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I’m sorting through your suggestions about what to do with childproofing a house with cats, and here’s what I’ve got so far:

1. Buy a different type of non-toxic cat litter.
Likelihood that this will happen: Possible. It’s a lot more expensive than the stuff I use, and would require a trip to a whole other store, which is very tedious with a baby in tow. I’m putting it on the list of things I could do if I absolutely had to.

2. Switch them to twice-daily feedings and not leave cat food out any other time.
Likelihood: Probably not. A couple of our kitties are pretty food-aggressive, and I could see that turning into a source of unnecessary fighting.

3. Buy new baby gates with pet doors in them.
Likelihood: God, no. The gates we have were such a huge pain to install, the last thing I want to do is start over from scratch. And at least one of our cats (read: Beaumont) is not that bright, so I have a feeling that Cate would figure it out before he does.

4: Buy a house with a basement, so I can put the litter boxes down there.
Likelihood: Duly noted for next time, since we’re planning to move in 2008.

Since we have four cats, we have three litter boxes. Here’s how it breaks down:
* The first litter box is in the laundry room. I’m not worried about Cate getting into that one, since she’d have to crawl through Dave’s office in order to get there. And she isn’t allowed in Dave’s office unless she’s being closely supervised. There are too many computer cables and other potential sources of electric shock in there. If Dave or I aren’t with her, the door stays shut and she can’t go in.

* The second litter box is upstairs, in my office (technically an extra bedroom that’s been converted into an office). I don’t know why, but a long time ago, one of the cats decided to start peeing in there, and then the rest of the cats got a whiff of it and were like, “oh hey! Is this where we pee now? Whee!” That’s reason #1 on the list of why the carpet has to be replaced before we can sell this house, because man, you can NOT get rid of that smell completely. I finally gave in and decided that you know what? You guys want to pee here, then here’s a box. Go nuts. I put one of those room divider screens around it, so it’s sort of hidden, and I don’t really worry about Cate getting into it. I don’t leave her alone in my office (she likes to turn my pc on and off – fun buttons!), and even if I took my eyes off of her for a minute (because after all, that does happen), I don’t think she could crawl back there without bumping the screen and making me aware of where she was. So I’m not too worried about that one.

* The third and final litter box is in our bedroom. I realize that this is not ideal, but when I first moved in with Dave, Teenie hid in the master bedroom for weeks (months? I forget). So to prevent any little accidents brought on by her stubborn refusal to leave the room, we put a box in there for her. She still doesn’t go far – she might occasionally explore the rest of the upstairs, but she never comes downstairs. She and the other cats don’t get along, and since she’s 11 years old now, I think that’s just the way it’s going to be. I’ve lived with this cat long enough to know that if I move the litter box, she’ll just keep going in the spot on the carpet where she thinks the box should be, so there’s really no point in trying to wean her off of it and make her use the litter box in my office instead.

So that’s really the only litter box I worry about. It isn’t hidden at all, and I don’t know how I can put up a gate to keep Cate out of our bedroom, since she’s in there all the time. The box is in a far corner, and so far she hasn’t shown any interest in crawling in that direction. I’m just worried that she will as she gets older, and I don’t really know what to do about it.

Fortunately, she’s now old enough that she understands “no” and “uh-uh,” so hopefully if I see her heading toward a litter box, I can stop her before she gets there and reinforce that that’s one of those things we don’t touch, sort of like Daddy’s computers and the oven. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that that’ll be all it takes.

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I’m sure that some people who read this site must have dealt with this issue before, so help me out here: how on earth do you have pets and babies in the same house?

Since Cate has started crawling, I have had to swipe cat food out of her mouth on at least three occasions. (I only successfully retrieved it two of those times, the other time it went down the hatch too fast. Oh well, a little extra protein in her diet won’t hurt, right?) And twice in the past week, she’s overturned the cats’ water dish onto the floor and all over herself. She hasn’t yet discovered the litter boxes, but I know it’s only a matter of time before they become her own personal sandbox. And oh my god, eww. I don’t know if there’s enough soap in the world.

