Man down

On Tuesday, June 25^th, Jenna turned 4. Sadly, it was also the day that our little kitten Sonic disappeared. Since Mitch and Sonic were standoffish at best, I decided that I should take over this week and write a eulogy of sorts, a meowmorial if you will.

It should be noted that I am a cat person. If I were to ever become an animal, it would undoubtedly be some type of cat. Sonic was the fifth cat that I have had over my lifetime and I have very much enjoyed every one of them. Cats have a lot of qualities that dog people tend to find bothersome and annoying. They are more reserved in their affection, they are independent and sometimes aloof, they don’t seem to need praise and attention as often or as much as other pets. I can understand why some people don’t like cats, but I find all of those things to be endearing qualities, probably because they mirror my own personality in many ways. I loved having a pet that could go out and do its own thing and be independent. And I suppose my foot rubbing thing is sort of cat-like.

But for all their aloofness cats still love their owners and love being around them, and Sonic loved people more than any other cat I’ve had. He was a purebred Siamese, whereas I’ve only ever had shabby tabbies in the past. I suppose that led him to think of himself as more of a person than a cat. Whenever he was inside he would follow the people around wherever they went. That meant many mornings dutifully watching at Alixa’s feet while she did her hair and makeup. It meant many evenings climbing the ladder and jumping through the windows on the kids’ bed-fort while Jarom tried to read Jenna and Bo stories. That meant the occasional nap next to or even on top of Emmy in her bassinet. I spent a lot of evenings hanging out with him on the couch watching TV after everyone else was asleep. It’s been a sad week around here. Alixa commented today that she didn’t realize just how much she loved Sonic until he was gone. Bo keeps looking out the windows while he eats and says “Sonics missing”. I keep hoping to look out onto the back patio and see him swatting at moths, just like he was doing the last time I saw him.

 I’ll miss having someone pounce on my toes as they wiggle under a blanket. I will miss having my legs attacked while I wait in front of the house for Nate to pick me up. I’ll miss seeing him shoot up a tree or chase the kids around the backyard or take a nap on his blanket in some ridiculously uncomfortable position. I’m sure we’ll get another cat someday, but I don’t know when that will be. Maybe we don’t live in a good spot to have an outdoor cat. There are coyotes and bobcats, and lots of people that seem to judge you pretty heavily for letting such a pretty cat outside. I don’t know which one of those nabbed Sonic, but I’m not sure I want to try again with another cat right now. And I don’t think that cats should be indoor only. It just seems like it deprives them of a lot of the things that they love to do. So for now we’ll probably just be sad and miss Sonic and maybe we’ll get another cat in the future. But we are sure glad that we got to have him for the six months that he was here. He brought a lot of joy into this home.

Feel the burn

Recently it occurred to me that we have now been living in Texas longer than we lived in Virginia. And even with the summer heat starting to roll in we are pretty happy with the choice to move. A few weeks ago we had Emily’s blessing and had a little get together at the house afterwards. It is nice to have so many great friends that we’ve made here in such a short time. The blessing went well and people said they were impressed with what Jarom said, especially because he usually doesn’t say anything. Alixa was a little worried that Jarom didn’t mention anything about a spouse. I’ll let you make your own interpretations of that omission.

Around the house we are all staying pretty active. Alixa has found a weekly volleyball game to play in and is enjoying it immensely. She is also working very hard to shed her baby weight by regularly attending the gym since the day that Emmy was old enough to go into the day care. She even recruited a few friends to switch from 24-hour Fitness to the Frisco Athletic Center so she could have some friends to work out with. The husbands of those friends also switched, so now Jarom has some lifting buddies and has starting an actual weightlifting routine for the first time in years. Jarom is also playing lacrosse in an adult summer league and very much enjoying it. His first game he played midfield exclusively, and between the exhausting 80-yard runs back and forth and the general rust from the 6-year layoff he wasn’t anything to write home about. In week two he played mostly attack, and scored 3 goals. His mind is definitely still faster than his body, but he is having a great time playing with the young guys and is holding his own despite being one of the oldest ones out there. Lacrosse is definitely not an old man’s game.

