After Baby Katherine and Cousin Alex Left

After Grandma Kathy, Auntie Dot, Cousin Alex and Baby Katherine rolled out of the driveway Monday morning, a sad little Mr. Trouble on Feet came inside with me.  He was crying.  I set him down and walked over and unleashed the cat, who has to be tied up to the futon to prevent him from escaping because sadly there are some people in our neighborhood, not our direct neighbors, but several houses away, who would like to kill the cat because he sneaks into their yard to steal chipmunks.  This means that I live with quite a bit of daily stress trying to prevent the cat from escaping while four kids and scores of piano students come and go all the time.

I walked into the kitchen, and soon Mr. Trouble on Feet ran up to me emphatically signing “cat” over and over and then “grass.”  It took me a few minutes to catch on, but then I looked up and saw that stupidly, I’d left the door WIDE open and that the cat probably was indeed in the grass somewhere.  I put on a pair of shoes and went on a search and found nothing.  I was about to give up when I looked over and saw the cat in the corner of the yard heading to my very kind neighbor’s garage.  I followed him, and the cat was grumpy.  Very grumpy.  He didn’t run away, but he was doing a fair amount of growling and I knew he was going to bite me, but I knew I had to get him back inside regardless.  I reached down and the cat SPRANG up like something out of a cartoon, straight in the air, 3 or 4 feet up, and twisted midair, but I caught him before he landed back on the ground.  The cat did not like that, and although he doesn’t have front claws, he dug in with his back claws and bit me before I managed to get ahold of him by the scruff of his neck and drag him back inside.

My stomach now looks like it has been attacked by a vampire.  Just in time for Halloween.

After the cat was banished to the basement for a bit, Mr. Trouble on Feet spent the rest of the morning calling up Baby “Kuh Kuh Kuh Kuh Kuh”  on his cell phone.  He called Cousin Alex and Auntie Dot and Grandma and all the big kids at school too, but he called Baby Kuh seventeen times as often to say hi.  He does indeed love his cousins.