Purrrfection

I swear I’m not bored, not in the least, I’m overworked ... but I’m suddenly aware of a feline soap opera in my neighborhood.

A couple weeks ago, we saw a small calico cat in our backyard with three kittens, obviously fairly newborn. They might have been born right there, possibly under my very nose, while I was trying to set up a three wire trellis for our Mourvèdre vine (yes, poor to mediocre wine coming soon!) or dealing with the loss of the third, littlest olive tree in a pot.

My friend (and former boss) Tim risked blood loss to gather up the feral cats in his neighborhood and bring them in to be fixed before releasing them. I’m an animal lover too. Well, frankly, that’s a silly phrase. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t love some animal? Yes, I know, there are the Michael Vicks, but that’s lack of education. No one smart, no one with any empathy can believe animals are any less than humans, especially the ones of the cat and dog varieties. Yes, I digress, but the point is I’m an animal lover too, and instead of making everyone miserable schlepping animals to the pound in a crate, I think of short-term rather than long-term solutions. I just feed them.

This is the microcosmic equivalent of feeding homeless people instead of teaching them a trade. It’s easy, and so I do it. Sorry. Part of my excuse was that I want to teach Mikey about being careful around strange animals while maintaining empathy. (That looks awfully good on paper, doesn’t it?) Here’s how the routine has been for the last couple of weeks:

We’ll be out in the backyard. Mikey will notice the mother cat, who is generally on the other side of the pool fence from us, yowling.

“Mama cat hungry!”

So we go inside and get water (or milk if Daddy is feeling especially generous) and cat food (apologizing to our own cat Floyd) and being very, very careful not to spill, and then more carefully that the cats who might be scared of us don’t scratch, we bring them out to the cat and her kittens. Now, her kittens are adorable. You could watch the three of them (one black, one black with white paws, and one calico like her/his mom) all day long run around our backyard, onto the furniture, playing with Mikey’s cars and pool toys, and wrestling around.

I don’t know if it was Ian or me who first looked at the adorable creatures at play and mused, “Where do you suppose they’re pissing and shitting?”

So there’s that. But they’re so cute, what does it matter?

This morning, the kittens’ charm was lost on Mikey for the first time. He saw them playing with his baseball in the back yard, and hammered on the glass door, “No, cats, that’s my ball!”

“You’ll scare them!” I warned.

“Okay,” Mikey replied, and hammered harder on the window.

Then, just now, I saw a new figure in the backyard. A long sleek black cat, who gave the kittens a obligatory pat on the head, and then proceeded to mount the mom.

The kitten daddy.

And my poor fixed fluffy Floyd cat just watches from the window and thinks, “The drama!”

A Year Ago Today, We Brought Our Son Home

We were a little nervous about meeting the stranger. I had an email from our social worker saying that Michael’s social worker “really didn't express any major concerns and said that you guys were going to fall in love with him.” We weren’t sure if that was just words, since they were desperate to find a quick home for him, but we were optimistic, if, like I said, a little nervous.

Two children we had brought into our home had already been returned, lost back into the system. A 5-month-old infant who had taught us the basics of diaper changes and play, rocking and feeding, and that we really wanted to do this and might be good at it, and then a toddler who taught us not to take our eyes off one of those for a second. We had just kissed Baby A goodbye 24 hours before. This was our third-time-is-a-charm or third-strike, however it turned out.

That was May 27, 2010, one year ago today, when Ian and I brought our son home. He had with him a suitcase of all his possessions: a couple tee-shirts, a couple pairs of sweat pants, a ball, an Etch-A-Sketch, and a small plastic truck.

That’s unbelievable to us now. 365 days have flown by, and yet, it’s hard to believe there was a time when he wasn’t ours, and we weren’t his. How is it possible we weren’t there for his first smile, his first words, and his first steps?

We don’t concern ourselves much with what we didn’t share with him during his first 20 months on the planet, because he’s all about the future, not the past. This week, it’s break-dancing in front of the TV in imitation of the contestants on “So You Think You Can Dance,” and reading a new favorite book "Making the Moose out of Life," and telling our nanny Sally “I don’t miss you, I miss Daddy,” and eating Floyd’s dry cat food in order to get Papa and Daddy to cry, “Mikey, nooooooo!” while he giggles.

Thank you for making May 27th, 2010 to May 27th, 2011 so much fun, little boy, our pride and joy, our son. And infinite years to come.

La Coccinelle Jolie et Son Bébé Dansent!

The lyrics go:
Jolie coccinelle
Emmène-moi, emmène-moi
Faire un petit tour de soleil
Chatouiller le ciel avec toi

Roughly (according to the record company Putomayo who put out this album together with other children’s songs across all cultures) translated as:

Pretty ladybug
Take me away, take me away
Let me take a ride around the sun
And tickle the sky with you

Mikey's First Passport

Ian is British, and his sister, Mikey’s Aunt Helen, who is as of yet still known only from photos, is getting married in August in what will be the second great royal wedding of the year. Once we got a new birth certificate for Mikey, we went to get a new social security card and a passport.

That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some awkwardness at the post office. You can’t get a new passport for a child under 16 without having them be present, and with current budget cuts, the post office is only open certain hours on weekends, so we joined a long line filled with fidgeting kids. When “Tony” (not his real name – oh, wait, actually, yes, his real name), the only person present handling the passport work got to us, he first looked at Mikey’s photo and deemed it unacceptable. Luckily, there was a place right across the street where Ian could take Mikey and get an emergency pic taken.



