet. (He did, however, cut his lip on a zipper earlier this month, and oh, the pitiful faces were pitiful indeed.)

His latest quest has been trying to crawl. Not the inchworm thing he's been doing for the past couple of months, but actually get up on his hands and knees and crawl. He finally figured it out yesterday, and today, he decided to move on to bigger and better things, so instead of crawling on his hands and knees like a--dare I say it?--normal baby, he has been "crawling" on his hands and feet today. Like a baby bear. The downside to this is that his head is pointed down, so he can't see where he's going so earlier today, he crawled right into the entertainment center. (Yes, I was watching him. But normally, he moves at the rate of about an inch per minute, so when I put him in the middle of the room, and sat down on the couch to eat my lunch, I didn't exactly expect him to be in any danger.)

Between the eating all kinds of nonsense and the moving around and the sitting like a little Buddha, Luke's suddenly starting to seem more like a real person, and an entertaining one at that. After all, there's nothing funnier than watching a Very Slow Baby getting all excited and trying to chase a Very Fast Cat.

I don't have pictures to post this month (again) because I'm not entirely sure if we took pictures on our camera this month. We did take pictures on McMoose's phone, so I'll try to post some of those...soon-ish.

My Ick Factor

During my second year of college, I had this nightmare that I had a pimple on my cheek which started glowing red and then turned into a piece of wood and by the time I realized what was happening, I had turned into a tree. Even before this nightmare, I was predisposed to be highly suspicious of any skin things, but afterwards, it was MONTHS before I could pass a tree without shivering. To this day, I hate looking at the brake lights of buses because it reminds me of the red glow from the dream. And I really, really dislike plants.

Specifically flowering plants. I'm okay with flowers. I'm okay with plants that grow really slowly, so you can't really tell that they're growing. But things that actively bud and flower? Yech, *shiver,* bleh.

My stepdad bought us an amaryllis bulb in a vase for Christmas. It was a sweet and thoughtful gesture and I was very excited to bring it home and water it and watch it grow. And then? It started GROWING. Right now, it's tall and bud-like and every time I look at it, I nearly hyperventilate and then, I consider feeding it to a goat. This plan would, of course, require me to find a goat, which might be hard to do here in suburbia.

I wonder if there's a name for this particular phobia/neurosis.

The Bug's Bug

I knew it had to happen eventually and I hate to jinx myself, but I have to say, as illnesses go, Luke's first one was kind of a walk in the park. He had a very grumpy day on Wednesday, which I chalked down to the fact that we had gone to a La Leche League meeting, which threw off his nap schedule. And when I say "very grumpy day," what I mean is that he wanted to play on the living room floor with the coffee table. Sounds fine, right? Except I wasn't allowed to interact with him in any way. So for an entire hour, if I so much as looked in his direction, he wailed. Still, I'm sure you don't understand the problem because hey, that's an hour of the baby amusing himself, right? Except that during this hour? If I tried to get up off the floor, he yelled. If I tried to sit on the floor and fold one of the small mountains of laundry that had accumulated, he hollered. If I tried to knit or eat a snack or read a book, he broke down into pitiful tears. Which means that for an hour, I sat thinking about ALL THE THINGS I should have been doing instead.

Needless to say, this behavior is not normal for my kid. Usually, he likes interaction, likes being held and played with and talked to and growled at. I mean, the whole not-getting-to-fold-my-laundry thing was nothing new, but this was the first time that I was not folding laundry because I was sitting on the floor and staring at YET ANOTHER EPISODE of a home improvement show.

But other than that weirdness, he wasn't acting sick. No sneezing. No coughing. No runny nose. So when he was still awake 2 hours after his normal bedtime, I was done. Done with a capital D-O-N-E. I was convinced that a demon had taken over my sweet child's body for the sole purpose of TORTURING ME. Until I realized that his forehead felt warm...and his hands...and his feet...so I quickly whipped out the thermometer that has been waiting on a table in his room for the past six months and sure enough, he had a fever. A low fever, to be sure, but a fever nonetheless.

So of course, I took that as the perfect opportunity to hold and cuddle him all night long (why, yes, I AM opportunistic, thank-you-for-asking), which is why I know this fact: Luke is a really weird sick person. For one thing, he whistles in his sleep like a cartoon character. For another, all through the night and for a good part of the next day, he would get really, really hot and then, 15 minutes later, be cold and clammy again. On Thursday, every time he felt warm, I braced myself for the fussing and the whining that I expected to come with a sick child, only to find that a feverish Luke is actually a very charming and pleasant Luke. Who knew? And by Thursday night, he was completely back to normal again.

I, on the other hand, have a sore throat, a runny nose, and a headache that has been with me for the past two days. Because apparently, my immune system feels that it already helped one person through this illness and really, it deserves a few days off now.