February Faux PAWS

Last night Libby was working on her little preschool projects with me at the kitchen table. She has been learning her letters and numbers. Her little workbooks had her painting and coloring and glueing on the different pages. When she finished painting, I wiped up her messes, rinsed her paint brush and set the Crayola watercolor paints out to dry on the table. A few minutes later (while I was trying to make dinner, talk on the phone with Aunt Libby while getting beeped by my call waiting from Karrie, and looking up directions for Nathan on Map Quest), Caleb came cruising in to the kitchen and grabbed the cup of water that Libby had been rinsing her paint brush in. He tipped it just enough, and green water went all over the front of him, the chair, and the kitchen floor. I grabbed him back from the green puddle that he was standing in with his socky-feet. I shooed him out of the kitchen, tidied up the mess that he had just made, and parked him in his highchair to eat his dinner. It was then that I discovered he had found my whoppers chocolate malted milk balls and had goobered chocolate slobber on the living room carpet (and today I discovered one half eaten candy back in the box - Ew!). Meanwhile, Libby had been gleefully stripping the fluffy feathers off her pink feather boa and had covered the couch cushions and throw pillows with pink fluff. I restrained the nearly overwhelming urge to hog tie them in the basement, and hauled both kids upstairs for a bath to wash the noodles out of their hair from dinner. After I put away their laundry, wiped up the flood on the bathroom floor from their splashings in the tub, combed out their hair, and put them in their jammies, I tucked them into bed. Nathan came home from his Monday night church leaugue basketball game around this time. I cleaned up the kids' messes in the living room and the basement, while Nathan washed up the mounds of dishes that were towering in the kitchen sink. After cleaning up the kitchen, Nathan ran upstairs for a much needed shower, while I scooped the litter boxes in the basement and then took out the trash - all three bags of it, including the diaper pail, litter box deposits, and the kitchen trash. When I came back inside from the freezing cold, I found a large smear of bright blue paint on the kitchen floor at the top of the basement stairs. I could not figure out where it came from. I grabbed some paper towels and the windex and started scrubbing the blue paint off the floor. I happened to glance up and noticed that the cat flap through the basement door was also smeared with blue paint - a lot of blue paint. I felt like Gill Grissom on CSI trying to solve the blue paint murder mystery. The more I looked, the more blue paint I found - paint on the floor, paint on the basement stairs, paint through the cat flap, paint on the the landing shelf going upstairs - all places where the cats go or sit. I knew I was looking for a feline suspect. I found Petunia under the dining room table. She was clean. Static was sleeping in his kitty bed by the heater, so he was off the hook, too. Butternut was just coming down from upstairs, and as he passed by, I noticed a tell tale streak of blue paint on top of his right paw. I caught him (he's always skittish and HATES to be picked up) and flipped him over. Sure enough, he was the criminal. His tummy, normally a snowy white, was covered with thick bits of gooey orange, green, blue, and purple paint. Apparently, he had innocently enough tried to sit on the table to eat out of his cat food bowl, and had inadvertantly lain in the open paint tray that I had left out to dry. Since he was such a scaredy cat, giving him a bath was not an option. I thought I could use baby wipes on him, so I caught him again, pinned him down, and started wiping. Bad idea. Anyone who's ever used crayola water paints knows that you add water to spread the colors over a larger area. That's what happened to Butternut's tummy after the pictures that we took. The colors spread all over his tummy - beautiful blue and purple and green. He looked like a work of art, but I didn't think I should leave him that way. Crayola paint is non-toxic, but it's not meant to be eaten in large quantities when the cat cleans himself off eventually. I ended up using scissors to trim the tips off all of the fur on his tummy in order to get of the worst of the chunks and smears of paint. He still has a blue front paw, since he was growling, hissing, and trying to bite me by the time I got done trimming his stomach. The poor cat is still traumatized. He has the worst luck of all the cats. Poor Nutsey.



In other late breaking news, Nathan made a sheet tent for Libby and Caleb this afternoon. They loved it! Both of them enjoyed crawling through the tent, and playing together. This was Caleb's first official tent. Every time I asked him if he liked it and if he was having fun, he would vigorously bob his little round head up and down. Of course, Libby was full of vinegar when I got out the camera, so most of the pictures that I took with her in them were goofy. She keeps crossing her eyes lately when anyone tries to take her picture.

Later, this evening, the kids were watching Stuart Little together with Nathan. Caleb wanted to sit on Nathan's lap, too, but Libby was already parked there, so this was the solution. Caleb loved it and everyone was happy. What a silly little group. Caleb is learning new words all the time, but he prefers to gesture, grunt, and holler instead of using his new words. What a little caveman. If anyone's truly searching for the "missing link", I suggest they spend some time with little boys.