Category Archives: Words Words Words

Farewell, Nixie

I am back from the vet with an empty pet carrier and a Nixie-shaped hole in my heart.

It was time, but that doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier. It also didn’t help that her veins were collapsing so they couldn’t insert the IV properly, and had to inject her in the abdomen, which meant that she went more slowly (although with the sedative and painkiller they’d already given her, she wasn’t feeling anything by that point). At least I got to hold her close in my arms until she stopped breathing. It felt right, like it was a fitting bookend to how often I had held her as a newborn kitten to feed her, to make sure she lived.

Born to a feral cat being fostered by a friend who lived a few blocks away, Nixie was the tiniest one of the litter, very tiny indeed, and we didn’t think she’d make it without help. So I went over once or twice a day to give her extra meals and cuddles. Naturally, when she was old enough, she came home with me. She never really got very big, remaining the size of an adolescent kitten. She was perfect the way she was.

She used to sleep behind a row of books on the bottom shelf of a bookcase. If she’d been rolling on the floor and had motes of dust in her fur, when she walked through a sunbeam she looked like she was the velvety blackness of space with tiny sparkling galaxies scattered through. She liked to sleep in tiny hidey-holes, particularly shelves. In her later years, she slept next to my pillow at night, though this past year she’s slept on a blanket upstairs in the attic office. Her fur was the silkiest I’ve ever felt on a cat. I loved her purr, and how she would delicately reach out with a paw and just the tiniest bit of unsheathed claw to pat my hand or my cheek, to coax me into stroking her.

We had just over ten wonderful years together.

She was light enough to be able to jump up and balance on my cello in its soft case (and don’t think I didn’t find her napping inside the empty case when she thought she could get away with it!):

She would lie on my desk and keep me company while I worked:

Sparky took a really neat photo of her when he was about four:

But this is how I will always remember her, lithe, with big green eyes, sitting in the sun on my bookshelves.

Thank you, sweet little cat, for being my dear companion, for loving us all, and for enriching our lives with your delicate personality. Say hello to Maggie, Gulliver, and Roman for us. Sparky told me last night that Maggie would be waiting for you, to show you the best sunny spots and grass to play in. And I’m not going to argue with the eerily insightful seven-year-old, because honestly, I think he’s right.

Fall Concert Announcement!

Greetings, faithful orchestra groupies! It’s November, which means that yes, the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra’s fall concert for which you have all waited breathlessly is nigh! This concert’s theme is Vive la France!, and focuses on music by French composers or music written in France.

Circle Saturday the 24th of November on your calendars. (Yes, that is this coming Saturday night.) At 19h30 in the Valois United Church in Pointe-Claire (70 Belmont Avenue, between King and Queen), the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will present the following works:

    Mozart: Symphony no. 31 “Paris”
    Debussy: La première Rhapsodie (guest soloist: Eric Abramovitz)
    Halevy: “Si la rigueur” from La Juive (solost: John Manning)
    Fauré: Pelléas et Mélisande suite
    Bizet: L’Arlésienne incidental music

Admission is $10 per person; admission is free for those under 18 years of age. The concerts usually last just about two hours, including the refreshment break. There are driving directions and public transport info on the church website. I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all. And it bears repeating that children of all ages are very welcome indeed.

High Five, Sparky!

Sparky brought home his first official report card this week.

You may remember the second-, third-, and fourth-guessing we were doing when we decided to switch him into this new French immersion school for grade two. Were we going to kill his ease of social interaction? Would all his marks slip and his self-confidence plummet? Would he grow to hate school?

Ah ha ha. Guess who improved every single grade in every single subject? (Except gym, but as long as he’s running around and having fun and listening to instruction, I’m unconcerned about that.) His overall grade in French is a bit lower, but his marks in comprehension of written and oral texts and production of written work have actually gone up. It’s his communication/speaking that has dipped and brought the overall grade down with it, but that’s completely in keeping with being measured against a different set of criteria and expectations. While he’s technically just under a passing grade in French at the moment, I couldn’t be prouder of how well he’s doing when everything is taken into account, and it will only get better. Comprehension comes before ease of communication in any new language.

