This is Lissy.

It was a dark and stormy day on Saturday, the kind of day where the rain comes down sideways and the outdoors aren’t fit for man or beast. I was in my scraproom with the window cracked ever so slightly for a bit of the yummy rainy air when I heard a very sad meow. Under my window was a beautiful cat trying unsuccessfully to get out of the storm. I quickly went outside and invited her in. The minute Jonas saw her he asked what her name was. I said I didn’t know, and he confidently announced that her name was Lissy, a name I’ve never heard Jonas say before. We played and snuggled and she left of her own accord a few hours later when the clouds had lifted a bit. The kids were devastated.

Their unhappiness didn’t last long. She was back under my scraproom window an hour later. This time, I started really entertaining the idea of keeping her. She had a lot going for her. She was very pretty, and had the sweetest temperament I’d ever seen in a cat. She was tolerant of the over exuberance of a rambunctious two and four year old, and was extremely lovey. She was also pitifully thin, and she had many mats in her fur. Clearly, she had been on her own for quite awhile.

I sent the kids to go watch Elmo in their room to give the cat a reprieve from all the love. She hopped up on the couch with me, snuggled into my lap, and very suddenly I knew that she fit. This cat belonged here. The fact that I have been totally anti-pet, and that I would have some explaining to do with Chris, and that the cat expense could potentially cut into my scrap budget, and that I would have to clean a litter box just stopped mattering. This was my cat.

We ran to the BX, bought all the kitty essentials and came home. I put the kids to bed, showed Lissy her box (which she is using no problems), and started grooming her matted coat. I was as gentle as I could be, brushing out what I could and cutting out the really bad tangles, and she was very patient with me. After awhile, she fell asleep during the process, and I felt such a feeling of relief and gratitude from her.

She is a stunning cat, a love, and I can only assume that someone bought her and then dumped her when they moved or found the upkeep to difficult.

That night she curled up at the bottom of my bed, and as soon as she saw Maggie wake up and ran to her and started rubbing cheeks. Then she saw me sit up and did the same. In the past few days I have learned that she prefers affection to food, and that she would be held for several hours a day if she had her druthers. Last night I put her in Maggie’s old baby sling so I could hold her and do some chores at the same time. She loved it.

Every night, after the kids are in bed we snuggle up on the couch for a few hours and watch a movie or read a book while we cuddle. Every night I am overcome with a feeling of contentment as I stroke her long, soft fur and feel the vibrations of her purr. The concerns of the day melt away and I can’t think of anything I could do that would be healthier than to take this time of repose and quiet affection. Apparently, Someone knows what I need, and there are no accidents.

Seriously. Love is not too strong of a word here. I have had a raging sore throat for 6 days now. I’ve been popping so many painkillers I’ve lost track of what dose I’m supposed to be on. I was waking up out of a dead sleep to wince, shuffle to the fridge where I’d down a handful of Motrin, and crawl back into bed and lay there for a half an hour until the drugs kicked in and I could sleep again. This sore throat meant business.

Now, after a lovely throat culture (gag), it has been determined that I do indeed have a nasty case of strep throat- for the first time in my life. Two rounds of antibiotics later- I can swallow without contemplating getting an epidural to numb the top half of me. Modern medicine so totally rocks.

My doctor was very compassionate and even gave me tylenol with codiene in it. Being a total featherweight on narcotics, I’ve opted not to use them unless I really have to, seeing as how I’d probably become incoherant and the children would be totally free to steal entire boxes of ice cream from the freezer before breakfast and yank my bed mattress to the floor to create a soft landing spot for when they catapult themselve off the boxsprings, and give stuffed animals baths in my expensive cookware outside in the sand box. Oh wait. . .they did all that before I was drugged and while I was lucid. I can’t even imagine what they could accomplish with me totally out of the picture. Reason #417 of “Why I’ll Never Die”.

And now, dear readers, I’m going to bed.