So what do you do? I thought about baby gates, but the problem is, our cats haven’t figured out that they can jump over the gates, they just stand at them and yowl for us to come open them. (I now prop the gate at the top of the stairs open at night because I got so sick of Beaumont’s four a.m. wake-up calls.) I have no idea what the next step is, short of keeping Cate on a leash. And I have a suspicion that most parenting books would frown on that. Help?

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Today was Cate’s first day at daycare, which I have to say was far less traumatic than I was expecting. For me, anyway. According to Patsy, Cate had a few meltdowns during the day, but she also took a couple of naps while she was there, she enjoyed playing with the other kids, and she loved Patsy’s cats (which I kind of figured, since she loves ours). So it all went much smoother than I anticipated.

As for me, it was kind of amazing to have a few hours to myself in the house to do nothing but clean. You can get so much done when there isn’t a tiny person shrieking for you to pick them up every five minutes! The entire upstairs is cleaned and pretty much child-proofed. (Is there a way to child-proof a litter box? Anyone? Help?) The first floor still needs some work, but I’m saving that for when Cate goes back to daycare next week. But as nice as it was to get so much work done, I missed my little munchkin like crazy, which is bizarre since we were only apart for six hours.

When we got home, I made a video of Cate crawling. I know it might seem kind of weird to film her in the bathroom, but it has some of the best lighting in the whole house, plus she crawls better on the linoleum (I guess it’s easier to slide on than carpet?), and for a little extra motivation, Teenie was there and just hanging out as a big beacon of furriness for her to crawl toward. Worked like a charm.

(Warning to Angie: this video combines babies and animals. Your head may explode.)

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Two things that are totally unrelated to each other…

1.) Spring has officially arrived here, which means the cats are back into Hunting Mode. Normally this is fine, as long as they do their business outside. Not having mice in the house is a-ok with me, I just don’t want to know about the Great Outdoor Killing Spree. Unfortunately, Beaumont hasn’t quite figured that out. A couple of days ago, I found him with a tiny little bird in our foyer. I chased him off and screamed for Dave. The bird was cowering in the corner making this really horrible little squeaking noise. I thought for sure he was a goner. Dave told me to go upstairs – I don’t know what he was going to do with it, I’m honestly afraid to ask – but he said that as soon as he took the bird outside, it flew away. So I guess it wasn’t injured too badly. Or at least I hope not.

The other incident happened this morning. I was heading upstairs to get dressed, and I spotted Beaumont in my office, halfway behind my desk. That’s not a place where any of the cats hang out, so I thought it might be smart to go investigate. Sure enough, he had caught himself a teeny-tiny baby bunny rabbit. Again, I screamed for Dave, because I am totally useless in these situations. I honestly thought the rabbit was dead because it was frozen stiff when I saw it, but apparently he was just terrified. After Dave chased the cat out of the room and closed the door, the bunny started hopping around all over the place and it took Dave a while to catch him. It seems that he was totally uninjured. And he was so cute, I really wanted to keep him, but I know that isn’t very practical in a house with four cats and a baby. Dave set him loose in the woods behind our house, where he will hopefully be reunited with his little bunny family and live a long, happy life.

2.) Cate and I have a little morning ritual that I call Naked Time. Apparently a good cure for diaper rash is to let your baby go diaper-free for 10 minutes a day. She doesn’t have diaper rash, but I figure this is a good way to make sure she doesn’t get it. So, every morning, when I change her out of her pajamas, I lay a waterproof mat on the floor (you know, just in case), toss a blanket over it, and strip her down to her birthday suit. She really seems to enjoy it, she laughs and kicks her little legs in the air. It’s pretty funny.

This morning, we were playing with this little stuffed giraffe that plays different children’s songs when you squeeze his tummy (“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “London Bridge,” etc.). Dave came in the room to play with us for a while. He squeezed the giraffe and it started playing “Three Blind Mice.”

Me: You know, I’m realizing that I’ve forgotten most of the words to these songs. Like this one. All I remember is something about the farmer’s wife, and she cut off their tails with a garden knife.
Dave: It’s a carving knife.
Me: Oh, right. Whatever.
Dave (to Cate, in baby-talk): Isn’t your mommy dumb? She thinks the song talks about a garden knife, but there’s no such thing. She’s so silly. And wrong.
Me (to Cate, in baby-talk): Your daddy’s kind of a jackass, isn’t he?

