There was one week of hissing. It was especially pitiful when Benchley was saying “Mrow? Prrrroww?” and the new kitten was hissing in reply.

Then there was one week of passing each other in the hallway indifferently. Maybe a sniff or two, but no friendliness.

And now there is this:

And I am SO GLAD! Because part of the reason we GOT the new kitten is that Benchley wanted so badly to cuddle and play with another cat but Mouse was having none of it, and the vet said sometimes a kitten would help with that. And then we got a kitten and it seemed like just another major rejection for poor Benchley. But now! Oh, there is happiness throughout the land!

I started the day 3 hours earlier than usual, with one of my recent “Wake up at 3:00 and be unable to get back to sleep” nights. Do these happen to you? For me I’m afraid they’re a genetic inheritance from my mother, along with a seemingly endless interest in having more children.

I’m PROBABLY growing my hair for Locks of Love. This started as Meaning To Get My Hair Cut, and then turned into Trying Unsuccessfully To Schedule An Appointment, and then turned into Well, Now It’s Long Enough To Put In A Bun So Never Mind. One of my physical upsides is that I have thick, fast-growing hair, and so it seems like a good idea to take advantage of an idea that combines so well with my natural disinclination to do anything with it.

But I say “PROBABLY” because it’s also making me feel crazy (so! tangled! and ouchy!), and I can just see suddenly getting it cut off when I’m half an inch short of 10 inches, which is close to what happened accidentally last time: I hadn’t even thought of Locks of Love until I saw the pieces on the floor and said, “Hey…” and the stylist measured and they were just under 9 inches long.

I got SO MUCH done yesterday. I’d gone out to the store after lunch, and when I got back it was 3:00, also known as The Soggy Gross Dregs of the Weekend. Paul and I looked at each other over the heads of our roiling mass of loud, talkative, argumentative children, and we realized we needed to either start drinking or take action. We took all five outside, and I gave them all haircuts on the steps, and Paul played with whichever four weren’t being sheared. The two older kids took showers after their haircuts, and I gave baths to the three younger kids. Then I scrubbed the tub. Then I made muffins. Then I paid a couple of bills. Then I wrote some Postcrossing postcards. Then I filled my pill-a-day container. …Okay, I’m running out of things to say I did. But it felt REALLY ACCOMPLISHED at the time.

Elizabeth wanted her hair SHORT, and I wasn’t sure what to do. One, because it’s just FINALLY getting long enough to do stuff with, and two, because it’s also been getting tangled and difficult, and three, because I don’t know how to do shorter girl haircuts: I can cut boy hair, or I can trim girl hair, and that’s it. So we compromised on MEDIUM: it was shorter enough to please her, but long enough to keep me from feeling discouraged. I nearly got into trouble with “making it even,” but I managed to make myself stop.

Okay, so I am mostly caught up on blog reading now, and I read on only ONE SINGLE BLOG that Proposition 8 was overturned, so I am mentioning it here for those of you who, like me, get most of your news from other people’s blog posts.

In other news, our kitten is still nameless. We have a hard time naming our cats. One of our biggest hurdles is that I really enjoy thinking about and choosing names (duh?), so I don’t like to CHOOSE because then it will be OVER.

Also, Paul and I come from different Naming Backgrounds, which is roughly as complicated as coming from different religious backgrounds. Paul’s family names their cats based on fur color or Disney movies, so for example a black cat is named Licorice and a golden cat is named Butterscotch, and a cat whose fur doesn’t bring a noun to mind is named Milo. I come from a family that names cats using quirky human names, which we then later regret because a decade or two later those names come into fashion and we want to use them for children but now feel like we can’t. Examples: Keegan, George, Oliver.

I also want to avoid any name that sounds like it’s from our runner-up baby names list, because combined with my well-documented interest in having another child I think it looks pitiful.

Our goal is to instead choose the sort of name that is neither commonly used for people (or about to be) NOR based on the cat’s appearance. So Agatha is probably out, but we’re considering Marple; and Penguin is out but we’re considering Pigeon; and Oreo is out but we’re considering Daisy. I consider nickname-names fair game for pets, so Maggie and Bonnie and Birdie and Dolly and Flossie and Gussie would all be fine. But we crossed out Ramona and Eloise and April and Ginger.

Paul suggests:

SaNdEe*
Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn
Zaneeta
Bronze Thunderpaws
Granite Firefur
Hardcastle McMeow

And of course the last three are BOY NAMES, so Paul is not much help. Paul also likes Juniper, but withdrew it when he found out it was thisclose to being on the Top 1000 names for girls in 2009 (and I bet you fifty bucks it makes it for the 2010 list).

So far the kitten is affectionate with people (likes to sit on laps and will hop up), but is standoffish with the other cats. She’s not as playful as the average kitten, nor as wild; she walks around like she’s a grown-up. Her fur is half black and half white, and she has a tail that is longer and fluffier than I’d expect, almost like a feather boa (who’s famous for a feather boa? Mae West? others?). When she purrs, she sounds like she’s going to sprain something. I think her face looks birdlike, probably because of her bird-of-prey eyes. Also, she’s an Aries and enjoys tuna.

