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check out: What....what? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? What's with the wiener dogs? Oh my god I think I'm insane now.
artifact:
Hat box full of baby stuff that lives under our coffee table: classy interior decorating!
photos:
| Wednesday, January 25, 2006 So as of Monday afternoon Riley weighs 14 pounds exactly, which is 3 pounds less than our cat. Our CAT weighs more than our SON. Granted Cat is looking a bit on the zaftig side lately, not that I am pointing fingers because during these dark rainy winter days who am I to judge a little comfort eating, ahem, but here I was marveling at how Riley's been growing and thriving and rendering all of his 3-month outfits obsolete (and can I just say that it is in fact JB who is too sappy to get rid of them, I mentioned making a donation to Goodwill and he acted like I had suggested bludgeoning a sack of angora bunnies with a ball-peen hammer) when apparently all along I should have been adding Purina Adult Cat Total Nutrition to his bottles so he'd be bigger and stronger and potentially sporting a glossy pelt of fur right now. I find it mildly disturbing that the cat is larger than the boy, mostly because of something JB's brother told him recently. See, JB's brother is a mortician - funeral director, whatever you want to call it - and part of his job involves picking up dead bodies, before embalming them and restoring them to a lifelike sheen using formaldehyde and Silly Putty. The other day he was talking with JB and mentioned in passing (HA!) that he'd picked up the body of a woman who died alone in her house, and that her cat had started - Um, this is mildly gross so if you are maybe chewing on, say, a bologna sandwich right now? I apologize. - eating her. After the woman died it was a few days before anyone discovered her, and according to JB's brother, if cats are locked in the house with their dead owner and their supply of Meow Mix runs out, it is not uncommon at all for them to start eating the body. "Never dogs," he said. "Dogs will never do it, but cats, yeah. They go for the face, and nine times out of ten they start with the nose." The cat has already been getting on my last nerve lately, constantly demanding to go outside then realizing that DUH IT IS RAINING just like it has been for months on end now and can I come back in mree mow wow rowwww and once being allowed back in running straight to her food bowl to see if it magically refilled itself in the last 30 seconds and then deciding that maybe there is food outside and let me out please like righthisminuteWOWMOWMREEOW and wait! IT IS STILL RAINING? Repeat 858291050274 times per day. This kind of behavior tempts, nay, demands a boot to the ass because when I've spent an entire evening juggling a fussy baby and I've just gotten him to fall asleep and I'm tiptoeing outside of his room and oh so softly shutting the door and suddenly there is this unholy yowling that threatens the fabric of space and time with its relentless noise volume - that, my friends, is the time for eschewing the gentle path of the pacifist, for there is only one thing to do: kick the cat in the rear Pelé-style and mentally shout GOOOOOOOOAAAAAL! Anyway, now that I know she would devour us all if only she had the chance - and really, she could probably get most of the boy inside her, like a furry anaconda - her malevolency is fully realized. Someday I'll have a nice cat, a friendly sweet purring bundle who snuggles in my lap and does not take the opportunity to bite the living shit out of me, and I'll look down at her fuzzy little face and think: they start with the nose. Or maybe I'll stick with dogs from now on.
::: ::: Out of nowhere, Riley has started waking up during the night. I had blithely assumed all wee-hour activity would be over now that the child is almost as big as the cat and all, but knock knock, who's there, HUBRIS THAT IS WHO. Note to self: stop thinking that you can predict the boy's behavior because that is when he strikes, like a snake on a plane. We have something called a "sound and lights" baby monitor and would you like to see the most soul-sinking image in the whole wide world? Why, here it is:
That is a light display on the monitor, and the fact that the radial bars are lit up means that somewhere a baby has decided that it's 4 AM, and what the fuck, let's watch us some QVC. I wish I still had the paperwork that came with the monitor because it kept referring to the light arcs as indicators of a "happy, excited" baby. One arc means they're sleeping, two arcs means they're moving around, three arcs means they are "playing", and four arcs? That just means they're thrilled to bits! Singing to themselves, maybe! Playing a tiny ukulele! Except what it really means is that they're crying, and seeing the four-bar alarm in the middle of the night is a special kind of suck. The sound wakes me, of course, but it's a one-two punch to both hear Riley's progressively angry bleats ("Hey! HEY! HEYYY!") and be assaulted visually by the Lights of Doom. I can only hope this is a very brief stage that we will all fondly look back upon some distant day in the future. In the meantime I think I'll stir a little Nyquil into his rice cereal.
Oh, I'm only kidding. Look at that sweet little face, I would never give him Nyquil.
Especially when ground-up Ambien doubtlessly has longer lasting effects.
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