Fluster

In the fall of 1997, Rachel and I (who were not, I believe, technically dating yet) started talking about (me) getting a cat. We happened to have this conversation at a party in a dorm room in earshot of a friend of a friend who was hoping to be a veterinarian and so was interning at the Warwick Animal Hospital. He told us that one of the nurses there had found and rescued a litter of abandoned kittens, and so if we were interested, hey, free kitten. So it was that we found ourselves in the back room of the animal hospital watching three tiny kittens frolic and mew and play, and we decided to take home the one the nurse had named “Stupid.”

I had decided in advance that my cat would be named Fluster.

I seem to recall that we drove home from the animal hospital with Fluster on Rachel’s lap in the backseat, and when we arrived back at my apartment in Providence I raced around to solicitously open the door for her while she gingerly carried Fluster inside. He was five weeks old, and he fit in the palm of your hand.

Being a responsible person, I’m sure I wouldn’t bring home a tiny new kitten without having all of the necessary things in place, but I seem to remember not having cat food (or, perhaps, not having enough cat food) and so one of Fluster’s very first meals was a small piece of Pizza Pie-er crust. I think we can probably trace his love of baked goods to that moment. It was a rule in our house that one must not ever leave bread, or pizza, or cookies, or cake, or crackers, or really anything made of grain, anyplace that Fluster could reach.

Fluster started out unbelievably tiny, but he didn’t stay that way. We fed him little cans of Iams cat food, and he just wolfed them down. After he ate, you’d pick him up, and you would be holding a warm ball of mushy cat food with a thin layer of kitten wrapped around it, his little legs dangling off of your palm. I don’t know if it was the food or genetics, but in two short years Fluster went from this:

To this:

He was a frankly enormous cat: not fat, just long and tall. We used to joke that he was part mountain lion. He was, however, a most un-cat-like cat. He was not shy, or cautious, or graceful. He would gallop into a room, rubbing his face on every available surface or person. No one could visit our house—not friends, not family, not repairmen, not painters—without getting an enthusiastic greeting from Fluster. In 2004, we bought a house and had the kitchen renovated, which involved teams of contractors and workmen in our house for months. The other two cats, as cats will do, spent most of the time cowering under the bed upstairs. Fluster became a part of the workday. They had systems to keep him from dashing out the door; they called him Schmitty.

All of our cats were inside cats, but Fluster wanted nothing more than to get outside. If you left a door open and unwatched for more than a second or two, chances were he’d make a break for it. A very few times in his life we let him outside on purpose: he’d generally find the dirtiest patch of ground and earnestly roll around in it.

The classic Fluster story, of course, involves his trip to the emergency vet many years ago for some kind of urinary blockage. He had to stay overnight, and when we picked him up the next day, the report we got included the log of the staff’s attempts to care for him:

Attempted to feed cat. Cat was fractious.
Attempted to give cat medicine. Cat was fractious.

The best quote, though, and the one Fluster was unable to ever live down, was the first notation by the vet who placed his urinary catheter: “Difficult to exteriorize the penis. Small?”

That was when we started calling Fluster our “little guy.”

Fluster had the loudest purr of any cat I’ve ever heard. You could hear him from across a room, just rumbling away like a motorcycle. He was not always the most accommodating cat, but he was sociable, friendly, and occasionally cuddly. He was a happy cat.

When we brought the twins home, I don’t think Fluster knew what hit him.

Like all the cats, Fluster was astoundingly patient with the babies. When we ignored him to take care of the children, he kept on purring. When they tugged his fur and swatted his face, he kept on purring. When we left their food out on the table, he ate it.

Still, while I don’t want to say the babies gave Fluster cancer, they couldn’t have helped his stress level. For about nine months, we gave Fluster his medicine, and hoped he’d hang on. And he did hang on, until one day he couldn’t anymore. He made it easy for us: it was obvious he was in pain, and that he wasn’t really going to be able to be our Fluster anymore. So I held him, and stroked his head, and said goodbye, and now we only have two cats, and it’s totally strange to be able to leave groceries on the counter for 15 minutes without having the bags torn open or to be able to go downstairs in the morning without having to crush up a pill in wet cat food or to be able to leave the door open while ferrying packages from the car.

I won’t deny those things are very convenient, but I’d trade them in a heartbeat for our Fluster.

Tumbleweeds

Sorry that the blog has been so quiet lately. Matt is finishing up school (and he even has a job waiting for him in January!), the babies have been quite stubbornly sick, and in our limited free time we’ve been trying to get ready for the holidays (and, okay, I spent a few evenings watching Pride and Prejudice for some much needed escapism).

The babies turned 14 months yesterday, so I’m due for a post about that. Matt’s out of town this weekend for his grandmother’s memorial service, though, and of course he’s trying to return during a giant snowstorm, so I’m pretty much on my own with the kids for the next day or so. So in anticipation of that post being tardy, here is a video to hold you over (for the few of you who didn’t see it posted on Facebook):

Happy Birthday to Our Other Favorite Twins

I post with some regularity on a small general-interest internet forum. One section is devoted to pregnancy and parenting, and, as on many sites, those boards are broken down by trimester/child age range. To give you a sense of the small size of the forum, in any three-month age range there are maybe 25-30 people posting. So, small. Nothing like thebump.com or babycenter.com or any of those other hugely trafficked sites.