Oh hi, hi hi hi, I’m here! I have been photographing my clothing try-on sessions and getting scolded by Wal-Mart managers [note from the future: this was a link to a post on a now-deleted reviews blog], and then right after I finished working on that post and got it posted, we lost our internet service. We have been living like savages. SAVAGES! It’s like when the power goes out and you go, “Well, hey, I guess since I can’t use the computer I’ll do some laundry…CRAP!”

And meanwhile I was DYING because WHAT IF SOMETHING IMPORTANT HAPPENED AND I WASN’T THERE TO DEAL WITH IT??? Like, it turned out that I was supposed to have included in that clothes-trying-on giveaway (FIVE! HUNDRED! DOLLARS!) that you can get extra entries by blogging or twittering a link to the contest, but I didn’t realize! because I can’t access the rules until after the post is posted! and by then I couldn’t fix it!

Anyway, I’m likely to be in and out until we get this *mumble mumble some computery jargon* figured out, but I am still occasionally on Twitter via my cell phone, now that I’ve remembered I CAN.

Today is another tough-to-get-going day. I spent last night dreaming I was unhappily dating my high school boyfriend and living in an apartment that was under siege by, like, cannons. And, like, flaming logs and stuff. While it was a relief to wake up and find the the girl my high school boyfriend cheated on me with was no longer jumping out at me (and that flaming logs were no longer a problem), I still don’t feel particularly PERKY this morning.

The kids watched Kung Fu Panda yesterday, so today I have this stuck in my head: “Yesterday is history; tomorrow’s a mystery; today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.” Um. Thanks. (Though—I mean, are we all clear that that’s NOT why “they” call it the present? And why does “what sounds good” so often trump “what’s true”?) (See? This is the kind of day it is.)

Anyway, I made a pot of coffee and took an iron supplement, and we’ll see if those two things together can give me the energy and strength to lift a single drop into the bucket.

And actually, although I’m draggy, I’m CHEERY-draggy. If you know what I mean. Like cheery-melancholy, where you feel blue but you kind of LIKE it and enjoy wallowing in it a bit, as opposed to regular melancholy where you feel like crap? This is cheery-draggy, where I’m kind of enjoying the groaning and the making of coffee and the flopping in a recliner and the crabby remarks.

Today feels like a day of insurmountable obstacles: everywhere I look, another problem I can’t stand to deal with. Laundry, obviously. Fruit flies. The stuff I bought yesterday and didn’t put away. Consumerism in general. The minimum number of servings of fruits and vegetables that should be eaten by our family per day (thirty-five) (PER DAY). The spilled Pixos all over the dining room floor. The way so many things seem to migrate to the floor. The difficulty of continually training children to pick it all up again.

The way caffeine and alcohol and shopping and food do/don’t help. The inevitable, looming problems of aging. The difficulty of spelling words such as “aging” and “eying,” especially when I was so sure the difficult part was that they DID have the E before the ING. The messiness of my purse. The three phone calls I need to make. The decision about whether to let all the children go to a birthday party they were all invited to, and what to do about presents. The first empty jam jar from the homemade jam, and the question it raises of where to store it until next year. A work deadline so tight it’s likely a matter of someone else’s lack of planning constituting an emergency on my part.

So far I’m handling it by surmounting small things. It feels TOTALLY POINTLESS to pick up and put away Elizabeth’s headband when it is only one item of hundreds on the playroom floor, but I have LONG SAID that “all or nothing” is one of the WORST mental downfalls for me. All or nothing is the attitude that makes people say that if you eat a cheeseburger it’s dumb to drink diet Coke, or that if you cheat on your diet you might as well write off the whole day/week and start over tomorrow/Monday. It’s the attitude that makes people think that if you’re not going to be totally ripped, you’re an idiot to bother taking the stairs. It’s the attitude that makes people think there’s no sense donating to charity if they can only give $5, or $1. And it’s the attitude that makes me sink into despair as I contemplate all there is to do and the futility of doing any of it.

But no! We resist it! It is NOT all or nothing! All or nothing is not an appropriate attitude for a person who owns a math medal! Picking up the headband may be a drop in the bucket, but it IS A DROP, and the drop is IN THE BUCKET. That is better than having it out of the bucket with all the other drops! One drop > zero drops, just as cheeseburger calories < cheeseburger calories plus Coke calories. MATH. IT IS ABOUT MATH So that is what I'm doing today. I'm moving like a zombie, a zombie killed by despair and reanimated by children fighting over NOTHING, as USUAL, but I'm doing little things one after another. I emptied the dish-drying rack. I took one thing out of the Target bag and I put it away. I put in a load of towels. I put away Elizabeth's headband. Those drops are IN THE BUCKET, people! IN THE BUCKET!

Today I took the four older kids to a “kitten shower.” It’s an annual fundraising event thrown by our local animal shelter. It’s like a baby shower, except you bring presents for…um, the kittens.

And that’s all we did. Yep. We just brought our gift, which was kitten food and some cat toys, and we dropped them off, and we looked at the kittens. And that’s all.

Really. We looked at the kittens, maybe we bought some raffle tickets or something, but that’s all.