We do this whole “making snide remarks to each other through the baby” thing all the time now. I know we’ll have to cut it out when she gets older, but it’s so much fun.

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Cate is on her fifth outfit in less than 24 hours. Two she’s spit up on, and two she’s peed on. I’m hoping that five is our lucky number, at least for a few hours.

The spit-up thing is kind of funny. Yesterday afternoon, Cate had this enormous projectile barf; she got me, herself, and the chair I was sitting on. It was one of those barfs that was so huge that I just froze in shock. I didn’t know how to move without making the situation worse, so instead I yelled for Dave. He took the baby off of me and helped clean me up. It was quite gross, although we laughed about it, because really, what else can you do?

Then when I was feeding her in our bed at 4:00 this morning, I thought to myself that I was really lucky that she’d never spit up in bed, so I haven’t had to change the sheets in the middle of the night. Of course, a mere moment after that thought went through my stupid little head, she did indeed spit up. But I managed to catch it all with the burp cloth, so none of it got on either me or the bed. I was very proud of myself for my lightning-fast reflexes (and at 4 a.m., no less!). I had to change Cate’s pajamas and give her a little washcloth sponge bath, but no big deal, right?

So perhaps I was a little smug, and the Puke Gods decided that I needed to be brought down a notch. Because that’s the only explanation I have as to why, a few hours later, Teenie barfed the largest hairball I’ve ever seen, right smack in the middle of our bed. Alas, I dodged the baby barf, but I could not escape the cat barf. So it’s yet another unplanned Laundry Day for me. Fun!

As for the gas/colic situation, thank you for the suggestions. It seems to be a little better now. I’ve tried the leg-pumping thing, although I’m not sure if it helps or if it just distracts her for a minute because she can’t figure out what the hell I’m doing to her. The anti-gas drops mixed with her formula seem to help more than anything. And sometimes I walk around with her lying tummy-down on my forearm (sort of holding her like a football, I guess), and as long as I keep moving and keep the constant pat-pat-pat on her back, that seems to be ok too.

Another question for the moms out there: do/did your babies scream when they poop? The pediatrician said it’s normal, but it freaks me out. I know she’s not constipated, but whenever she goes, it sounds like she’s in pain. What the heck is that about?

Oh, and the last few nights, she’s slept for four hours before she woke up hungry. Ok, it isn’t exactly a huge leap over the three hour sleep segments that we were getting before, but I’ll take whatever I can get.

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More bad weather?? I don’t know if God is trying to test my sense of humor or what, but this cannot be happening. I’m trying really hard to think of it as “oh, the stories we’ll have to tell Baby Girl about the last few weeks before she was born!”, but it’s really hard to think in those terms when you’re in the middle of it.

We had a windstorm blow through here this afternoon, and (of course!) our power went out. I had gotten an email from Cara yesterday inviting me to crash with her & Scott in Seattle if that happened, which was very sweet of her, although I do wonder how many of those post-root canal painkillers she’s been taking. (Seriously, who in their right mind invites cranky, hormonal, weepy 9-months-pregnant women to stay in their homes?) And Kris called to remind me that I have a key to her apartment, in case I needed to let myself in while she was still at work. So I had some options. But when I called the power company to report the outage, they promised that they had already dispatched a crew to work on the problem. It was still early evening, and it wasn’t that cold (yet), so I decided to take a nap on the couch and wait for a while before making any decisions about what I was going to do.

Our cat Beaumont curled up against my belly while I was lying on my side, and he has this weird asthmatic purr that he does every 10 seconds or so. (It’s such an odd sound, like he needs to clear his throat.) But since he was leaning against my stomach, he’d do his little purr thing and then I’d feel a little kick-kick-kick response from the baby. I thought it was funny – like “get used to the sound of cats, kiddo, because you’re going to be hearing them a LOT.” So I was enjoying the little “conversation” that the cat and baby were having with each other, and I guess the rhythm of it must have eventually put me to sleep. The next thing I knew, I heard the auto-scooping litter box start up in the laundry room, and I opened my eyes and saw that the lights were back on. 

So, our power was only out for about two hours total. Not too shabby. Certainly a heck of a lot easier to cope with than nine freakin’ days.

