Month: August 2009

  • Other whales are more interesting than me

    I need to start wearing a sandwich board sign. The front says: I’M DUE SEPTEMBER 1. The back says: STOP ASKING.

    Who asks me when I’m due? Everybody. The Wallgreens casher. A stranger on subway. Every colleague that passes me in the halls/elevator. Museum visitors. Random dude I am waiting at crosswalk with. A crack head.

    I’m really not being self-centered here. This is actually happening. I know this is happening because I will be thinking about something totally random (such as narwhals, the unicorns of the sea) and a stranger will burst out with questions about my ripe uterus. It is a jarring experience, akin to being woken from a gentle nap by a  person in a creepy clown mask.

    Sometimes, the follow-up questions and comments are more exhausting than the initial opener.

    “What are you doing up and moving around?”
    “What are you still doing at work?”
    “You aren’t 9 months pregnant. You’re way too small.”
    “Oh look! You dropped!”

    While I think it is really interesting that humans seem hard-wired to rally around new life, I find it disturbing that this communal support of the future generations is so short lived.  Once a baby is actually born, the community just seems to loose interest. American communities don’t demand policies that would adequately support maternity leaves, breastfeeding, or fund public schools. We give financial incentives to companies that ravage the earth that our kids inherit. We fund wars that kill the youths of other countries and use the economically disadvantaged kids from our own countries to fight them. In practice, people don’t even give a shit enough about future generations to trade in their paper Starbucks cups for a travel mug. So while the attention to the fetus is sweet, it is cosmetic. It is people responding to my physical shape. While I feel bad for knocking well-meaning people for their lack-of-substance, constructing cheerful response after cheerful response to such redundant chatter is exhausting. I guess I’m just looking forward to talking about other things with people. Narwals, for instance. I’ve been dying to talk about them with someone all day, but every time I walk into a room, I’m bombarded with baby questions. Even when I try to tell people about these crazy whales with horns on their heads, people just look at me with this creepy face that says, “Oh look. The pregnant lady is interested in the outside world. How adorable!”

    Even my closest friends take a while to get over it. One pal calls me Baby Factory, which used to be funny, but I’m just bored of being pregnant. I want this kid out. I think she will want to know all about the narwals. Maybe we’ll even go to crazy remote fjords in Greenland to look at them together.

  • I Need Some Cat Advice

    Note: I’m writing this on my lunch break, so apologies in advance for a choppy/distracted feel.

    I’ve been hesitant to write about an issue that’s cropped up these last few weeks, primarily because I wanted it to be fixed before hauling it out into public. However, the more persistent the issue becomes, the less interested I am in writing a blog essay ending with a clean little dénouement, and the more interested I am in suggestions from my readers that might lead to an actual, real-life solution.

    The problem is my cat.

    Shaun and I have had Giles for nearly 8 years. When we first met him at the shelter, he was horrible, rancid, and hissing in his cage at everyone. But something about the near-human personality in his voice drew me closer to him. He made Shaun and I laugh.

     “What about him?” I asked the attendant.
    “You want to look at him?”

     We did. And I’m glad we did. From the moment he was out of his cage and given a few loving cuddles, Giles Alejandro Scimitar turned from screaming tomcat to a bonafide lover boy. He’s had his share of gross health issues (abscessed teeth make a cat smell like anchovies), but I take pride in our ability to be good pet owners. We’ve nursed him into a healthy, happy ten year old who pays us back in good humor and near-constant affection.

     

    Giles has moved a grand total of 5 times, including a 1-year stint staying with my best girlfriend while Shaun and I lived in Scotland. With us, he’s lived in a downtown studio apartment, a freezing cold Wicker Park pad, a spacious Ravenswood one-bedroom, a roach infested NYC building on 186th, and our current comfy 2-bedroom on Chicago’s north side. He has adapted brilliantly to each new place, happy to sit on the window sill and soak it all in.

    We’ve also had a million and one changes in furnishings. We married young and started with zero. Over time, we built up our home with abandoned items left in alleyways. Eventually, we replaced our alley goodies with a combo of new and second hand furnishings. Giles is used to change. He keeps pace nicely.

    All of this is to say: Giles has never sprayed, peed, shit, or ruined anything we’ve ever owned. He’s never felt threatened by new environments or items. He’s never destroyed anything out of malice. Until now.

    We got all our baby items through Craigslist and garage sales, so the acquisition and change-over of the room from office to nursery was a gradual one. For months, our cat didn’t seem phased in the slightest by the new stuff. We’d bring the crib in and he’d just sniff it a bit and walk away.

    We read something somewhere that said we should start making the nursery “off limits” early on to get pets used to not having access to it. We started keeping the door shut for a few months, but Giles seemed confused by the closed space and suddenly overwhelmed when the door would open while we were working in there. We figured that it probably didn’t make sense to him that the area was off limits and decided that it would all make sense to him once the baby arrived. So we started keeping the door open again. This approach was going well for about a month, until a few weeks ago, when I was organizing the baby’s garage sale clothes.

