It’s like I already have babies to take care of. And they aren’t even mine!
This is a rare example of them both being good at the same time. Two seconds after this they got up and ran into the other room to bark at a noise. Just trying to keep me and my unborn child safe. Thanks guys.
I apologize for the lack of blogging these days. I have a variety of excuses which I will spare you. Anyway. To sum things up, I am 40 weeks pregnant, I still haven’t had the baby, etc, etc, etc. I am officially on maternity leave, starting today, which is awesome. And, I am living in Vancouver now, and have been for about three weeks. I spend my time washing baby clothes, sorting through baby clothes, unpacking my stuff and wrangling the eight animals we have living here. Yes, eight. Luckily, my mom’s house is pretty big so you don’t really notice. There is my brother’s dog Emma (the doberman, she is the same age as Basil), my mom’s dog McCoy (the golden retriever, he is about five) (they are annoying, but we all know I am not a dog person), then there are the cats: Marilyn (who we got when I was 15. She is small, black and white and crazy), Juanita (the alpha animal of the house, a really sweet tortiseshell who invited herself into our house back when I was 17. We kept her–turned out she was pregnant!), Pierre (the orange and white male, one of juanita’s kittens, he can’t stand the drama with the female cats and spends most of his time out in the garage) and Roxy (small, black and white and SHY, the runt of Juanita’s litter, spends all her time on my mom’s bed.) Then there are my cats, Basil, who we all know and love, and Mia (who is technically Joe’s cat, but I have had her for about the last year.) Anyway, add me, Joe, my mom and SOON the baby, and you could make a sitcom out of our living situation. I actually like it though, because it gives me something to do at all times. I was pretty bored at my old house, sitting around, watching tv, sleeping. Here I have animal drama to tend to, projects to work on, people to cook for me, people to talk to…did I mention I have a lot of baby clothes that need sorting? I swear, this girl has more clothes than me. Anyway, I am going to go find something to eat for breakfast and then maybe try and be productive. I leave you with a video of Basil’s first supervised trip into our backyard:
As promised. The story of what happened to my feet. Or, why I am so itchy. Or, what $70 can buy you if you as lucky as me.
If you remember, I wrote a couple weeks ago about how my lovely roommate (love you Aaron!) let one of the cats out on accident. Apparently Mia picked up something else besides a taste for the great outdoors on her adventure…and brought in FLEAS! Eeeeew. I have never had to treat Basil for fleas in the year and a half I have had him…nor have I had to treat Mia in the time she has been under my care (as she is my surrogate cat, until my brother is back in a living situation where he can have her). So imagine my surprise when last week on Monday, Aaron casually goes, “oh, I think I just saw a flea.” Hmm. I thought, oh I will just go pick up some Advantage at the vet by my house tomorrow after work. Unfortunetly, that was the day I had to leave work at lunchtime to go help my sick mother survive her staph infection, so I stayed at work a little later to make up for that… not making it back to the neighb by 7pm (closing time for the vet) I figured, no big deal. I would just go Wednesday. So I get home, change into my pajamas, and sit down in the living room. I look down at my feet. There are about three fleas on each foot. Itty, bitty, little, teeny tiny fleas. Ew. I grab them all and throw them in the toilet. Drown, suckers. I walk back out. Again. Fleas on each foot. AACK! This happens about four or five more times in the next fifteen minutes. I am freaking out. I run out to my car, in my pajamas, and drive out to Delta Park to Petco. Advantage comes four to a pack. $70. yay. I buy it, along with some organic rosemary carpet spray. I race back home, thinking of my poor, itchy cats. I treat both of the cats and spray the carpet. The difference is drastic, and immediate. We have seen maybe one or two fleas a day since then. I actually haven’t seen any in the past couple days. I think all of the evil little things are DEAD. Phew. However. The damage was done. My feet look seriously BAD. I have about fifteen bites on each foot, five on each ankle, two or three on each leg, and a couple on my arms and sides. But my feet. Are. The. Worst. It doesn’t help matters that, being nine months pregnant, I can’t wear shoes to hide them. It’s flip-flops, everyday. It also doesn’t help that I itch itch itch myself like I am a third-grader with the chicken-pox. So bites turn into sores, sores into scabs. Lovely. I am such a beauty queen. This weekend my mom took one look at my feet and said, “I’m sorry. But you look like white trash.” They are starting to go away, but I fear I might have permanent scarring from this little adventure. I would take a picture but I am too embarrassed. It’s like the universe said, “How can we make Alexia even LESS attractive these days? Oh I know. Let’s make her look like she has an infectious foot disease.” Thanks, Universe.