Jenna and Bo get most of their exercise these days in the pool. Pretty much every day is a pool day and they are both little fish. As soon as Bo gets his floaties on he will fearlessly leap into the water and paddle himself wherever he needs to go. You definitely still need to keep an eye on him, but it is nice that Lix doesn’t have to worry about him as much as she used to. And we are glad that the painful experience that he had with Dani pretending to catch him as he leapt off the Chipotle bench hasn’t turned him into a scaredy-cat. Jenna continues to improve her swimming technique, and can now put her face in and swim moderate distances. She is enrolled in some swim lessons at the FAC and is doing great. Her next hurdles are keeping her legs straight when she kicks and side breathing while swimming.

Sonic gets his exercise by following other people around the neighborhood. A lot of people take walks, and Sonic is very friendly and will follow them and go right up to them. They see a purebred Siamese cat and assume that he shouldn’t be outside because he is far too pretty. So they call the number on his tag, and Jarom will go over and get him. Sometimes they call from the front yard where they found him hanging out, and Jarom can just tell them to put him down. But a few times he has turned up 3 or 4 blocks away. I guess not too many people have outdoor cats here. A lot of people have expressed concern about coyotes, which are definitely around, but I think we are far enough away from the fields where they hang out. Alixa says we should take the tag off, but I think there is a chance one of these good Samaritans would just keep him if he didn’t have ID.

Summer comes with other forms of entertainment too. The family took their annual trip to see a Roughriders game on a blanket past the outfield wall and enjoyed it immensely. The kids are becoming very good at playing with each other and imagining things. Their favorite right now is to play ninja turtles. Jenna is always Donatello and fights with a stick while Bo is Raphael, who fights with forks. They do karate on the bed and run around the house fighting each other and general crime.

Jenna is turning 4 this week and we celebrated with a pool party a few days early. All her friends came and splashed around for a few hours, enjoyed some cupcakes, and opened presents. Jenna got lots of awesome toys from the nice people that love her, and when it was over everyone went home and there wasn’t a messy house to clean up, so everyone wins. Later that day mom and dad hooked Mimi in to babysit and were able to have a fun evening out on the lake boating with the Ogdens and Nates. Jarom got to continue to work on his wakeboarding (he can get out of the water and ride, but can’t do any tricks yet) and Alixa got to have an arm workout and a tanning session. She was actually very close to getting out of the water and will hopefully be able to do it the next time we go. Most importantly, she didn’t have to ride the tube, which is her greatest fear. It was a very pleasant evening and it was great to be able to just ride around on the water. Perhaps someday we’ll get a boat, or we can just keep finding friends who have one and mooch off of them.

Emily is getting her exercise in the form of growing, which she is doing like crazy. She is no longer the tiny little baby she used to be. She is starting to be a bit of a chunker. At her last doctor visit the possibility that we were overfeeding her came up. We’re not there yet, but that is how much she is growing. She is mostly a very sweet baby and is sleeping very well. She doesn’t fit comfortably into her 3-month clothes anymore, so Jarom is going to have to climb up to the attic and bring down the next batch. Alixa wants to change her name to Brookie, a decision that got voted down by everyone else in the house. Jarom thinks Emmy is great, Jenna chose Brightly, and Bo steadfastly refuses to call her anything other than Emilybrooke. Alixa keeps trying to work it in, but I’m not sure it is going to happen. But whatever you call her, she is getting to be pretty darn cute.

 

Uno Mas? No.