Another layout from the Home Scrap Club! If you haven’t checked out this monthly kit club yet, hop on it! I select all of the items in the kit, and they are always the latest and greatest! This is the last week to take advantage of the sign up for 5 months and get your 6th month free deal.

A little scrapping for today! These papers are the brand spanking new My Mind’s Eye line “Tres Jolie”. Super fun to work with! The rest of the stuff on the layout includes: Chatterbox Chipboard, Heidi Swapp Chipboard, Maya Road Chipboard, Quickutz Revolution Scallops & Arrow and miscellaneous Buttons. Very fun to make! I love how the chipboad adds to much dimension! To unify the browns of the different letters, I applied Staz On ink in timber brown.

We have a duck pond on base and, more than anything, the kids want to catch a duck. I got this pic of Maggie in hot pursuit a few days before Chris deployed. I wonder what she’d do if she ever caught one!

This layout was created using Cosmo Cricket Jitterbug papers, Brand Spankin’ new Maya Road chipboard birdies, and the font is Uptown Girl by Quickutz, as are the large flourish and scalloped border dies. Very fun! Loving my Revolution tool and these new dies!!

I don’t get my kid. Jonas has come home from school sick as a dog twice in the past month. Both times he has spiked a high fever and puked his guts out. Both times he has sprawled on the floor, moaning, retching, begging for water and wanting to be in the bathtub. Both times I worried that something was really wrong with him, like appendicitis or demons. And both times, he has passed out asleep and woken up with the birds the next morning, right as rain, bouncing off the walls, with absolutely no trace of illness. I don’t even know what to think.

The past few weeks I have become increasingly concerned with how I was going to handle the upcoming summer holiday. I have become very dependent on Jonas’ preschool to take him off my hands and wear him out. I couldn’t remember what I did to survive last summer. Then yesterday, we had beautiful weather. It was 65 degrees and sunny. The kids got up early and spent most of the day outside playing with chalk, bubbles, the sandbox, and the hose. I had forgotten the magic of the hose, and the hours of freedom and peace it buys me in exchange for a flooded backyard and an extra load of laundry. So totally worth it. Vive le hose!

Chris has been gone for 5 weeks now. The time is not flying. The thing is, I don’t find myself struggling to accomplish the extra tasks, like I had worried about. It turns out I do an awful lot around here and that hasn’t really changed. I do miss him a lot though, more than I had realized I would during the months of preparation when I was worrying about the kids and worrying about Chris and worrying about our major appliances. I get the kids in bed at night and sit there wishing he was around. E-mail and phone calls are a life saver.

Last weekend was so much fun! My inlaws took the kids for the weekend, and for the first time in ten years, I was home alone. I celebrated the first night by sleeping for ten hours straight. Then I went to an all day crop with my friends, where I got a few things accomplished scrap-wise.

The next day I got to teach a Make ‘n Take at The Scrapbook Nook. It was Quickutz day and we had a rep from the company there to demo their new electronic cutting system the Silouette, and I got to demo the Revolution, a fabulous die cut machine that I totally adore! I was beyond stoked to do this demo because the nice people at Quickutz had sent me about $100 worth of very cool dies for my machine to play with. The demo went great! People loved the little mini album they got to make. To totally top off a triumphant day, the Quickutz rep gave me a new font for my die cutter (Up Town girl) totally free, and told me that their products in my hands was simply a good investment for the company. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Here are some of the projects I did for the event. I’ll put more up later.

This last one is the Make ‘n Take I designed and taught.

Tomorrow morning I don’t have to haul my lazy butt out of bed and take Jonas to speech. We had his final IEP meeting today with Miss Carla, his speech teacher, and he officially graduated. The kid talks. In fact, he talks nonstop, and usually at full volume. He isn’t always easy to understand, what with a propensity to make up words and to talk so fast that it all becomes a garbled blur (Iwacerealriiiighnaaaaaw), but it is talking enough. I’m proud of him, and also a little uneasy.