Last night I came home around 10pm after spending the evening at my mom’s house to find our front window open. We usually leave them open a tiny crack, to get a breeze when it’s hot out, but I have told Aaron before to be careful not to open them too much and tempt the cats to squeeze out. But, as often happens with Aaron, my words had fallen on deaf ears. Basil was sitting there, in the windowsill, sticking his head out, looking at me. Instantly, I was struck with fear. Fear of our house getting broken into and there being a serial killer waiting inside for me? Oh no. THE CATS GETTTING OUT! Oh no! Right on cue, out of the corner of my eye, I see a cat dart at me from across the courtyard. Oh, hi Mia! Hi Mia, you indoor-only cat you. How nice that you are outside here, and not safe on the inside where you belong. I grabbed her, unlocked the door and immediately started yelling at Aaron. Everyone knows the one rule of our house, and that rule is DON’T LET THE CATS OUT! He was asleep, and I yelled at him a little but decided to save my official scolding for the morning (This morning, approx. 5AM, as he is getting ready for work, I yell from my room, “Aaron! Come in here so I can yell at you!!” He knew he was in trouble.) Luckily, everything was fine and really, my cats have no desire to run away. Anyway, the point of this rambling is that this past weekend was the one year anniversary of the origin of my fear of losing my cats. One year ago was the Traumatic and Horrible Week that Basil Disappeared.
Last July I was about two weeks into a new living arrangement with a girl I didn’t know at all. Things were going fine, and the cats were happy. I left the weekend before the Fourth of July to go camping with my family at Detroit Lake, and she said she would feed the cats for me while I was gone. I came home the night of the 3rd. I walked in the door and Mia instantly starting acting weird. I could tell something was up. Basil was gone. I looked everywhere in the house, and then started roaming the streets calling his name (wearing a bikini and a bathing suit cover up, at 11pm). I called my roommate and she told me that he had been there when she left (I later found out from our other roommate that that wasn’t true.) I finally gave up and went to bed. The next morning I woke up and it hit me all over again, like a bad dream. It was the Fourth of July and it was about a million degrees outside. I made about 100 fliers and spent the day plastering the neighborhood with Emily’s help. I immediately started getting calls from friendly neighbors (I love Sellwood) who thought they had seen Basil. These all turned out to be false leads, sadly. I attempted to go out to a friend’s party that night, and ended up having to leave because I started crying uncontrollably when I thought of Basil being alone outside with all the loud fireworks. He was only nine months old, and had never been apart from me before since my brother had rescued him from death when he was only four weeks old. The next couple days were honestly some of the most difficult of my life. And yes, I know, my life has been extremely easy in terms of tragedy that I consider my cat disappearing to be so high on the list. But I even rank it higher in crappiness than finding out I was pregnant and dealing with all that. Animal craziness runs in my family. We can’t help it. We take it very seriously. Anyway. I walked around the neighborhood, drove around the neighborhood, spent hours calling his name. I visited the humane society and every animal shelter I could find. I did everything I possibly could, and I still didn’t have my cat. I was absolutely, completely heartbroken. The evening of Friday, July 6th, I came home from work and started contemplating moving on with my life. Aaron (my current roommate, you’d think he would have learned) called me to see if I was planning on going out that night, and I went outside and sat on our front steps to talk to him. In the middle of our conversation I heard it: Meow. Meow. Meow. Loud meowing. Not Mia’s meowing. Sidenote: The morning after I got home from camping I had heard similar meowing outside in the same place, but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Then a loud car drove up and some people walked up the stairs and it stopped. This time I was DETERMINED to find the source. I dropped the phone, still on, mid-conversation, and ran down the stairs to the bottom of our townhouse. Second sidenote: Our townhouse was connected to another townhouse, and on both sides there were these square holes that went to underneath the house. We left ours open, for the stray cats that lived under there. Our neighbors had theirs blocked with styrofoam cubes (guess they hate cats). Anyway, I ran down there, towards the noise that increasingly sounded just like my cat. I pulled the styrofoam out of the hole, and yelled “BASIL!”. Instantly, he popped his head through the hole. I grabbed him and ran inside and collapsed from relief, with him still in my arms. It was, hands down, the best moment of my life (again, don’t judge me). I was so relieved, so happy. And so was he. Also, hungry. So, basically, I am not sure what happened to Basil, or how he got out, or how he got under the house, but then wasn’t able to get back out. It’s all a big mystery, and until he learns to speak (we are working on it) I will never know. The result of this experience was that I am now the most paranoid person in the universe about my cats. Part of me thinks that the reason Mia was out having an adventure last night and Basil was sitting nicely in the window is that he doesn’t want to get accidently separated from me again either.
He loves me.
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