Disasters

So, I know better, and yet these kids still manage to catch me off guard. It’s like it’s their mission in life, to find your moments of weakness and then take advantage in a way you’d never expect. The other day I was chatting with my father, standing by the front door. I’d just come back from my weekly break, and he was headed home, but first we had some catching up to do. The girls were a little crazy, running around and flinging diapers at each other (clean diapers, fresh from the package), making a mess and shrieking up a storm. I asked them to pick up the diapers, and they started to, carrying armloads of them down to the family room to put them away. Maybe ten minutes went by as my dad and I chatted, possibly fifteen, before he left and I headed into the kitchen to make them lunch.

Peanut came up to me, hands held out to me and said, “Look Mommy. It’s dirty.” She’s never been one to like dirty hands, and will cause a fuss if she finds a speck of lint on her palm, so I escorted her toward the kitchen to wash her hands, but then I noticed what was on her hands. Sand, which made no sense, as we keep no sand in the house. I asked her what it was and she said, “We’re making footprints,” which also made no sense, so I followed the sound of String Bean’s cheerful chatter and found a complete disaster. Kitty litter, fresh from the litter box (as in, not the clean kind), was everywhere. It covered the bathroom floor, the laundry room floor, it filled the potty chair, it was in the sink, it was tracked onto the carpet in the family room, it was on the coffee table. There were sand buckets filled with it and toys strewed around on top of it. I was too horrified to react, but after I yanked the kids out of the mess and got to work sterilizing them from top to bottom, shaking my head and muttering to myself to avoid yelling at them, they got the idea that they were in trouble. Which is strange, since they’ve been told countless times never to touch the cat box, and until now, have had a perfect record. How could they suddenly forget that it was forbidden? Except, of course, if they knew it was, and that was the whole allure.

Regardless, I did eventually get around to yelling at them, when String Bean put on an attitude, smirking at me, making jokes with Peanut, and refusing to act contrite in any way. I put them both in time out with lunch while I vacuumed up the bulk of the mess, then swept, then mopped, and I still don’t feel like it’s clean enough. We’ve had countless conversations since then about germs and dust and general filth, to not just make it clear that the litter box is off limits, but to explain why. But I feel pretty sure the explanation isn’t necessary, because they’d never do anything as predictable as making the same type of disaster twice.

Dirty Cat

At the height of our menagerie, we had three cats and one dog. Even in a 2000+ square foot house, it was crowded. Once we threw two kids into the mix, well, let’s just say that sad as I was to lose one of the cats to cancer, it was nice to be down to only two litter boxes to police. Two months ago we had to put down another beloved cat. That loss was harder, since our kids were older and the 4-year-old was very bonded with her. It turned out to be a nice lesson in life and death for her, and a nice lesson in children’s pragmatism for me. When I finally broke her the tearful news that our sweet Alley was too sick and had died, she pondered this briefly, then said, “But we still have the dirty cat?” (her affectionate nickname for our cat Fish). “Yes,” I assured her. She nodded, “Okay. Can I have a snack?”

So we’re now down to one cat and one dog. The dog is a vizsla, which, if any of you are familiar with the breed, means that at five years old he only sometimes seems like he’s going to burst out of his skin from the sheer excitement of living. The remaining cat is now fifteen and remarkably spry and healthy. He has one flaw that makes him hard to live with, and that earned him that very sweet nickname “dirty cat.” He poops. Everywhere. This began in rebellion a few weeks after our first child was born. He eventually broke the habit, and went back to using the litter box when she was a few months old. Then a year later we had a second child, and he’s never gone back.

We’ve tried a variety of anti-anxiety meds that made him jittery, snoozy, and spacey, but none of them did a thing to curb the poop-everywhere habit. I looked into cat diapers, but decided that having two kids plus one cat in diapers would be more bottom-wiping than I could handle. At some point I resorted to covering the living room floor with newspapers, which he seemed to enjoy, then reduced the amount of newspaper gradually. Now the only newspaper is next to the litter box. Usually, he poops on the paper, folds it carefully over on itself, pees in the litter box, and crawls back inside the couch to snooze his day away. Usually.

I'm in no rush to get rid of the dirty cat, trying as he is. We've been together for 15 years now, which makes this the longest non-family relationship I've had. But on that sad day when he leaves this world, I plan to pack up the litter boxes for a while, and enjoy living in a one-pet household.