We won one of the raffles, too! It was a cat basket, full of cat toys and cat food! Pretty awesome.

Okay, we also had a snack. We had a snack at the kitten shower, and we also learned a lot about cats from an informational video about cat adoption.

Oh, and we used their bathroom. Yes, we also did that.

Oh, and we took home a party favor.

It’s a kitten! She’s three months old, and we don’t know what to name her! And if she keeps purring so loud she’s going to SPRAIN something!

Samantha posted this question on Twitter about a second child: “How do you KNOW when you want another? I’M SO CONFUSED.”

Note that she was not asking ME at all. She was asking Jonniker. Did this stop me from mulling the question? Er, no. And is it stopping me from answering it JUST AS IF IT HAD BEEN ASKED OF ME? Why, no! (Hi, Sam! I’m in ur Twitter, eavesdropping on ur conversations!)

So, second child! PART of it, I think, is very similar to deciding to have the first child: there is a leap involved. A feeling of, “We CAN’T KNOW if this is a good decision for us or not. It COULD be the best decision ever, or the worst, or anywhere in between. Given that we CAN’T KNOW, we will have to make a GUESS. And looking around us at other people who have had a first/second child and been glad they did, at least eventually, we’re going to gamble that we too will be glad, at least eventually.”

And part of it was an “on paper” kind of decision: what do we want Our Family to BE? A family with one child? A family with two children? What do we theoretically WANT?

And part of it is the same as ANY experience we’re considering repeating: we answer the question, “Did the GOOD of this experience balance the BAD in a way that made it WORTH IT and make us want to REPEAT IT?”

If you’ve had a second child, how did you decide? Was it the same for you as it was for me—i.e., a combination of leap/gamble and theoretical want and worth-repeating-ness?

If you’re considering a second child now, how are you working through the decision?

I have a UTI. For some reason this doesn’t strike me as being at all TMI, possibly because a UTI takes up THE ENTIRE WORLD, and can’t you just TELL from the way EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS WRONG that I have a UTI? I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, is my point. I bought cranberry juice at Target while my prescription was being filled, so that I could take my first dose of antibiotic before even leaving the parking lot. I had also already taken Azo (pain relief for this very problem), and that DOES help but NOT NEARLY ENOUGH, and also the nurses are so exasperated with me for taking it because it messes up the pee test. A nurse today actually THREW HER HANDS UP IN THE AIR upon hearing that I had not chosen to spend all night wide awake and weeping with misery, unable to sleep because of feeling as if I desperately needed to pee. Has she never had a UTI? I wish her one, on a weekend after Urgent Care has closed for the afternoon, as a gift to improve her understanding of modern medicine.

The morning exercise plan was a total fail. I did it for about a week and then…didn’t anymore. BUT, it was also a success, because trying to exercise in the morning dramatically improved my attitude about exercising in the evening. If I’m even tempted to flop and whine, I just imagine getting out of bed to put on workout shoes, and I suddenly feel cheerier.

The jam I made is very delicious, but is SO FULL OF SEEDS. And this is AFTER I removed many MANY seeds: for 4 cups of mashed fruit, I got about 3/4ths cup seeds. Paul and William took a random sample of berries and COUNTED THE SEEDS IN EACH ONE, so I can now say that based on a sample from our black raspberry bushes, black raspberries have an average of 49 seeds each. Well, this does explain why the jam is still jam-packed with seeds despite my efforts. How do the jam makers do it? Brute force, I’m guessing. A total lack of regard for the berries’ feelings.

OMG I think I made jam. Real JAM. I would have taken more pictures except I was too in awe of my own self (and/or too busy comparing self favorably to Caroline Ingalls) to operate a camera.

FIRST, I picked black raspberries until my poor arms and legs were scratched/bitten to the dickens.

THEN, I froze those berries in single layers on cookie sheets before transferring them to freezer ziploc bags.

THEN, I thawed MORE BERRIES THAN I COULD POSSIBLY NEED: 7.5 cups, for a recipe that called for 4 cups of mashed berries.

THEN, I used my late mother-in-law’s applesauce-straining system (it is a metal sieve thing, plus a stand for the sieve thing, and a wooden thing to squoosh the fruit through the sieve thing) to remove some of the seeds from the berries.

THEN, I discovered that 7.5 cups berries made 3.5 cups berry mash plus .5 cups seeds.

THEN, I thawed another salad-plateful of berries, which made up the other .5 cup of mashed (without any seed-removal measures taken).

THEN, I stirred some freezer-jam fruit pectin into 1.5 cups of sugar, and then added my finally-4-cups of mashed berries.

THEN, I stirred for 3 minutes.

THEN, I put that stuff into 5 plastic 8-ounce freezer-jam containers.

THEN, I waited 30 minutes.

THEN, I transferred the containers to the freezer, and put the remaining stuff in another container for the fridge.

THEN: JAM, BABY, OH YEAH. And it only took $4.50 of containers plus $3.00 of pectin plus $scratches plus $time, and you know what? Jam is only like $2-$3 jar at the store.

(But still! JAM!! From BERRIES that GROW in my YARD!)

(Plus, I can reuse the containers.)