Into the Drink

This is our cat, Gertie. She's kind of weird. We got her when Lilie was a baby, so even though she's odd, we like her and we're going to keep her. She's very good natured, very self-sufficient, very pretty and clean, she doesn't leave hair all over my house and couches, she doesn't rub up on anybody, and she doesn't claw my furniture. Most of the time, she is outside or sleeping on or under my bed.

One of the slightly strange things she does is drink from the bath tub. When she was a kitten, both the places that we lived had leaky tub faucets. She took to not ever drinking from her water dish, she'd just go lick the faucet. However, we no longer have leaky faucets. Yet she still tries on occasion. -- Like the other day when I was bathing Vi.

Nels is so nice, he'll turn it on for her if she comes to sit on the edge of the tub. I, on the other hand, am more likely to tease her by attempting to push her into the tub. :) She has good reason for liking Nels better than she does me. :)

Birthdays and Harvesting

Finally getting around to posting the girls birthday pictures! hooray! :)

We has a great week with our birthday girls this year. Grandma Moon was able to come the week before and spoil them with her beautiful presence and presents :) as well as carrot cake. Yum! Good food is always in abundance when Grandma is around! :) It was a gorgeous week (except for Hazel's birthday, on which I believe it snowed) and that weekend, Grandma and Grandpa Chick and Great-Grandma and Grandpa Larson were able to come visit on their way to Utah. It was so wonderful to see them and the girls loved going to out to breakfast with them Saturday morning.

Hazel's cake this year turned out . . . lovely. She told me that she wanted a pink cake with a purple octopus on it. (???) Too bad spiders and octopi have to look so similar! :)

Her special birthday heart hair :) and her fuzzy new robe.

After eating most of two cakes by the time we got to Elsie's birthday, I was just all caked out. So instead we made birthday brownies. :)

If you should try this at YOUR house, please be sure to cool the brownies before you put the was candles into them . . .

October started off beautiful, but then let us know (full force) that she is a FALL month. We picked the remainder of our garden October first and it froze every single night for the next two weeks! :) We got LOTS of pumpkins this year (which was nice after last years sad attempts). I had no idea what to expect from a pumpkin plant . . . just an fyi for future pumpkin growers, pumpkin plants get HUGE!! It took over at least 1/3 of our fairly large garden with its beautiful orange fruit and bright green leaves (not to mention part of our neighbor's backyard), but if nothing else, it made my garden look really full and abundant! :)

Not only did our garden produce --- produce this year, it also turned up baby kitties! :) Which my children have been loving and loving and loving into docility.

They are absolutely adorable and it's been fun to have them around, but truth to tell, I'm really glad that they're not mine. - They're strays. - I'm glad that they've started eating solid food this week and are now ready to find someone else to love them.

Cats Beware!

After church on Sunday, while I was making dinner, Hazel was playing in the front yard with the little girl who lives next door. Their favorite thing to do is torture Toby, our kitten.

That night he didn't come when we called for him...or the next night...we figured with as cold as it's been, maybe some neighborhood kid took pity on him and "adopted" him. (Saturday we got the first snow of the season!) However, we did joke about Kamryn (the little girl next door) locking him in her house somewhere! ha ha! She likes to put Toby in the toybox when she comes over.

Well, last night and the night before I haven't been able to sleep well and keep waking up at 5 AM with contractions that then go away, but leave me feeling really anxious. This morning Hazel came up to our room as I was laying there at 5:30 saying that her stomach was hurting and she was hungry. Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to look for breakfast and found that we're out of eggs, milk, and bread --- Breakfast Foods --- or at least needed to make most breakfast foods. So we quickly got ready and decided to go to the store at 5:45. I went out to turn on the car so that it would be warm for her and heard a cat crying. I went back in, thinking that it was just Gertie (our other cat) in the garage and it wasn't, but I couldn't hear the other cat very well when I went back on the back patio. So I went back to the front and followed the crying to the side of our house were we have a bunch of yard stuff and random things from the house that need to be taken to the dump. Thump, thump, thump from one of the old cupboards from the garage.

Once I finally cleared away the buckets of rocks that had been placed in front of the doors, poor Toby came racing out! He had been in there for 2 days!!! Our poor little kitty went through 2 cans of tuna fish (I'm out of cat food, too) before we went to the store.

Needless to say, I'm not sure how much longer he would have lasted, especially with as cold as it's been the past few days. I think I need to have another talk with Kamryn about the difference between living animals and toys.

I'm SO mad!!!

So...I love cats, I love dogs. I have always been an animal lover and I'm sure I will be until the day that I die. I don't have a dog, because there's no way that I'm cleaning up poop in my backyard! Cats are pretty low maintainance, they take care of themselves...they're very independent creatures. If you look at my other posts, you'll see that picture of Lilie holding our new kitten, Toby, they are inseparable, both the girls love him and I could not imagine a more lovable "toy" for the girls. They think he is spectacular...and truth to tell, he's an amazingly patient cat. I've never seen an animal put up with so much. Lilie loves to tote him around with her. She slings him over her shoulder or carries him squeezed up tight to her chest. When she puts him down, she'll come to me and say, "I put Toby down so he can breathe."

He is truly a great cat...but so help me, if that damn cat ever poops on my floor again, I'll squeeze his little head off!