    I noticed something strange on a pile of baby shoes that had been languishing on the floor. Dark, sticky, weird liquid was all over two little pairs of sneakers. I smelled it. Piss from hell.

    I threw the shoes away. Giles glared at me. I glared at him. We didn’t cuddle that day.

    A week passes with no incident until I go in the baby room to sweep while doing my chore rounds. And what is under the crib? A puddle. A pissy cat puddle. Shaun is commissioned to scrub the entire floor on hands and knees, searching for further pee-evidence. No new findings surface. We start saving for a vet appointment.

    Giles and I are not getting along. He seems surlier than usual. He howls at my stomach when I rub stretch mark prevention cream on it in the evenings. I tell him he is a crabby animal and throw him off the bed. I dream that he runs away and I wake up feeling relieved.

    A weekend passes. A garage sale car seat enters the home. Giles pisses in the base of it. I scrub it and scrub it and scrub it to get it smelling like normal again. I want to start closing the door to the nursery again, but fear that it will make the issue worse.  

    Shaun does extensive internet research. He finds that cats spray because they feel like someone new is coming into the home and they want to imbue their cat scent in with their owners scent in case the newcomer thinks they don’t belong there. This makes me mildly sympathetic towards the cat, but I am still seething deep down. Shaun has always had more patience than me. I try to channel it.

    Channeling is going well until damn cat pisses underneath the crib again yesterday morning, right before my very eyes. In fact, that bastardly cat met me at the bedroom door upon my waking and accepted cuddles from me before walking sassily into the nursery and pissing on the floor. Vet budgeting was nowhere near completed, but a same-day appointment was made that very morning. The credit card can take the $337 brunt for now. I needed answers. Especially since I now felt myself wanting to decapitate the animal I’ve always loved and considered a family member.  

    On Monday, we have to drop off a urine sample at the vet’s to see if Giles’ issue is medical. This needs to be ruled out before it is determined to be a behavioral issue. While the vet is not a behaviorist, she recommended that we keep Giles’ litter box extra clean. This is a chore that Shaun has inherited from me, since pregnant people aren’t supposed to go around cat shit (there’s a bacteria lurking in there that can be deadly to unlucky fetuses). I’m not sure if Giles just hates the way Shaun cleans it or what, but I do suspect that I was more vigilant and thorough than he is (I’m being generous here). The vet also gave us a spray that prevents some cats from going near an area. However, the spray could possibly have the opposite effect, so we are really hesitant to try it.

    When we got home, we did a bit more research and decided to try the following training steps:

    1.)    Shaun needs to keep that litter clean in the way I clean it. Daily scooping. Weekly litter overhaul, which includes tossing all the litter and washing out the actual box with water and mild soap. A bit of baking soda and a thorough vacuuming of entire cat area.

    2.)    Keep the nursery door open when we are home, but closed when we are out and at night. Hopefully, this will help Giles understand that the nursery is a “limited access area.” When we open the door to it and he rushes over, curious (as he does), we will take time to cuddle him in the nursery. We hope this cuddling will make him understand that he doesn’t need to feel threatened by the baby or her stuff.

    3.)    We need to invest in a crib net.

    4.)    We’ve already started keeping Giles out of the bedroom at night, since the baby will be in a bedside bassinet for her first month or so. However, to make sure he still knows he’s loved, we’ll take time out to snuggle him a little when the door opens in the morning.

    5.)    We played Giles some audio of a baby crying. His ears went back, flat against his furry little head. He was not pleased. We will try to play him this audio while reassuring him with petting and soothing words for a few minutes every couple of days until baby comes. This is supposed to get cats used to the sound, which is apparently a total freak fest to them.  

     That’s all we’ve got for now. This is a deal breaker for Giles if he doesn’t straighten up—if I perceive a threat to the baby, obviously the baby stays and the cat gets the boot. But I’d like it if we could all be one happy family. I am willing to work for this, within reason. (Reason being: I can not see myself having the physical or mental ability to clean up both human and cat piss simultaneously.)

     The vet provided us information for a recommended a pet behaviorist to look into once the test results are in. This is something worth investigating, but I don’t think we can afford to go that route. Money is always tight for us, but particularly now.

    If you have any suggestions or have dealt with something similar, please leave them in the comments. Thank you!

    EDIT:
    I should mention that Giles is nutered. I use the word “spray” but the pee is puddle pee. The vet suspects the sticky darker fluid in the shoes and car seat base were—get this—anal gland spray. Ewwwww! This is what nutered cats can spray when they are really pissed off or scared. The rest of the pissy stuff was just plain old puddle piss. And it only happens in the nursery. And he still usually uses his litter box most days.

  • Productive weekend. Made fajitas. Bought a breast pump. Picked up farm share. Made cabbage soup and chocolate zucchini cupcakes with farm share goodies. Collaged thank-you cards for some very nice people.  Aquired instructions for recently scored $15 garage sale car seat. Yoga class. Laundry mat. Dishes dishes dishes.

