Sometimes it's hard to love the cat.

This evening as Gabe and I were going through our cozy bedtime ritual, I walked him over to his crib to take out the decorative stuffed animals (as placed there by the decorators who staged our home which STILL HAS NOT SOLD ahhhhh am losing my mind from the noise of the vacuum and the fumes from the kitchen cleaners which I use EVERY DAMN DAY), I noticed something highly unpleasant.

Our cat, who has been acting up a bit ever since Gabe started walking in earnest, had peed in the crib.

CAT PEE IN THE CRIB.

The bad, bad, bad cat also managed to pee all over Gabe's lovey lion blanket (a very soft, sweet, small blanket with a lion's head sewn on one corner). I was horrified. I am still horrified, several hours later.

So rather than rock Gabe in the glider chair and lay him down gently to sleep as had been my plan thirty seconds earlier, I was forced to strip the crib and and put on a clean mattress pad and sheets. Thank goodness for the waterproof mattress pads that I bought in bulk when Gabe was a newborn. That purchase represents a rare moment of lucidity in the midst of several highly sleep-deprived weeks.

Also, thank goodness we have a backup lovey blanket.

OR SO I THOUGHT.

Gabe has slept with his lovey lion blanket since he was a very little guy. It's organic and made from breathable fabric and it's quite small, so even though I was absolutely terrified of SIDS (and undoubtedly will be again for Version 2.0), the lovey lion blanket never worried me much. Shortly after Gabe began sleeping with the lovey lion, we received a nearly identical blanket as a gift. It's exactly the same, except it has (you guessed it smart readers!) a bear's head on the corner.

I've offered Gabe the bear blanket on a few occasions in the past, usually when the lion was in the wash, and he accepted it without protest.

Not tonight.

Tonight I got him all snuggled down in his crib and handed him the lovey bear. He took it happily, then frowned and sat up to get a better look at it. He examined the blanket, looked at me with raised eyebrows, looked back at the blanket, then smelled the blanket. He turned to me with a very serious expression on his face, extended his arm to show me the blanket, and said, "Uh oh!"

Clearly, not fooled. Not for a minute.

After some serious negotiations he accepted his Elmo doll and DaDoh the gingham stuffed lion as substitutes, and seriously, I don't know what I would have done if he hadn't taken them. I had a few moments of something close to panic as I tried to imagine how I would get him to sleep without the cat-pee-soaked lovey lion. We have an allegedly high efficiency washing machine and dryer, and those damn things take an hour each to run a full cycle, so tossing the lovey lion in for a quick wash was not a good option.

Lucky for me, I have the greatest baby in the whole entire world, and he cheerfully settled down with Elmo tucked under one arm and DaDoh tucked under the other, and was out cold in mere minutes.

Lovey lion is in the wash now, and should be good as new in a couple of hours.

But what am I going to do about the cat?

This Can't Continue

The baby is surviving on carbs and applesauce, people. (And now that I think about it, apples are pretty much the carbiest fruit. So really he surviving solely on carbs. Great.)

He rejects all vegetables, except for Trader Joe's Veggie Sticks WHICH ARE NOT ACTUALLY VEGETABLES. They are POTATOES with carrot and spinach FLAVORING. Trader Joe's, you sell me nothing but LIES. Lies and potatoes.

I tried to trick him tonight by dipping one end of a Veggie Stick into a tiny bit of hummus. It worked, in the sense that he put the hummus end into his mouth. But then the hummus touched his tongue...and he decided I was trying to poison him and he made crazy, crazy faces and spit the hummus all down his shirt. So that was pretty much a fail.

So he rejects vegetables, he rejects hummus, and he also rejects animal protein like chicken and turkey, OR SO I THOUGHT. It turns out there's s one other thing that he WILL eat, but I am almost too ashamed to mention it here. Then again, since no one really reads this, I can confess. He ate cat food tonight.

CAT FOOD.

FOOD CREATED FOR CATS.

