Never-ending yard projects

I really wanted to work on this neglected corner.  The cannas were there when we moved in, but have never been tended to.  

I added a border, planted a few more canna bulbs, moved my potted bougainvillea, added a small water dish for the birds, and our broken St. Francis statue---and it looks so much better!  Next year I will add a few elephant ears in the back corner and some day lilies out front.  We have so many new birds drinking from the water dish and from the tiny bowl on the St. Francis statue.

I had dug out this bed in the front yard a few months ago when we were getting torrential rain showers, but then never finished it.  It was covered with weeds so I decided to take action.  I bordered it and planted lots of different shades of lantana, and have seen several butterflies landing on the blooms already.

This started out as Stanley's memorial garden, but we've decided to make it our pet memorial garden.  I had already planted the clematis vine and the Turk's cap last year, and then added caladium bulbs at the end of May.  The amazing thing about this garden is the Turk's cap.  I planted six plants last fall, and thought only two were going to come back.  See the tiny green clump in the sun (to the left of the caladium)?  That's a new Turk's cap that broke through the ground the day after Henry died.  It gives me goose bumps (the good kind) every time I look at it.

And finally, construction has started on Phase II of our path project.  I marked out the border the first day, and have been digging out grass in small sections every other day (it's just too hot when Gabriel is napping to do more, or to get out there every day).  I plan to be done with this part at the end of next week, then we'll put down the plastic and start laying the border.  

I've become a little obsessed about the yard.  The better it looks the more I want to get out there and work every day.  It's amazing to me how little money we've spent and how much better it looks.  I would love to do this for a living some day, and maybe with all of this practice I won't be considered an amateur anymore.

Unforgettable moments

There are so many moments you want to capture as your child matures.  It's easy to get the really big moments on film, either pictures or video, like birthdays or the first steps.  The hardest part is to try to get everyday moments saved somehow.  In just the last week, Gabriel has done so many new things and I know I'm not going to remember all of them.  I thought I would just mention a few so when I go back and read this I can smile.

He has just learned to differentiate between circles, squares and triangles.  He has a set of blocks with the lid cutout with all three shapes, and I've always helped him put them away before.  All of a sudden, he can do it without any help.  

After helping him do the hand parts to Itsy Bitsy Spider for about 5 or 6 months, he did it on his own for the first time after dinner last Friday night.  He likes to do it just like I taught him, three times with each time faster and faster.  We did manage to get this on video.

He has started saying hi and waving to people all over the place.  Then when we walk away, he waves and says bye-bye.  In a really cute high pitched voice, like a teletubbie says bye-bye.

After a couple of weeks of chanting "mama" all the time, all over the house, he has finally decided to start recognizing his "dada" too.  Just in time for Father's Day!   But it's funny how different he says the two words.  Mama is always said really fast, and usually loud.  Dada comes out much more slowly and deliberately, and quieter.  It might just be because it's a little harder for him to say.  But the funny thing is that it actually mirrors me and Jav's personalities.  I'm frenetic and loud, Jav is calmer and quieter.  Kind of funny.

Last Saturday afternoon, we were getting ready for Mass.  Jav was talking to me as I was finishing my makeup, and we weren't paying that much attention to Gabriel.  All of a sudden we realized he was going back a forth between us, hugging our legs and giving us big sloppy kisses on our knees, over and over again.  It was just the sweetest moment, one of those where you thank God that your child turned out to be so warm and loving.

So that's my little Gabriel diary.  Thanks to all three people who read this for indulging me.  (Even though I know Mamaw won't be too bored by it).

The eye of the tiger

It's been a week since I lost Henry, and I've had some time to reflect on what made him the most awesome cat on the planet.  

He had what some would consider a disability, especially since he lost his sight when he was around one year old.  But he never, ever let it slow him down.  He had an amazing ability to map out spaces in his head, so much so that he could hide from me in the house or outside.  I can't count the times I thought he had gotten out of the house or yard, only to find that he had figured out another foolproof place to hide.  How he knew that he was camouflaged will always remain a mystery to me.

Supposedly, blind animals don't like to climb or get into high places.  Henry didn't know this fact, and loved to get up into the top of our scratch posts, and to climb on top of things outside.  As long as he could feel his way up, he would try.  Sometimes he'd try even when he couldn't scale it.  I'm thinking about the propane tank at the old house.  Being round, he couldn't scale it.  He eventually let curiosity get the best of him and jumped on top of it.  And the courage it took to leap back down from these places when he had no idea what was below is something that will continue to inspire courage in me for the rest of my life.