Things have been crazy around here. It is safe to say that the transition from 2 to 3 kids has not been a smooth one. Jenna has been really great. She is helpful and pleasant most of the time, and our biggest complaint about her is probably that she has a tendency to repeat a single line from a song over and over at max volume until your brain starts to sizzle. But she continues to impress us with her whip-smartness and we love her big smile and she is a great big sister, so we’ll keep her even though she is constantly yelling about the oncoming buggie attack.

 Last day of preschool

Bo, on the other hand, has turned into a terrible monster. He is moody and grumpy and yells and cries a lot and pitches fits and is generally unmanageable. On the flip side, he is adorable. As Alixa put it tonight, he explodes the cute-meter. And he is even cuter now that he is talking so much. You can have entire adorable conversations with the little guy. And he says hilarious things. Today Jarom made some comment to Bo about how Emmy couldn’t talk and Bo replied that she could. When Jarom questioned him further, he explained that Emmy speaks Spanish, in a tone that was so matter of fact that Jarom began to wonder if he was telling the truth. But then 4 seconds later he will start crying because he wants crackers or he doesn’t want crackers or Jenna is having a cracker or whatever. The two’s really are terrible for this kid. We still love him, but we are really hoping that this phase doesn’t last too long.

 Watching a show with Tusk

 Helping? with the laundry

Emily is also a little bit of a mixed bag. She sleeps great at night, and for that we (and by we I mean Lix) are grateful. But she doesn’t sleep during the day. She will take 20-minute cat naps, but it is hard to get anything done when you have to stop to go settle a crying baby all the time. She is very healthy and also (we believe) pretty cute, and we know that she is not quite 2 months old and still hasn’t really settled into a solid sleep rotation, so we won’t get too concerned until we have another month under our belts. And it wouldn’t be nearly as bad if Bo wasn’t going through his issues at the same time. But as it is poor Lix has a hard time getting stuff done during the day, and Jarom has a hard time getting stuff done when he is home, and sometimes we all wonder what we were thinking. Jarom’s doing research into vasectomies because he is worried that adding another munchkin to the mix might push him over the ledge. Lix is sure that she can convince him to have one more, but if I were a betting snake, I wouldn’t.

Lix and the kids have been spending a lot of time at the pools. Jarom goes with them when he can on Saturdays or late afternoons. Jenna is a great swimmer and very confident around the water. She is signed up for some swim lessons this month to see if we can get her to be fully autonomous and floatie free. Bo is following in her wake and loves jumping into the pool, so hopefully you are nearby to catch him. If he has floaties on he can get anywhere he wants, albeit at a less than speedy pace. But it’s nice because Lix doesn’t have to keep a panicked eye on him at all times. She can keep a more relaxed eye on him. We’ve also been over to visit Mars and PJ at their apartment to swim in their pool, which is a pretty fun one for the kids, complete with a hot tub and two levels of pool that are great for leaping.

 Just a small sampling of the many ways to take a catnap

This month Lix has started back up on the golf, playing 3 times. She has shown a little rust, but played very well. Her second time out she was only a single stroke behind Jarom after 9 holes, and almost broke 100. It is good that she is playing so well because the Winns have an upcoming match against another couple and Jarom would really like to win. Sadly her season is about to come to an end because she refuses to play golf in temperatures that are near triple digits, and Texas is not far off from that. Jarom’s athletic endeavors include beginning play in a Men’s lacrosse summer league this week. It has been over 7 years since the last time he played in an actual game, so it will be interesting to see how this goes. He doesn’t know anyone else in the league, so he really has no idea what the level of play will be. But he is excited to get back into it.

Happy Mother's Day

Emily has her baby blessing tomorrow, which means that she will likely be very barfy in the morning and cry while Jarom is trying to talk. Bo will probably be screaming in the audience while Jenna sings “swabbing the deck” over and over and Alixa tries not to kill any of her kids in a public place. And to top it all off people won’t stop trying to return Sonic. Just tonight Jarom had to walk down the street a few blocks to retrieve him from some nice folks who picked him up in front of the house on their evening walk. That’s just the way things are going around here these days.