Fast

Inspirational song: She Came In Through the Bathroom Window (The Beatles)

My daughter had a housemate who was an old friend of hers from high school. She actually stayed with my daughter twice, once when she lived in the condo in Boulder, and once renting a room from her here. In the interim she had moved to Japan, and while she was gone, she left her cat in my daughter's care. When she left again last year, she assumed she was leaving the country again (hasn't yet, but I don't know the current plan), and by this time the cat was quite elderly and had settled in with my daughter's family. For a few months now, we have been concerned with how thin and slow the cat is getting, and that decline has sharpened in the last week. This evening, it has become obvious that she is not long for this world. Unfortunately that wasn't certain until after the vet closed for the day. If she is still hanging in by morning, my kids are going to have to make the decision whether to help her along. It's a hard choice to make, but they know it will be the right thing to do. I'm sad that they have to go through it, especially knowing that Valerie has gotten attached to the old lady cat. That's not a decision I have been good about making, so I have no advice to offer them.

This was a babysitting day. At one point I had to duck around the corner to start a phone call without baby voices overpowering my conversation. When I left the room, both kids were in the dead center of the living room rug. Seconds later when I came back from the hallway, they were both crawling towards the front door, giggling over their game. There is no question that boy is fast. We brought out the pack and play (playpen) this weekend. I still have to repair the big hole in the netting that Saoirse ripped when she was a puppy, inside by herself while we were out in the yard. So far Dmitri doesn't mind being in it, particularly when his sister plays in it with him. (We keep it wedged against the ottoman, with a towel over the torn spot, until I fix it.) They first played in it while I was off cleaning the house of our overwhelmed friends, so Valerie now refers to it as "prison," thanks to her eternally sarcastic grandfather.