We had a parent-child-teacher meeting after school on Thursday, and his teacher is just as excited as we are. He told me not to be concerned about the low mark (I assured him that I wasn’t, because the higher than expected marks in the two other French areas were a good sign of his development) and that Sparky’s achievements were pretty impressive. And when we left, Sparky told his teacher that he was going to stay in this new school for grade three — “Right, Mama?” he said, turning to me with a sudden anxiety. “Oh, yes,” I said. “I think we can guarantee that.” That, plus the illustrated page for one of his projects on which he’d written ‘I love school’ and his ongoing positive attitude and excitement about going to school speaks volumes to me about the fit of programme with his nature and educational needs.

It’s always nice to be told that it’s a joy to have your child in a class, and that his expression, creativity, sense of humour, willingness to work hard, and general happiness are pleasurable to behold. His teacher pointed out a couple of art projects in which Sparky thought outside the box and came up with slightly unusual ways to achieve a goal, and said that his fine motor skills and sense of building in three dimensions were advanced for his age (no surprise there). Sparky showed me his “portfolio” (a binder of his work so far) and I could very clearly see the evolution in his comprehension, his understanding of French grammar, and the vast improvement in his printing. He’s started learning cursive, too, and his little practice lines of cursive letters are adorable. In English he’s writing one-page stories, and they clearly have beginnings, middles, ends, are exciting, clear, and leave no loose ends or introduce no new characters or plot strands out of nowhere.

Today is a nice sunny ped day, and we are just back from a celebratory trip to Starbucks. We bundled Owlet up in her new ski jacket with the owls on it (pictures eventually!), put her in the stroller, and walked over. I had promised him a hot chocolate with whipped cream and a cookie. And I got a creme brûlée latte, because I work hard supervising and guiding his homework with him, and I deserved a treat, too. Last time we did this Owlet was still only a faint hope, and Sparky could only finish half his cocoa. Today Sparky finished every last drop of his chocolate, and Owlet sat on one of the chairs and grabbed for everyone’s drinks. (I fed her whipped cream from my latte and Sparky gave her a couple of bites of his cookie. She let it be known that it was Not Enough and next time things had better be different, though we do this so rarely that next time she’ll probably be drinking her own cocoa.)

Owlet: Fifteen Months Old!

I am astonished at how quickly Owlet is changing. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be, seeing how she’s practically a different baby every day, and we’ve gone through this with Sparky… but wow. Suddenly we have a little girl.

We have an accident-prone little girl, to be honest. Owlet tripped over a mote of dust and drove the corner of a baseboard into the centre of her forehead last Friday night. Blood literally pouring down a child’s face onto a white shirt does interesting things to one’s focus. She’s mostly fine now. It’s her second head trauma this week. (The first one wasn’t this bad; she whacked the edge of her eye socket on the edge of the coffee table, bending down to pick up a cup. It split and bled, but wasn’t half as bad as this one.) HRH said she’s not allowed to walk ever again. If she’d been a bit worse we’d have taken her to emergency, but she seems fine apart from the gash. It possibly could have used 1-2 stitches, but waiting forever at the hospital and putting her through that would have been much more stressful for everyone. Owlet was her usual perky self half an hour after it happened, so things seem okay. I had forgotten how badly head wounds bleed. And Owlet hates cold things put against her face; she gets very angry. At least the cold washcloths and frozen packs distract her from the actual trauma. And we discovered that she has a latex sensitivity, so now she has the slightly curved gash in the middle of her forehead plus a raised red irritated circle around it from the band-aid we covered it with. HRH says it looks like a Do Not Enter sign. Let’s hope the baseboards pay attention next time.

In the less-than-dramatic column of achievements, Owlet adores brushing her teeth, climbing stars (and can do it very well now, so well that Sparky will let her climb them alone with him, much to our heart attack-inducing surprise when we discovered that), and helping unload the laundry basket and put her clean diapers away. She can throw together her stacking rings like a pro. While crayons are still too tempting to chew, she has discovered plain pencils, and loves to draw with one on the promotional pads of paper we get every couple of months in the mailbox from our local real estate office. Watching me draw cats and fish and houses fascinates her.