Yes, it was obviously that Mikey looked too cute and cheerful in the first photo, and that isn’t likely how he would look during a transatlantic trip. Actually, the problem really was that his face was too big in the first pic for the facial recognition software they use. You’d think in this day and age where Picasa and Facebook and dozens of other available-to-the-public programs can recognize your fuzzy, pixellated face from miles away, the feds would know how to do it too, but best not dwell on what that means for airport security.

The other part of the experience which was a little awkward, was Tony slowly catching on to the fact that Mikey was adopted by two men. When I got to his window, Ian was outside chasing Mikey around the parking lot, playing the new game Mikey invented, Spiderman versus Sharkman. All three of us have to be present, so Tony asked for my son to come to the window.

“And you wife,” he added.

“Hold on, I’m waving to my son and partner,” I said, gently correcting him while I gestured to them to come in.

When Ian and Mikey came over, we chatted away while Tony looked to the birth certificate to the application, and back and forth, a couple times, not sure what to say. I didn’t want to say anything and make any assumptions about what he was thinking. Ian chatted with the people behind us in line, and Mikey played on the floor with their kids.

Finally: “Which – who is the father?”

“We both are,” I said. “We adopted him.”

Since I had put the adoption certificate down together with the application and birth certificate, the fact of his adoption shouldn’t have been a surprise. We had filled out the form as appropriately, all Tony had to do was copy. Once it finally sunk in, Tony filled in the form, took our $105, and said we’d get his passport in 4 to 6 weeks. And then we’ll be on an 11 hour flight to London.

Hold on, let me let that sink in.

Oh boy.

O, You Scary Cow

Saturday night, Mikey didn't want to go to bed, so we said, "Tomorrow, you want to see animals?"

"Huh?"

"Horses, chickens, cows. What sound do cows make?"

"Mooo," Mikey said. "I see animoos."

"Yes, you go to sleep now, and when you wake up, you see animals."

Cut to 3 am. Mikey climbs up in our bed. "I see animoos. I see animoos now."

We explain that animals are sleeping, and we won't go to see them for 6 hours so he should go to sleep. He can't. Too excited. Keeps listing all the animals he's going to see (including sharks, fishies, and octopus ("ottopoos"). We can't sleep either, perhaps because of the excited toddler bouncing up and down on the bed.

Finally, it's 9 am, and we pack up our picnic lunch (including the requisite bottle of wine for us) and head for the Gentle Barn. It’s a great place (www.gentlebarn.org), a home for farm animals who were neglected and abused. Mikey falls asleep in his car seat. When he wakes up, he sees his first horse.


"Animoos, yay!" he cries. "Yay! Yay, animoos!"

We get out and see the horses and then the cows. Mikey's eyes widen. He hadn't expected them to be so big.

Then the cow looks at him and goes, "MOOO!"

Mikey runs into my arms. As he wakes up more, he gets less frightened, particularly when we go to smaller critters elsewhere in the farm. He even helps me feed the horses some carrots. But still, whenever he sees something he's not sure about, he calls it a "cow" or "scary cow."

"Look at that piggy, Mikey! It's huge!"

"Scary cow," Mikey nods.

Another Toy Story

I woke up this morning to Mikey in my ear in a conspiratorial hiss: “Mickey Mouse and Woody … fuck.”

Even three-quarters asleep, I knew he was talking about two of Disney’s beloved characters, Mickey Mouse and Woody, the cowboy character voiced by Tom Hanks in the Toy Story franchise, of which Mikey was a great fan. Still I had to ask, “Mickey Mouse and Woody, what?”

“Mickey Mouse and Woody,” he articulated carefully, holding up his toy fire truck where he had put his Mickey Mouse and Woody figures. “Fffuck.”

“Yes, Mickey Mouse and Woody in the fire truck,” I agreed.

But that was not the end of the narrative. Unlike the adventures of Woody in Toy Story 1, 2, and 3, the storyline in Mikey’s land of imagination is not professionally produced and scripted. It is not a slave of character consistency, genre constraints, or simple logic. In short order, Mickey had tossed Woody aside (but kept his hat on his own head) and was on board a toy plane, destination unknown. In the seat next to him was a small plastic skateboard and three crayons, Red, Yellow Green, and Cerulean.

“Eeee,” Mikey intoned softly, pushing the plane backwards into the wall. “Crash.”


The crash was not too serious, evidently, because the plane turned around and continued to go backwards until it stopped in front of a twenty-one pound cat named Floyd. Floyd gave it a sniff.

“Nein, nein, nein, Floyd,” Mikey said. “Auf, Floyd. Minen. Minen plane.”

Like most toddlers, Mikey speaks excellent German.

The cat gave Mikey the Usual Withering Look, and then the small plastic skateboard was out of the passenger seat and rolling along the floor. Soon it was wedged into a baby doll’s lips.

“No, baby,” I said, becoming just a bit parental. “Take the skateboard out of your mouth, you could choke. It’s dangerous.”

“No,” said Mikey. “Baby and satebor a-kiss.”

Then there was much smooching noises and the baby doll and the small plastic skateboard went to first base. There is a lot of kissing in Mikey’s play. That’s why I believed that first rumor I heard about Mickey Mouse and Woody.

Best Birthday Ever, Part II: Happy Yoyo

Mikey wasn’t mad about the caviar, but he loved the birthday cake, of course. He had some interest in eating, and lots of interest in blowing out the candle, over and over again while singing his version of “Happy birthday,” which is “Happy yoyo.”