When you watched him prowling around in the yard, it was like watching a tiger (although somewhat smaller).  Maybe it was because he was a short-haired cat, but you could see every muscle when he walked.  His hunting ability was uncanny, since he only had smell and sound to guide him.  (Cats hunt with their eyes above all else).  I loved watching him run at top speed around the yard to successfully nab a locust.  He even liked to hone his skills at night.  If I left out small stuffed toys, he would hunt and find them, then start yowling.  We will never know if the yowling was to let us or the other cats know about his conquest.  His yowling sounded just like a crying baby.  Jav and I had only been dating about two months when he heard Henry yowl for the first time.  He looked absolutely shocked that I was hiding a baby somewhere in the house.   Henry would also take the toys and drop them where we could see.  After Gabriel was born he started leaving all his toy conquests in his room, which I thought was so cool.  

Henry had all that bravery and wildness, but he loved to cuddle up with you, sometimes for hours.  He was truly the best things about cats all rolled up into one.  He had the eye of the tiger, and the soul of a cuddly kitten.  

I had a friend at work who claimed to love animals.  But she only owned one dog when she was in high school that got heart worms and died.  She said the pain was just too much to put herself through again.  I never understood this.  The pain is awful when you lose a pet, but there are always so many more needing homes that will provide them love.  And think of all the things I would have never learned about dealing with blindness, or courage, or heart if I had not brought Henry into my life.  

 

       

The cure for all that ails you

I'm always saying that laughter is the best medicine.  It was proven to me again last night.  We went to see Eddie Izzard at the Majestic last night.  It was a little over two hours of almost non-stop belly laughing.  And all the stress from this past week started to melt away.  I could actually feel it leaving my body as the show went on.  And I slept like a baby (although only for about 5 hours or so), for the first time in a long time.  But I'm really not here to talk about me.

This man has perhaps the most brilliant mind in history (and he's incredibly sexy too).  His intelligence never ceases to amaze me.  Of course, his audience has to be up there too to follow him, and even then it just makes your brain tired every now and then.  The show was mainly about religion, and sort of poking fun of different beliefs in a tasteful and respectful way.  He did this by throwing in tons of history, starting all the way back with the beginning of the planet.  I'm going to try to describe my favorite parts of the show, edited of course.  Otherwise I'd do my longest blog post in history.

There's really no evidence that dinosaurs went to church.  (this was a physical routine of what it would be like if they did, with hand shaking and squeezing into pews and hymn singing.)

How he thinks biblical figures like Noah did actually exist, but he probably only took his own livestock with him on the boat.  (this was a physical routine of Noah's poor wife trying to figure out where to put everything from giant squids to all the different types of spiders, and almost having a nervous breakdown).

This led to a tangent discussion (something Eddie is famous for) on how giraffes can't make any noise but coughing, so have to resort to charades to warn others of a tiger.  And about the fact that the only place giraffes have to hide is behind other giraffes, so if you see one standing on the African Sahara, there are probably 100 more crouching behind him.  

The wonder over how the Romans, with all their penchant for military prowess, were held back by the complexity of the Latin language.  Especially in tense situations when people started invading, and the messengers were struggling to find the right verb tense.

I really could go on, and on, and on with a never ending list of wonderful and funny parts to the show.  It's impossible to write how funny the man is.  His facials expressions and physicality are what make the show, so he is a dish best enjoyed live, or at least on a DVD.  (And did I mention I think he's dishy?)  He'll all of a sudden be inspired by a new idea and start thinking out loud about working on it for future shows.  Comic genius working right in front of your eyes.  The evening was a dream come true for me, one that I really needed after this long, hard week.  And one I will be remembering and laughing about for probably the rest of my life.  

Unanswerable questions

I'm trying to quiet my head from all the "why"s floating around inside.  

Why did Henry get so sick, so fast, when he's always been such a healthy cat?

