Week 22 Day 3: Cat scratch fever

I just went in to Gavin's room to check on him and soothe him back to sleep because he woke up crying several hours after his 7 p.m. bed time. He was standing up, holding onto the crib railing and wailing, which is not unusual, except he was holding on to the railing on the wrong side of the crib, facing the wall rather than facing out into his room. According to Stacy he has done this before, but I have never seen it. He's just so tired and so disorientated and unhappy he doesn't know which way is up. He just wants a mom to come help him fix it. And it made my heart break a little bit seeing him like that. Poor dude. He is sleeping again and hopefully will sleep through until morning. And by morning I have my fingers crossed for 6 a.m. or later. These 5 a.m. mornings are killing me.

Today was a bloody day for Bear, I'm afraid. The cat and I are to blame for two separate incidents. Although I had an elephant as my accomplice (isn't that always the case?).

Jota (a.k.a. Jasper) is a really good cat as far as cats go. People are always telling us how good natured and mellow he is. And it's true. (He's also rotund, but that's beside the point here.) The problem is that even though he's a nice cat, he also has all of his claws. We trim them often (he's very good about this, even purring as we do it), but they're still claws. Gavin and Jota get along well. Gavin is obsessed with Jota and Jota tolerates Gavin's over-exuberant attention and even invites it. But sometimes you don't want your ears pulled or two little doughy fists grabbing hold of your furry stomach pudge and squeezing with all of their 10-month-old might (and that's actually a lot of might. Gavin is strong. Bear is a very apt nickname). And since Jota can't say, "Knock it off," most of the time he just removes himself from the situation, but he sometimes resorts to his claws or jaws, though even in the case I am currently reporting, never in eviscerate mode.

Today Jota was especially comfortable curled up on the make-out chair in the living room (called the "make-out chair" because Henri, who has issues of his own, is not allowed on the couch when people are sitting on it, but he is allowed to share the chair with a person, though it should be noted that no one makes out with the dog in this house, unless you count Henri tongue-kissing Gavin). So this morning when Gavin crawled over to the chair and pulled himself up and proceeded to pull fur or tug ears or whatever it is he did, Jota chose the "fight" side of the fight or flight quandary and pulled a total Freddy Krueger, scratching Gavin on both sides of his head from behind his ears to his temples.

Now I was sitting right there in the living room, but it all happened so fast and was partially obscured by the playpen. So I heard Gavin start to cry and whisked him away from the cat thinking that Jota had scratched his hand. Jota has scratched Gavin's hands multiple times because Gavin's hands are small, fast-moving objects. Jota's favorite. It was early morning and rainy to boot, so it was pretty dark in the living room, so I took Gavin into the bathroom to inspect him and get his scratches disinfected and washed. But the only wound I saw on Gavin's hand was on his thumb, and it didn't look like a cat scratch (it is, I strongly suspect, actually caused by thumb-sucking with teeth). Puzzled, I turned Gavin toward me and said, "Where are you wounded, Child Bear?" And I saw it right away. Jota didn't break the skin exactly (a wee bit of blood in a small portion of the deepest scratches), but Gavin is allergic to Jota (as am I. As is Stacy. But we are crazy) so the scratches all puffed up pretty good making it look worse than it was. I got him cleaned up and chances are good they'll fade really quickly, but needless to say, Jota and I are not on speaking terms right now. Jota is also off the babysitting list, making the chances of Stacy and I going on a date any time soon even slimmer.

As for his other injury, that was my fault. And the elephant's. See, we have this elephant funnel that Gavin really likes to play with, though it's not a toy. We never give it to him unsupervised or anything, but sometimes he likes to hold it when he's in his high chair before he starts eating the first course (no toys allowed while eating, though I make an exception for the puffs appetizer course since the whole point of the puffs is to keep him busy and distracted while I prepare the rest of his grub). So today I put him in his hair chair and he was holding the funnel, no big deal. I strap him in and then go to slide on the tray, being careful that his hands are out of the way so I don't pinch his fingers. Unfortunately I do not make sure the elephant funnel is out of the way. Indeed, it was not. The tip of the trunk was in his mouth so when I slid the tray on, "Wham!" I forced the funnel into the roof of his mouth. Before he even started crying, and it only took a second, I knew that must have hurt. And boy did he cry. In fact, cry isn't even the right word for the wounded animal sounds that came out of my little boy. He was, quite plainly, hysterical. I put a baby washcloth under cool water and placed it in his mouth. Sure enough, when I took it out there was blood. Not much blood, mind you. About as much as you might find when you nick yourself shaving. But still, he was bleeding and it was all my fault. The bleeding stopped relatively quickly and he was soon eating his lunch like nothing happened (although he did have those little cry hiccups intermittently throughout the meal). But I felt awful. And now the cat isn't speaking to me. At least he can't kick me off the babysitting list.