We tried a series of new sippy cups, because she was hauling away on the valve ones we’d been using since she was about eight months old and working so hard that I was envisioning disaster when we started giving her open cups. Three different kinds later, it turns out the cheap take n’ toss style are the winners. Although the straw cups aren’t a total loss; she just needs to remember not to tip them up like the other cups. They’re good for the car.

I am very impressed at how well she follows direction. “Switch the toy to your other hand and put this hand through your coat sleeve” was followed without hesitation the first time I said it. “Time to get your boots and coat on so we can go get Sparky” is followed by her bringing her boots to the door and plunking herself down in my lap, pointing up at her coat, and saying “Go, go, go” while trying to turn the doorknob afterward. It’s fascinating to watch her figure things out, too. She can drag things around and climb on them to reach higher. (This one is somewhat disconcerting.) She tried to squeeze through the cat door in the gate that blocks off the stairs to the attic office the other week, too, but got stuck with one arm, her head, and part of her torso through it.

She has started waving hello to people. She wanders around the schoolyard under the trees where we wait to meet Sparky, and waves cheerily at the other parents. She ran right up to a pair of twins around three years old yesterday and gave them each a handful of dead leaves. Slowly she’s starting to understand that it makes more sense if you wave goodbye before or while someone leaves so they can hear you. She loved Halloween; you could practically see her thinking, “Wait — we walk up to someone’s door, ring their bell, smile at them, they give us colourful things and then talk to us? Bring it on!” We don’t have photos of her because we were rushing from one thing to another, but we intend to dress her up again this coming weekend and take pictures of her then.

Her lower molars are coming in, and are currently huge swollen bumps in her lower jaw. She’s quick to grizzle these days, and has been erupting into small but fierce tantrums when something is taken away from her or she is told she cannot have something that she wants. She’s wearing size 24 months or 2T clothes in general, though we like her in 3T jumpers and dresses and her pants need to be at least 2-3T to accommodate the diapers, and size 5 shoes.

New words are showing up. She loves to eat “chzz” and drink “jsss”, and tell us to “go go go!” A “fsssh” is the first animal she says the name of instead of saying the sound it makes. (Possibly because “bubble bubble bubble” is hard for a fifteen-month-old to say?) Food is “nyum nyum nyum,” and after lunch she goes to the gate at the basement stairs and asks to watch “ss ss sse” (or Sesame Street, for those of you unacquainted with our daily routine). And “No,” is a big new one, usually said while shaking her head. Unfortunately it isn’t always accurate, because she sometimes says “no” and shakes her head when she actually means “yes,” which isn’t part of her vocabulary yet.

She points to steer us when we carry her, and brings books to us excitedly and jabs her finger at the text to make us read it. Her current favourite book is The Pigeon Has Feelings Too by Mo Willems. I read the bus driver’s request for the pigeon to show his happy face, then I look at her, and she draws herself up importantly and says, “Nnno!”, proud that she’s “reading” the next page where the pigeon says, “Never!” And she loves to “ticka ticka ticka” people and cats, which makes all of us laugh. She has developed a somewhat menacing toddler chuckle, which we call her evil chipmunk laugh, low and completely at odds with her cheerful, innocent persona. We all laugh whenever we hear it, which makes her laugh more, which… you get the idea.

(For comparison, here’s Sparky’s fifteen-month post.)

LATER: We went to her 15-month checkup. The good news is that her weight is beginning to level off, and she’s only at the 95th percentile instead of the 97th. (Are you laughing? I did.) She weighs just over 27 pounds. No wonder my lower back hurts! She’s now 32.5 inches tall, too. That’s still 97th percentile. Yikes. Well, this all explains the 2T clothes she needs to be wearing…

An Update On Nixie

Nix came home with me again this afternoon.

