Believe it or not, it isn’t all about cats dying at our house. I haven’t written about the kids in a while, and here’s why: they’ve both started preschool now. We are now without our Anna. Her last day with us was July 1st, and the kids started their new school on July 5th.

Super-nanny Anna!

It was a bit of a rough ride at first. We had actually tried to start Maya at a more traditional preschool back in June. I won’t use the word “disaster” but it didn’t go well. The potty training in particular took a huge step back. I think they just weren’t in a position to offer her the kind of attention she needed. The other thing that bothered us is that we couldn’t figure out if Maya was really eating lunch. They served food family style and we’d get reports from Maya like, “the other kids got all the food first” and “I didn’t like anything.” It already felt so strange having her away all day, not knowing how she spent her time and who she saw and what she learned. Then to pick her up every day to find her pants wet and to wonder whether she had eaten was just too much.

That’s our girl!

The kids now go to a montessori school. We discussed Maya’s transition at length with them before we agreed to attend. What I was impressed with was their kindness. They seem to have a good learning environment and a lot of structure, but they temper it with what seemed like a clear concern for their students. I can’t say it hasn’t been without a few bumps in the road, but Maya is doing very well now. She adores her teacher and the potty training is actually going exceedingly well. Plus, I have to pack the kids’ lunches, so I at least have some feedback on how they’re eating.

Seriously, this guy!

Ian is Ian and of course has settled right in. These days, I come in to pick the kids up and several of the teachers (including the school director) tell me how much Ian loves them. I don’t bother telling them that he loves everyone. When they first started going to the new school, he’d cry every time a teacher came to take him. He’s still a bit clingy from time to time, but now, Sean barely sets him down before he’s trucking it back to his classroom.

Maya, not quite four and Ian, not quite two

Before school started, we bit the bullet and got Ian his first haircut. It made me a little sad to cut off his curls, but his hair was so long in front it was causing him trouble. By now it’s so long, we really need to get it cut again.

Ian’s first haircut

Maya as well had been telling me she wanted her hair to be short. Initially she wanted it to be short enough that she’d be able to see the skin on her head. Sean and I discussed letting her do it, just so she could see, but we were worried about her getting sunburned. Instead we settled on a sensible bob, and she loved it. That haircut suits our ability to get her out the door in the morning (no need to install a ponytail) and it suits her inability to keep said ponytail in for more than a few minutes.

Maya had her first piano recital over the summer as well. Her music school makes a point of having them perform early and regularly so that it simply becomes part of what they do and hopefully takes away some of the associated anxiety. She did fine of course, even adding her own little hop at the end before the final bow.

Maya posing on the ball at Target after a successful recital

With the start of preschool, the kids wound up getting sick A LOT. I thought we had done a pretty good job of getting them out around other people and exposing them to a good barrage of microbial life. I guess nothing really compares to the disease stew that is a group of toddlers and preschoolers. We were lamenting how our summer had evaporated without us really noticing. I think it’s because we spent the better part of a month and a half fending off one kind of illness or another.

I’d love to say we’re past all that now, but as they say, winter is coming. I expect a fresh round of awful is heading our way. I keep reminding myself that we’re building good, sturdy immune systems in those kids. Here’s hoping.

Maya posing with Hank from “Finding Dory”

Earlier in the summer, Maya got to enjoy her first trip to the movies. We took her to see Finding Dory. We were sort of on the fence about whether she could sit through it (spoiler: she couldn’t), but then we noticed that one of the characters was an octopus, and we all know how Maya feels about those. Then we found out that the Alamo Drafthouse was doing a little carnival. It was on. We actually took an afternoon off work so we could take her while Anna watched Ian. Maya had a great deal of fun at the carnival, and did an acceptable job of sitting in the theater. We made many trips to the bathroom, almost certainly because she was bored, and she told me repeatedly that the movie was too long.

Ian and Mom in the pool at swim lessons

The kids are both enjoying their swim lessons. Maya, while obstinate, is doing a good job of propelling herself through the water. Ian, despite also being capable of propelling himself through the water and even controlling his breath, now steadfastly refuses to do so. He will jump in the water all day long, but if you hold him in the water and ask him to cover three feet between the swim instructor and you, he will no longer do so. There’s not much for it but to keep trying. He’s very comfortable in the water; he just hates forced swimming.

At any rate, what we have to share right now are their school photos for this year. Maya has an interesting way of smiling when she’s doing it intentionally that looks more like a grimace. But we’ve had her take selfies before too, and she’ll work her grin around till it’s just the sort of grimace she wants. It’s not like she’s unaware of it. My original plan had been to fill in some of the things described above with photos; I suppose there’s an outside chance we’ll come back and do that in the not-to-distant future.

I am now the last Missourian left at our house. The week before last, we lost Velvet, the only remaining member of the trio of kitties that moved from Missouri to Texas with us after we graduated college. Since she was a stray, we don’t really know exactly how old she was, but we’re guessing in the neighborhood of 19.