Jonas has been going to speech twice a week for 18 months now. It’s such a part of his routine and of my routine that it will be weird to suddenly be done. Jonas doesn’t understand that he is all done, even though I’ve tried very hard to explain that he is a big boy now who uses his words. He still asks when “Miss Carla School” is and when he is going to see his friends there. I wonder how long it will take to adjust.

With Chris gone, a part of me looks at every adjustment to his schedule as a personal affront, even when it is a positive change. I feel like he’s dealing with enough confusion and uncertainty over Daddy, and doesn’t need anymore stress. I was worried about his new Sunday School teacher, worried about the kids moving out of his preschool class and worried about the constant changing up of the regular volunteers there. Enough with the changes! Maggie and I are the only constants, and frankly, Maggie is growing and learning so fast, I’m not sure she counts. I don’t think Jonas thinks so. He has been regularly petitioning for not one, but two baby brothers. We need more kids, he says. Boy babies. Two of them. He is very specific.

I have been trying to keep our routine solid over the past month, and also trying to do extra little fun things to add a little zest. The other day we went to the bookstore and I told Jonas he could choose a book. I was totally expecting a rhyming, brightly colored kid book featuring some trademarked character, but instead, Jonas stumbled across a stack of anatomy books. He flipped through one book with tons of drawings of bodies and body parts, some with skin, some without. He announced that the skinless man was the bad guy, because he was scary and no skin is pretty freaky looking. I got his logic, but I did try to explain the concept to him. He flipped the no skin man page to a picture of a man with a flaccid penis.
“What’s that!” he asked with a disgusted look.
“That’s a penis. You have one of those.” As the words left my mouth I felt every eye in the children’s section lock onto me.
“No I don’t!”
“Yes, you do. It’s what you pee with.”
“Hmph.” He muttered, disgruntled with my explanation, yet unable to disagree. The other parents tittered nervously and some rushed to remove their children from the presence of this uncouth mother who used the word penis, out loud, in front of their innocent babes ears.

He picked up another anatomy book, this one, where each page includes a model of the body part that is the topic of the page. “What are those?” He asked, pointing to a small plastic replica of kidneys and a bladder.
“That’s the urinary tract. Those are the kidneys and that’s the bladder.” The pee goes through those and gets filtered out and then goes to the bladder and then you go pee.”
“I don’t have a bladder.”
“Yes, you do. Everyone has a bladder.”
“Oh.” He flips a few pages. He pokes the little plastic brain. “This is a bad guy head.”
“Honey, that’s a brain. You think with your brain; it’s inside your head.
“I do NOT have a BRAIN!” He announces, totally repulsed.
“Everybody has a brain, Jonas. Mommy has a brain, Maggie has a brain, you have a brain.”
“Daddy has a brain too?”
“Yes, Daddy too.”
“It’s time to pick a book, Jonas, we need to go.”
“I want this one.” He hold up The Human Body. “I want the bad guy book.”
“It’s the human body, Jonas, not a bad guy. That’s what we look like under our skin. Are you sure you don’t want to pick one of those books?” I gesture toward the rest of the children’s section, full of books about teddy bears and Elmo and cows that type.
“I want this one. I want the bad g-“ He corrects himself. “ The Human Body book.”

Ok. There’s no changing his mind. We start to walk out and head past the bargain book section, where, lo and behold, there is a coffee table book all about anatomy and surgery. He is absolutely gleeful. He plops down on the floor and fingers the skinless face on the cover. He starts flipping pages and stops in awe when he finds a picture of a baby, sans skin.

“Look mom! A baby! A baby with NO SKIN! Wow!” The elderly gentleman browsing near us looks at Jonas incredulously, and then glances at me, clearly anticipating something equally off the wall. I just shrug and think, “Maybe he’ll be a doctor.”

Life with Jonas. It is never predictable.

I had an article I wrote come out today over at Scrap Village. If you’d like to learn how I made the word “kisses” check it out!