Why were there so many things that happened over the past few months that gave me good reasons for Henry's changes in behavior?  I moved one of the cat scratch posts from his favorite room, the front office, back to our bedroom.  He seemed a little mad about it, and may have been at first.  But then the reason he didn't climb to the top anymore was apparently because it was too hard physically.  Also, I changed the cats' food a month ago, which is why I thought he was losing a little weight.  I thought he was mad because I cut out the canned food altogether.  

Why did I let myself get so busy that I didn't see how sick he was?  Although Jav and I have figured out that he really only started to get really thin and slow down over the last three weeks, why didn't I take him in then?  

Why didn't we read up on kidney removal to find that the kidney is one of the most delicate organs to remove due to all the attached blood vessels.  Would this have made us decide to use a specialist instead of Dr. Norris?  Jav and I both still think we would have wanted him to do the surgery.  We know he would never have offered to do it if he felt he wasn't qualified, and that he feels just as awful about what happened as we do, and we wouldn't have gotten that empathy from a specialist.

So many questions, and it really doesn't matter what the answers are.  Maybe that's just the way I am trying to deal with my loss.  One of the only things I feel good about today is the fact that I decided to start letting Henry go back outside last year.  He was allowed out at the old house, but when we moved here we decided to make him stay inside because he seemed to get obsessive about going out.  After a year of living here, I just couldn't take his sulking anymore and started letting him out again.  He truly was happiest in life when he was outside, and got to spend alot of time in the backyard.  My last happy memory of him will be looking out my kitchen window and seeing him laying under our biggest oak tree Monday night, sniffing all the fun scents in the air and listening to the birds as they ate their evening meal.  I really didn't want to bring him in that night, he looked so content.

I was just reading one of my Yoga Journal articles about dealing with grief, and I saw this passage that is helping me to feel a little better for the moment:  "Every life has an arc - however prolonged or truncated - and every soul has a path."  Henry seemed pretty happy until just recently, and his path was a rich and full one.  And he made my path SO much better for having him in my life.  That's what I'll have to think about to get me through this sadness.

Sadness

Henry didn't make it. When my phone started ringing at 10:30 I knew it was bad news. Dr. Norris had checked on him at 8: 30 and he seemed to be doing pretty good. Then he went back at 10 and he had passed away. I had really started to get my hopes up, and feel like I'm living in a horrible nightmare. We've lost three bright lights in this house in less than a year, but Henry's went out way too soon. The pain is really too much for me right now. He was the bravest soul I knew.

Surgery today

Henry update:  (8pm)  He made it out of the surgery, but is still in very critical condition.  Dr. Norris removed his left kidney, which was attached to a huge tissue mass.  He sent it off to be biopsied and won't have the results back for several days.  Dr. Norris said he didn't see signs of tumors or irregularities on any of the nearby organs, although his spleen looked a little discolored.  Alot of Henry's blood vessels had attached themselves to the mass, so Dr. Norris had to cut them and close them back up again (sorry I don't remember the medical terms).  The danger is that having such a large mass removed from his insides (and one that had sort of become a part of him) might send him into shock.  So far his heartbeat is strong, and he was starting to come out of the anesthesia at 6.  Dr. Norris was going to check on him several times during the night, but was hopeful that at this point Henry would make it until morning.  Then we have to wait to see if he starts to get stronger tomorrow.  At least the first goal, making it out of the surgery, has been made.  Now we wait and keep praying.

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Henry goes in to have his kidney removed today.  He has still been eating some the last few days, although about half or less what he usually eats.  He hasn't been moving around much, just getting up to come and eat and go outside.  Once outside, he doesn't prowl the yard like normal, but just picks a nice spot somewhere in the yard and camps out.  Ever since he was little, I've carried him over one shoulder, and he feels so light and bony compared to the big, husky cat I'm used to holding.  We have just been blindsided by how fast this has come up.  We think it's only been about a month that we noticed he had lost weight, and I keep telling myself that if I had any inkling it was something this serious, of course I would have taken him sooner.  But I'm still having a pretty big battle with guilt right now.

This will be a massive surgery, and I hope he has the strength to pull through.  And of course, I hope Dr. Norris doesn't get in there and find that things are much worse than we thought.  I keep thinking about the early months of Henry's life, when he was found starving and dehydrated by the Eastern Hills High School field house with his sister.  She didn't make it, but Henry proved to be a fighter.  I know he still has that fight in him, but I hope it's enough to fight through all of this.  I'm praying for a miracle.