The vet examined her and quietly showed me that there were multiple masses, mammary tumours, and that in cats such masses were generally malignant. I’d done my research and I knew the numbers, so it wasn’t a shock. He said in theory they could be removed… but, I pointed out, they’d already regrown once, probably twice, and he couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t regrow yet again. (In fact, he said, “This mass has been here for a while, it was here the last time she was in, wasn’t it?” and I said that no, that one had been removed. So not only has a new one grown back in these past four months, it now has friends.)

Is it cancer? Probably. But to be sure they’d have to do tests and biopsies, and really, even if it was confirmed, there’s nothing anyone could do anyway. So I said I’d like to take her home again to be with us as long as possible until the quality of life dictates otherwise. We worked together to develop a treatment to hopefully heal the wound she created by licking and chewing away at her fur–topical antibiotics, antibiotic pills, and cortisone, plus more bandaging–and the last treatment is love, lots of it.

How long do we have left with her? Who knows? In general, my research has indicated that four to six months is common after the masses show. Except we found and dealt with the first one about three years ago (it was nowhere as extensive as these ones, though), so really, your guess is as good as mine. If it is cancer, it will be a shorter time than a longer one. But every day is precious. She is a strong, healthy, ten-year-old cat, other than the undetermined masses. We will watch her with love and make the decision when it is time, or when she asks us.

Trudge Trudge

I am struggling with a bout of being non-social. I’ve drastically reduced my use of social media, and as you can see I haven’t been blogging much. Part of that comes from not having the time–I’m doing the mum thing all day, and when the kids have been put to bed I sit down at my computer to work–but part of it also comes from fatigue. I don’t have the brainpower to write anything. And if I did, a lot of it would sound the same: Owlet is bouncing off walls and chattering and being cute. Sparky’s current obsession is Angry Birds. HRH and I are tired. I’m the one who’s losing out, of course, since I journal for my own reference. So here’s a scattershot of what’s been going on.

Work-wise, it was independently confirmed by my copy chief that editors are so happy with the work I’m doing on the novels that they’re starting to ask for me by name, which thrills me. I’m pretty much doing a two-week assignment, then I get a week off, and then I do another two weeks of work. So it’s steady.

We had lunch over at the Preston-LeBlanc household on Sunday, and it was so nice. Owlet wandered around completely overcome by all the things to look at and touch, and enjoyed Pasley’s potato-apple-carrot soup immensely, as well as an apple she plucked from a fruit bowl, the first she managed to bite into with the peel still on. Tamu and Pat and Flora stopped by the previous weekend and we delighted in watching BebeFlo and Owlet play together (especially the peekaboo game with a blanket at the end, where they both ducked under it and stood there giggling at one another). We got out to MLG’s fortieth birthday evening at Hurley’s before that, which was also fun, because I hadn’t seen everyone in ages.

HRH installed the new range hood this past weekend, and it’s a definite improvement over the last one. It no longer sounds like an aircraft taking off, as my father-in-law put it when he gave it to us. The only thing left to do is cut a hole in the kitchen wall for the new exhaust pipe. We’ve been without a fan since the attic was converted into the office, as the old exhaust pipe went up there and lay along the ceiling crossbeams on its way to the exterior exhaust vent. Once a floor was laid, there was nowhere for the duct to go (cutting holes through the ceiling crossbeams isn’t such a good idea, you know?), so a new vent needs to be made. That will happen this weekend.

I dyed fibre and spun it for a fellow Raveller, who won it in a draw for prizes in our Ravellenic Games team that she captained, and I’m quite pleased with it. I hope she is, too. It was my first time dyeing more than a bit of fibre to mess about with. I used Ziplock microwave steaming bags (which was an interesting experience in itself), and did the four ounces of fibre in four one-ounce batches. She requested raspberry and tangerine, and I blended a very nice colour for both from my Jacquard acid dyes, which of course blended and subtly altered when I spun it up. I did a DK/light worsted two-ply yarn, and I gt at least 300 yards out of it. It plumped up beautifully after a wash. Canada Post tells me that it’s out for delivery in her area right now, so she may have it today!

