Lil' Orphant Emory

We have five cats. This may not seem like a big deal, but up until Saturday evening we only had four. And we were definitely not planning on having anymore. I mean we have a baby and a one bedroom house. Four cats are too many as it is! Never mind all that though, because we have five cats.

I will never again suggest to my husband that we go driving around town for the fun of it. It only leads to trouble I tell you. Trouble and five cats! How can one see a tiny kitten in the middle of the road and not stop? You can't see any houses in sight and the kitten is as scrawny and bedraggled as they come. You just stop in the middle of the road, get out of the car, and take that kitten home with you. Then you spend two days (make that three days) giving that kitten bath after bath with baby shampoo and a flea comb so you can pick off the one trillion fleas that are crawling all over it. You also have to schedule an appointment with the vet because the kitten has worms and ear mites. A walking parasitic infection is what it is.

Now she is family and we've named her already. She lives in our bathroom. Our one and only bathroom, which I miss having all to myself. Oh, well. We're looking for a bigger place anyway. We'll just have to factor in space for two adults, one baby, and FIVE CATS. Welcome to the family little Emory.

Messes, Milestones, and Mud Wrestling

CiCi is three months old. It seems like just yesterday she was the size of a peanut in my belly and making me nauseous all day long. Now she's relatively the size of one of my cats and talking gibberish to her red Lamaze elephant. How time has flown. Though I still seem to be stuck in a rut. I wear either a pair of very tattered jogging pants everyday, or, if I want to look nominally human, a pair of hated maternity pants. It's not that I can't wear my prepregnancy jeans, it's just that they're too tight on the belly to be comfortable right now. Maybe soon, I'll be dancing around a bonfire in the backyard whilst tossing maternity pants into the flames with abandon. Sounds like a plan for the Fourth of July!

The house is also in a rut as it has not seen the right end of a vacuum cleaner, dust rag, or broom for quite some time. When I have free time I'm often thinking of either taking a nap, taking a chunk out of the endless mound of laundry or eating some breakfast, which is actually lunch, because I don't get to eat till afternoon. The house is slowly being overrun with furballs. I'm thinking I should start collecting them and making sweaters for the winter. If I don't soon, CiCi will be old enough to start collecting them, and I don't think you can give hairball medication to a baby.

During some of my free time, spent not cleaning my house I've been reading the occasional parenting blog. It's fun to read about the trials and tribulations of other parents. The only problem I find is that parents, mothers in particular, are very competitive. There's the breastfeeding v. bottle feeding argument, the spanking v. time-out argument, and the homeschooling v. public schooling argument. To name a very few. I'm sure this will become a reality TV show soon. I picture women in their late twenties to mid-thirties wearing bikinis and aprons throwing themselves at each other in a giant mud pit while screaming, "I breastfed little Johnny for three years!" and "I never raise my voice at my children even when I'm menstruating!" I'm sure it would be a popular show and get a wide viewing audience what with the mud wrestling and bikinis. Maybe I should pitch it to a major network...