    Recently, I joined an art collective called League of Extraordinary Letters. Basically, it is a nationwide collective that sends eachother little bits of art in the mail. (We are on a mission to revive snail mail and to give people a reason to do something creative just for fun.)

    Now, I like to sketch and take photos, but I’m not an artist in the talented/motivated/dedicated sense of the word. However, I can write some funny stuff, including notes from a fictional family I call The Beefeaters. Today, I mailed League members a belated Beefeaters Christmas letter from 2007. (Because getting a holiday card in August is funny enough, let alone it coming from 2007.)

    The actual Beefeaters letter involves some really bad clip art and newsletter formatting that won’t display properly on Xanga. But the actual copy is pretty funny (I think). I’ve included it below for your reading enjoyment.

    ***

    HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

    Well 2007 sure was a doozy. Good health, good fortune, and good animal husbandry made us Beefeaters, a prime example of God’s great work. At my position of Midwest shipping and receiving manager for Omaha Steaks, I got a raise. They pay me in steaks as of now, but next year they promise money. This year I got a swanky new shirt. Teensey says it’s “Bitchin’”. Also a new Tim Horton’s opened up down the street. I love their Blueberry Muffins. Yum!

    As you all may know, we experienced some sadness this year. We had to put my wife and our children’s mother, Brenda Beefeater, down in late October. She was getting old and having trouble moving around, so we thought it best to do the humane thing. But we would like to welcome the newest addition to our humble family, Brenda 2, a purebred beagle. It is a period of adjustment for us all, but soon I believe the children will respect and possibly love their new mother.

    Lil’ Jericho’s football team went all the way to State this year. He scored the winning touchdown in the qualifying match against Goodrich. He’s also still dating Cindy Lou. It’s been 2 years and they’re still going strong. May God continue to give her the strength to contain herself until the vows are spoken.

    Teensey’s doing better than anticipated. Lost 80 pounds this year and we couldn’t be more proud. Went to Uncle Tom’s cabin this Summer. It was a hoot! Chaperoned Lil’ Jericho’s school trip to Cedar Point, that Demon Drop is what Grandpa Horace calls a “Stool Loosener.”

    Speaking of which, got a proctology appointment next week. It’s my first. Wish me luck! Well, whatever anyone else says, 2007 was a great year. May God bless and caress each and every one of us.

    Yours in faith,

    The Beefeaters

    ***
    I’ve been loosing touch with writing lately. Life is consuming me. I can’t let it do that. I like myself better when I’m writing, even silly stuff like Beefeaters letters. Ideas come easier from brain to mouth. Journal and me have been great pals this year, as the life changes of this year have been best digested by yours truly in a private manner. But I miss public forums. I miss blogging. I think I might be ready to pick backup again, with real blog essays. Who knows? Perhaps even a shiny new WordPress blog is in order. I just might have something to say about motherhood, once it happens. (When don’t I have something to say about just about anything?) But will I have the time? I could make the time. For that and all the other things.

    Sheesh. Life’s tough, you know? How do you know what to shed and what to cling to? Trial and error, I guess.

    Well, this is a ramble and a half. See what you get when you don’t blog for a while? Crazy stream-of-crappiness.

    I think my laundry is cooked. Landlord put a new machine in the basement. Laundry is down a quarter and rent did not go up with the signing of this year’s new lease. Woo hoo!

    Also: I’m about to give birth, apparently. Well, not right away. But sometime this month. By September 1. At my Thursday appointment, the doctor says I’m 1.5 cm dialated, in case you were wondering what my cervix is up to these days. Also, ultrasound reveals that Fetal Friend is currently 6 lbs, 7 oz. That is HARDLY fetal. This little thing is a bonafide baby! Trapped in a sack! I think she’s getting as restless as me with this whole thing. She lumps around a lot. Sometimes she kicks my guts with brute strength in the middle of the night. Ninja.

    Is anyone else a fan of the Black Eyed Peas song, My Humps? Okay, so by “fan,” I mean: does anyone else enjoy making fun of this song endlessly and singing it to their fetuses? Because when Little Foot moves around, my whole belly lumps in bizarre ways. Like: you can CLEARLY see her legs and feet and rump rummaging around on the inside. To this, I sing:

    “My humps/my bumps/my lovely lady lumps!”

    We’ve also taken to calling the baby Lumpy.

    I’m not afraid of the labor. Something as big and wriggly as a cat lives inside of me and I think she is just about as over it as I am. So bring it, labor. We can handle you. We are tough women and at least one of us is a ninja.

    Before I depart, I feel obligated to apologize for such a crap blog. I’m adding to the online chatter here and I’m probably doing so because Shaun is away working the Chicago con all weekend and I couldn’t wrangle any friends to play with me today so I’ve become isolated and weird in my solitude.
    ___________________________________________________________________________________
    What are you up to this weekend?