I am currently sewing the Halloween costumes for both kids, and mostly enjoying myself, although doing it in fifteen minutes here and fifteen minutes there is a bit frazzling. I lose my train of thought and a sense of what I’d planned to do next, or how to do it. (I am working without patterns for both of them, because I don’t have enough stress in my life.) I made a lovely pair of polar fleece pantaloons for Owlet, complete with two deep lace ruffles on the legs, and they’re possibly the most adorable things ever. I used polar fleece for warmth, because nights at the end of October around here are usually quite chilly. I made her a mob cap as well with polar fleece on the inside, but it’s smaller than I thought, so I need more deep lace to sew around the edge so it looks less ridiculous.

The last bit of current news is the worst. Today Nixie goes to the vet, and I suspect that she is not coming home. I am spending as much time as possible with her today. At the very least, the large, weeping, overgroomed area on her chest has become infected; at the worst, the overgrooming is directly related to a possible recurrence of the mass that was removed as part of her surgery this past spring, which makes the third appearance of it, and as something like 80% of feline tumours are malignant, even if we get it removed it will just happen again. We don’t have the money for tests and biopsies in the first place, nor treatment if the worst is confirmed. Sparky and I had a hard cry this morning when I reminded him that she was going to the vet today and she might not come home, and he railed against the injustice of it all: “I don’t want Nixie to die! I want her to come home! She is the best cat!” Of course you do, sweetheart; we all do. No one wants her to die. But things die, and we can’t stop it. It doesn’t make it any easier to deal with, and our hearts hurt so much, but it is a truth, and something we have to face, either now or in a few months, or a few years. When I dropped him off at school he met his friends at the schoolyard gate and stopped there, and I wondered why he didn’t go all the way in. And then I saw one of the girls put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and I understood what was happening: as soon as he’d arrived told them that Nix was sick, possibly too sick to come home, sharing his grief and his hurt, and they were sympathizing with him.

At best, I am hoping that they will be able to prescribe antibiotics and come up with a solution to cover the wound so it can heal properly, because everything I’ve tried has failed. At worst, I have to make the decision that every pet owner hates to make. Somewhere in the middle lies the “we can’t do anything but make her comfortable” diagnosis, and if that is what happens I will probably bring her home again until her quality of life deteriorates to unacceptable levels. Because right now her quality of life seems good: she is still eating well, moving in her usual fashion, using the litter box, purring and enjoying the occasional cuddle, and I am weak, and it feels wrong to say goodbye when she seems so normal other than the infected wound. Her energy hasn’t changed at all, and with every other cat we have known when they were tired, ill, and suffering, even though all of them were stoic they way cats are, because we are attentive and sensitive to that sort of thing. Nix doesn’t project any of that. Knowing when to make that decision is the hardest part of this whole process.

I’m so tired. I think the fibro is starting to creep back, as I’m having trouble focusing on things, lacking the energy to be happy and enjoy my hobbies, the body aches and weak hands are here again, sleep is not restful, and my appetite has vanished. Part of this could be attributable to the time of year, but I suspect that the fibro-quashing pregnancy and year of postnatal adrenaline and hormones are finally done with, and my body is slowly creeping back to normal operative levels. It is not fun. I am trying to find joy in small things, and it is very difficult. I don’t have much time to read, or spin. I can sometimes knit for a row or two. But most of my baby-nap time is taken up by cooking or baking or tidying or work or errands. And it’s all very well to think that this time next year she’ll be in daycare, which is exciting because we know she will love it, but that does not help me now.

Thanksgiving

We are thankful for making ends meet (it’s happening, and it’s only going to get better as we catch up), our lovely little house, our children, our family, our friends (near and far, in person and those we know and love thanks to the wonder of the Internet), our health, and the beautiful world around us.

And for leaf piles!

Sparky picked Owlet up and dumped her right into the middle of the pile of leaves that he’d raked up with his Nana, then rolled around with her. She loved it. Initiation into a Canadian fall tradition: complete.