So it was a rather unlikely coincidence that there would be another poster on the site who was due with twins on the exact same day that I was. Unlikely and incredibly fortuitous, because once Julia and I started emailing each other off the board, we discovered that not only did we have many other things in common (including that we both graduated from Brown, a year apart), we also just plain really liked each other (I’ve used the phrase kindred spirits before and I’m not afraid to do it again), well beyond the shared experience of twin pregnancy (and, later, twin parenthood). We certainly had a lot to say about that topic above all else, though, and found ourselves emailing and Google chatting with great frequency about heartburn, hugeness, our fears about preterm labor and life with twins, and every other topic we could cram into our lengthy exchanges.

Well, a year ago today Julia and her husband Jeff took the plunge into twin parenthood and gave birth to their beautiful Ben and Elly Bea. I remember so clearly sitting on the couch, enormous, reading her announcement email, and feeling a little left behind — my friend was in the thick of it, loving and caring for two babies, and I was 36 miserable weeks pregnant and giving Matt instructions about what to do if my stomach were to rip away from my body when I rolled over that night (he was to root through my internal organs and save the babies).

Of course, a week later Matt and I jumped off that cliff ourselves, and Julia proved to be even more of a lifeline for me as I attempted to survive those harrowing early months. We both devoted our scant free time to furiously cranking out long emails in which we gave and sought advice, expressed and accepted encouragement, and marveled about how hard and amazing the whole thing was. (Mostly the former for a while. Lately a lot more of the latter.) At one point Julia aptly described it as writing to a diary that writes back (but not in the creepy Tom Riddle way). Through those emails (and some phone calls and, eventually, whole-family Skyping), Matt and I got to know Ben and Elly pretty well: we always had a pretty good sense of how they were sleeping, what they were eating, and even their, erm, digestive habits. We know their personality quirks and their most endearing habits. We’re pretty attached to them.

Unfortunately, they live 3,000 miles away from us, in Portland, Oregon, so in spite of the fact that we know Ben and Elly probably better than any other kids in the world aside from our own, we have never met them in person. And so today we had to celebrate their birthday from afar, with Julian trying to eat the party hat and Eloise for some reason wearing her crankiest pants. But Julia and I have big plans, beginning this summer when we all meet when they come to this coast to visit her family and continuing with our biannual trips to visit them Portland, then taking the kids to Prince Edward Island after they read Anne of Green Gables, and ultimately renting a series of houses in marvelous locations around the world. The adults will sip the local beverage of choice and the kids will play quietly and delightfully (all best friends, of course).

But for now, we have to be content with wishing Ben and Elly happy birthday via blog post, and congratulating Julia and Jeff on surviving the first year. It looks as though Matt and I are going to, too, and it’s in no small part thanks to their fabulous support and sanity-saving humor. I am sure we will all manage to stay in touch even after everything becomes easy-peasy in Year Two.

I Am 14 Years Old

Plan Toys is a company that makes some very nice wooden toys. We have the Punch and Drop, and the kids really enjoy pushing the wooden balls through the holes, or knocking them together, or generally tossing them around. It’s a hit.

The names of some of their other products, though, just consistently make me giggle. Hammer Balls? Miracle Pounding? Come on.

Off the Grid

Well, not off the whole grid, but off of the Internet-accessible portion of it, anyway. The four of us will be away for the weekend, but expect a rush of posts when we get back. I have a (more and more tardy) Father’s Day post to write, and we’ll have four days worth of pictures to post, and we’ll probably want to recap our trip.

So, see you when we get back!

Frustrating

So, our good camera is on the fritz, and we took it in to be repaired. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that the repair shop we took it to takes a week just to give you an estimate for the repair. Which is, come on, ridiculous.

The daily picture project must carry on, so I apologize for the crappy point and shoot pictures you’ll be seeing for a while. Our cute little camera just doesn’t take good pictures at all in low light, and we’re almost always in low light. On the plus side, having the little camera on me all the time means I’m much more likely to take video, so expect to see some video clips over the next few days!

From the Archives

My dad’s moving, which entails a lot of digging old stuff out of the basement. Today he sent along these pictures of me at seven months old.

Matt, 7 Months

Rachel’s comment: “You look like Eloise, with Julian’s cheeks.”

Backlog

Program note: due to the aforementioned colic, we’ve fallen a little behind with the daily photos. Not to worry, we’ve taken tons of pictures; I just haven’t had time to edit and upload them. I’ll be working on back-filling them over the next few days, so if you don’t subscribe through an RSS reader, you might want to scroll down so as not to miss a single scintillating picture.

Flowers

While I stand by everything I said before, I have to admit that Eloise looks flipping adorable in her flowery pink nightgown.

Famous

Rachel and Julian are featured on the Cupcakes Take The Cake blog! Neat!

Timeliness

I have a pretty significant backlog of daily pictures to post, and a handful of posts I started while we were in the hospital but that I somehow never got around to finishing. (I wonder why?) Over the next day or two I’m going to be catching up, so expect to see a few new posts come up, backdated so they slip into the correct point in the chronology.

Take a stroll back through the archives, won’t you? Maybe you’ve missed something!

Appreciation

Just a quick note to tell you how much we appreciate the outpouring of congratulatory emails, comments, and calls. We’re hoping this post will stand in for the personal response we’d like to send each of you.

Huh. This is starting to sound like one of those “contact us” disclaimers on a corporate website:

Thank you very much for contacting us. Although we read every email, due to the high number of emails we cannot promise to reply to each and every one. Be assured, your thoughts are very important to us. Thank you again.