But right now it’s snowing out, so who knows how much longer my good fortune will hold out. If nothing else, I expect that I’ll probably lose my Internet access after too much snow accumulates on the satellite dish. I know how to get the extension ladder and use a broom to brush the snow off the dish, of course. I’m just not sure if I’m up to it. Or if it’s even advisable for me to be scaling ladders at this point.

Oh, and I postponed my doctor’s appointment until Thursday. I was exhausted, I knew the bad weather was approaching, and the idea of sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room two days in a row was quite honestly too much for me. I haven’t even decided if I’m going to go the appointment on Thursday, or if I’m just going to resign myself to the idea of feeling like crap until this baby comes out. We’ll see.

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I dropped Dave off at the airport yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t realized that he was flying out on Sunday so he could be there bright and early on Monday morning. I guess it’s logical. But it means he’ll actually be gone for five nights rather than four. FIVE! It all equals doom, I tell you!

And of course, as soon as I got home from the trip to the airport, I managed to have a total freak-out session. I had crawled back in bed when I got home (part of my self-imposed bedrest; which is not so much my idea, but more of a necessity because I don’t do too well when I’m out of bed for more than two hours at a time). While I was lying down, I got a weird feeling that was sort of like menstrual cramps. Hmmm. Seems like I’ve read this symptom before, yes? Oh wait, that’s right: every single freakin’ pregnancy book under the freakin’ sun describes early labor as feeling like menstrual cramps. Heck, even my cousin described it like that. And at that precise moment, Dave was probably on a plane somewhere over Oregon. Do I have phenomenal timing or what?

(Note: I’ve been having Braxton-Hicks contractions like crazy for the past few days. This was noticeably different, believe me.)

Just to be safe, I checked the clock next to the bed. It was 2:58 p.m. The cramp-like feeling passed after about a minute. I had the same crampy feeling again 12 minutes later, at 3:10. Then… nothing. Na-da. Lots of baby kicks and dancing, and my hips still ached and I had weird shooting pains down my inner thighs, which is basically what the past couple of weeks have been like for me. But no more crampy contraction things. So ok, that’s good. As much as I would like to get this kid out of me, I would definitely prefer that it happen when Dave is around. 
 
Later that afternoon, my cat Teenie managed to totally freak me out too. When I’m in bed, she generally wants to cuddle up near me, but then she goes to sleep. Her favorite spot is in the little nook between my pillow & Dave’s; I suppose it’s an ideal location to be petted by two people rather than just one. But she’s an old lady cat (she’ll be eleven this year!), so she doesn’t have the super playful kitten energy anymore. Once she’s settled, she’s out. She might occasionally wake up to give herself a bath, or to go get some food. When she comes back to bed, she’ll usually purr for a minute or so while she gets herself re-settled, but that’s about it.

But no. Yesterday? She stood next to me, totally staring at me for a very long time (like 20-30 minutes), purring very loudly at me, and she’d occasionally lift one paw and sort of rest it on my arm. As totally bizarre and out-of-character as the little paw-pat was (like she was trying to reassure or comfort me), it was actually the staring that freaked me out more than anything. She was boring her eyes into me like that little terrier Eddie did to Frasier. It was creepy. I felt like she was trying to tell me something. It seemed as though I was on an old episode of “Lassie”. What is it, girl? Is Timmy stuck down in the well? Do I need to call my ob/gyn?

It was totally bizarre. My mom says she thinks animals pick up on “those types of things” (whatever that means), so maybe she was giving me a sign that I’m going to go into labor sometime this week. I’m not kidding, that’s totally my mom’s theory. Nevermind any of the symptoms I’ve told her about, it was only when I told her the story about the cat that she was all, “Well, that seals it. I guess I need to start keeping the phone ringer turned on when I go to bed, just in case you need to call at 4 a.m. to tell me that I have a grandbaby.”

Although you know, assuming my labor takes long enough for Dave to fly home, the idea of having the baby this week is quite honestly fine with me. I’m not anywhere near being done with my to-do list, but seriously? I am so over this whole pregnancy thing.

So please, send me happy “dilation and effacement” vibes for my OB appointment this afternoon. I’ll update again when I know more.

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