Velvet

Sean rescued her in 1999, while I was actually already in Texas, having graduated and become gainfully employed. He lived in a basement apartment and the people in the upstairs apartment appeared to have moved and left her there. He didn’t think too much of it until it got cold; then he started to worry. I received all this information during our nightly phone calls. My memory is inexact at the best of times and downright terrible after 17 years, several jobs, and two kids, so treat this as a dramatization. The timeframe, though, is accurate.
Night 1: Hey, I think the people upstairs may have left one of their cats. She’s really sweet.
Night 2: It’s supposed to snow tonight. I’m worried about that cat.
Night 3: So, I took our new cat to the vet today for shots. She’s really mean to the other cats. We need to come up with a name for her.

Food, glorious food

When Sean took Velvet in, she weighed about 6 pounds and was a full-grown cat. They estimated her age at 1-3 years. As I heard it, she’d hunker down in one spot in the apartment and hiss and growl if any other cat got near her. And wow did she eat. She ate like there might never be food in front of her again. In other words, she ate like she had been abandoned. Neither of us were used to cats that didn’t regulate their diets fairly well, so she achieved a fair “bowling ball with legs” body shape before the vet kindly pointed out that we may switch her to lower calorie cat food. It changed nothing. There was even a point many years back when Velvet had a dental issue and had to have all but her tiny grooming teeth removed. Even then she didn’t lose weight. At her peak, she weighed 16 pounds. When she died, there was less than four pounds of her left.

We often called her Velvet Elvis, or Velvis for short, because her lip would get stuck on her gum and it would kind of look like she had the Elvis snarl going on. It also didn’t hurt that her physique would have looked at home in a sequined jumpsuit with some rhinestone sunglasses shading her eyes. Maya even regularly referred to her as Velvis, though she certainly didn’t understand the reference (we’ll work on that).

Velvet in the snow, probably unwillingly

Another facet of Velvet’s abandonment manifested in her unwillingness to be outdoors. We’d take the three cats outside to let them roam a bit. Applet and Verbo would happily sniff and poke around (or run up a tree). Not Velvet. She would immediately run back to the door and wait there till someone would let her in. We figure she thought the other cats were insane. C’mon guys, what if they don’t ever let you back in??!!

She was the sweetest lap kitty that ever lived. That’s all Velvet really wanted: to sit in your lap and be petted. We used to call her Hooks after the cop from the Police Academy movies who had the quiet little voice. She’d sit at your feet and whisper meow at you till you sat down and then she’d happily hop up and and settle into your lap. As rotund as she was, she made a great monorail cat, tucking her feet up beneath her girth, but her preferred way of sitting was more interesting. What she liked to do was have her butt in your lap and her face toward yours. Then she’d stre-e-e-e-etch out her front legs as far as they’d extend so that she looked like a giant furry raindrop. She sometimes would even knead your face a little with those extended paws.

Velvet snuggled up with my pregnant (with Maya) belly

Velvet also really loved string. She would wake from a dead sleep half-way across the house if she heard the whisper of string unspooling. I’ve never (and I mean never) seen that cat move fast except when she had string to chase.

Travel was a little difficult with Velvet. She was terrified of the car. The poor thing would pant when she was scared. In the car, she would pant to the point that she’d have giant shoestrings of drool dangling from either side of her mouth to the floor. Needless to say, after a point, we tried to let her stay home more often than not.

Velvet loved it when we had a baby; she could lay on all the baby stuff!

At the beginning of this year, Velvet began to have a lot of what I’ll delicately refer to as litter box trouble. We had been dealing with her kidney insufficiency for a number of years by then and had just been told she was likely to have intestinal lymphoma as well. Since she was on her last legs at this point, we decided that we’d put her in a cage and let her live out her days there. Sean found the giant-est dog enclosure he could at the pet store. It was large enough to have a litter box, a bed, and water with decent separation between them. After the first couple days, she decided she loved it, even getting a little pissed at us if we didn’t put her back in her cage quickly enough after meal times.

But cats are astonishingly resilient creatures. She puttered on like that for months and months. She spent nearly all of her time curled up in her bed sleeping. But she’d wake up for petting. She’d wander out of her cage to eat her meals. She’d even get pretty vocal if she thought we weren’t conforming to her preferred timeline for dinner.

Velvet curled up on the turtle Lolli had crocheted for Maya

She put up with Ian’s abuse like a champ, seeming to welcome it even. When she was caged, he’d stick his pudgy little arm through the bars and she’d rub her face on him, Ian giggling all the while. He still stands up on the couch looking over the back of it and pointing to where the cage used to be while yelling, “Belbet! Belbet!” And I sadly explain to him every time that Velvet died. She’s all gone. We don’t have her any more.

At the end, Velvet was carrying around a pretty heavy burden of diagnoses: hyperthyroidism, kidney insufficiency, intestinal lymphoma, and pancreatitis. Sean had taken her in for some fluids (for her kidneys) and an injection of Procrit (to help with her anemia) and was told that she was severely dehydrated. A day later, she wouldn’t move to eat or drink or use the litter box. We had her euthanized that same day. We’ve struggled since the beginning of the year with the question: was this the right time to put her down or was there still some quality to her life? The vet had advised us back then that if she stopped seeming like herself, it was probably time. That day it was obvious. Velvet had left the building.