I'm serious. After he had rejected the nice healthy dinner I prepared for him (except for the applesauce and Veggie Sticks, which he ate with relish once he decided there was no further hummus around to torture him), I put him down on the ground to crawl around while I rinsed off the highchair tray. He said "hi" to the cats in an excited voice, and crawled towards them. "How nice," I thought to myself. "He's going to pet the cats. He's getting so good around Magnum and Phoebe, so sweet and gentle to them." Then I turned to watch, just to make sure none of the cats tried to swipe him (which they almost never do these days).

They didn't. But he swiped food from them.

Yep, Gabe had one hand in Phoebe's bowl and one hand crammed into his mouth, shoving cat food down his gaping maw as fast as he could. Oh. My. Goodness.

I ran over to him, tried to force the chicken pellets from his mouth (FAIL), and forced open his fist to remove the uneaten pellets from his hand (SUCCESS). He got pretty mad at me for taking his delicious chicken pellets away. Crying was involved.

So basically the $7 organic free-range chicken breast from Whole Foods = REJECTED.
The disgusting chicken and rice cat food pellets from Centinela Feed & Pet Supply = YUM.

I need a glass of wine. I also need to lay off the ALL CAPS, probably.

Gabey Proofing

To elaborate on my last post, it turns out that our house is one big baby death trap.

I thought Matt and I were doing a pretty good job making things safe for our little crawler. We put those little plastic plugs in all of the electrical outlets. We're installing locks on all of the bathroom drawers and cupboard doors. We put up baby gates in the kitchen doorways. We put a brightly colored foam playmat down over part of our lovely Mexican ceramic tile floor. We even replaced the pointy-cornered coffee table of death with a nice leather ottoman-type thing.

And still, the baby keeps finding extremely dangerous and disgusting things to play with. For example, he discovered a large hairball gacked up by one of the cats right in the middle of the floor under our dining room table, where I couldn't see it but he could. (Luckily I got to that before he did - his general excitement at crawling under the normally boring table tipped me off that something was going on down there). Similarly, he found a choking-hazardous raisin beneath the couch, probably left behind by my lovely niece Parker. He also discovered that it's really fun to pull on the living room curtains as hard as possible to see if he can pull them down. (The good news is that he cannot, even when he throws his entire eighteen-pound body weight into the attempt.) He has also tried crawling into the cat litter boxes (we stopped him), knocking over a porcelain vase (he couldn't quite reach it), and chewing on an electrical cord (it never even got near his mouth, so don't worry).

Fig. 1: Baby Attempts to Pull Down Living Room Curtains

Whew. I knew crawling would change the game, but I simply didn't realize what I would be dealing with. He's a tiny tornado of dangerous activity. A tiny but extremely cheerful tornado.

The good news is that - also like a tornado - he isn't stealthy at all. You know how people make their pet cats wear collars with little bells on them? We considered it, but we don't really need to put a bell on Gabe, he's so noisy when he moves across the floor. He looks and sounds very much like an iguana, slapping his hands really hard onto the ground, which sort of gives the game away.

He also sticks out his tongue like an iguana, now that I think about it:

Fig. 2: Iguana Tongue

So the bad news is that he has no respect for danger or his own body and it's become very, very exhausting to chase after him as he whimsically attempts to inflict great bodily injury on himself despite my spending all that money on baby proofing items (i.e. the aforementioned locks for cupboards that Gabe has never shown any actual interest in trying to open). The good news is that he's slow enough and klutzy enough that we have no problems anticipating his next moves and cutting him off at the pass.

If his crawling becomes more proficient or ninja-style though, we are in serious trouble. Perhaps we will simply empty the house of furniture, leaving only the leather ottoman thing and the foam floor padding. And his 18,327 toys, of course - we'll keep the toys. Because if we remove all the danger and hairballs and breakable vases, he's going to need something to play with.

Oooh, I can't wait until he starts walking!