Attract Mode

OK, Cathy gets to insist on my title spelling since she took the picture.

He likes to stand on his head

I’m too thirsty and worn out from Cathy’s cleaning agenda and my dog’s ridiculous ability to contort her paraplegic self, oh, and from said 365-day-old to not lolcat my language. Sorry.

Tomorrow– that is, today after I sleep for a few hours– we’re taking Hannah to the vet again. Then Kevin is taking the day off and we’re going to go to Ranch 99 where we will let Robin ride mechanical horses, and then maybe we’ll go to the park. Later, there will be presents and cake. And probably pictures. And maybe even video, except I never have time to edit video. Maybe a very, very short or very. very long unedited video.

Technically he’s already been given a number of presents. But tomorrow will be the bulk. He’ll ignore most of them. But I bet he’ll like the cake.

Maybe we’ll get us adults some champagne, too. It’s been a beautiful year.

and wanted to alienate all my friends, I would post a picture of what I must now gaze into at least twice daily. Hannah’s amputation site is the stuff of nightmares. I miss the stitches. My dreams are a mix of Braid and the wound, where I rewind my brain over and over trying to not look.

The tail dock didn’t really heal closed. On Monday we took her in for her stitches removal appointment. They said ‘hm. leave in another week’. On Tuesday, she pulled herself out of her cage when the door was left open. 9 hours later, I realized she’d pulled her stitches out then, too. There wasn’t really any blood, but you could see disturbing white glints when you looked at the open wound. Emergency room and associated costs, ho!

They put in more stitches late Tuesday night.

Yesterday afternoon, I checked on her and some of the stitches had snapped. Gaping injury, disturbing glints of white, etc. Emergency room ho!

They kept her over night and installed special loop sutures so we could apply and regularly change a wet to dry dressing. I guess this is one of the problems with antibiotics! Antibiotics keep infection away but they /don’t/ stop tissue from dying. Dead skin doesn’t hold stitches well.

She’s also developed enough upper body strength/flexibility to get to her tail area without curling her back end around. So she’s in a cone collar. And she’s an angry, angry dog. She has come to TERMS with her handicap, and with having a human pair of back legs and she is READY to SCOOT AROUND so why are we keeping her down?

Dumb dog.

I have finally acquired a pressure cooker– the aluminum 6 quart Presto one.  Even just cooking a potato, the scent  it puts off is great and the flavor is so much more intense than a microwaved potato. The pot roast I’m making now smells heavenly. It really brings back memories of my grandmother’s house, which is where I first encountered the device.

Plus, the very mechanical way it operates is fascinating. It makes me think of steam engines– the pressure regulator is a loose metal knob that rocks and rotates to release steam, and is heavy enough that it only rocks when the pot reaches 15 psi.

I like taking care of Robin, but my personal problems are making his mobile baby-hood more dangerous than it really should be.

For example, I’m profoundly unaware of my physical space. I routinely get bruises on my arms and legs because I bump into doors and tables and so forth. Sometimes, my arms are holding a baby.

And, as everybody knows, I’m incredibly distractible and not always… aware enough of my surroundings to think through consequences. For example, a Kids ‘N Pets bottle was left on the floor. Empty, it turns out, except for maybe a few drops. Kids N’ Pets is an enzymatic odor-removing cleaner than has, among its ingredients, isopropyl alcohol. So, I hear a bottle-shaking noise. I look over. Now, right now, I don’t actually recall what I saw, because the adrenalin made me react before I’d fully processed the information. I know Robin had the bottle in his hand.  I don’t think he was chugging it. I separated them very quickly. I picked Robin up and he snuggled up to me, sleepy. I inspected the bottle. The first thing I saw on the label was ‘keep out of reach of children’. The second thing was ‘Non-toxic’. It didn’t have any ingestion warnings. I couldn’t smell the distinctive odor on Robin’s breath. It seemed empty– but I’d heard liquid being shaken around a moment ago.

I made Robin a bottle, reasoning that if he wasn’t in any kind of discomfort, dilution couldn’t hurt, and he almost immediately fell asleep. I poked around at the web for a couple of minutes, decided that given the nature of isopropyl alcohol, I wasn’t reassured by his calm sleep, and called Poison Control. I figured asking how much was dangerous and what I should do was a good idea even if it was unlikely he’d had any of what didn’t seem to be a very dangerous substance.

The nice lady looked it up. 10% isopropyl alcohol, and that’s the most dangerous ingredient. He’d have to drink a quarter cup or more to get sick. And feeding him was in fact the right thing to do.

Whee. I feel wrung out.

(And here’s a lesson in why memory is unreliable, because as I calm down, I remember instead that he was crawling away and the bottle was tipped over on the floor. I looked at it and saw how similar in shape it was to the water bottle Robin now drinks from regularly. I recalled the splashing noise  and my own inattention and I freaked out. He couldn’t have held that big bottle in one hand. Maybe two? Was he holding it and shaking it? Or did I build that image myself? I can’t rely on my own memory, so I have to go by his own past behavior. Pick up bottle. Shake it. Stick nozzle in mouth to see if he can to the bite-and-suck he does for the water bottle. He wouldn’t be able to, and it would taste bad. Shake more for fun noise. Discard. Man. I never even considered the danger of letting him teach himself to drink from those water bottles. I’m glad this was such a harmless lesson…)

Last night, we dug out some foam alphabet blocks that had been stashed somewhere last time we cleaned Robin’s room. And we learned a new facet of his personality.

We would stack the blocks up.

Robin would knock them down.

We’d make a neat pyramid.

He’d scatter it.

We’d stuff all the blocks in a container and he’d stomp over (and somehow it was stomping despite being on all fours) and pull them all out.

From across the room, he’d charge a four-block tower like it was an affront to God, or at least him, and whack it over, and then pick up the individual blocks and toss them aside.

He didn’t laugh. He stuck out his little jaw in an expression of grim determination.

Later, he was on his back on the floor drinking his bedtime bottle. I stacked all the blocks into a mega-tower. He looked at it, and waved his feet toward it, as if he could kick it over from the other side of the room. When that didn’t work, he took his bottle out of his mouth, and stared meaningfully at the tower. Then he popped the bottle back in again, as if to say, “I’ll be coming for you later.”

And he did. He scattered those blocks far and wide. Then he threw them, for good measure.

In the last 24 hours, Robin has started pulling himself up in his playpen regularly and easily. As has become usual for him, he first hit this milestone three weeks ago or so, did it a few times and then stopped. But in the last day he’s started doing it again at the drop of a hat.

He’s also figured out how to navigate the single step between each room of our house, up and down. He crawled over to the staircase and peered up and down it thoughtfully before backing away.

He also got to pet a live vacuum cleaner as it roared next to him! He was nervous but petting it was the only way forward.

And he got to try some edamame, since previous exposures to soy haven’t caused any problems.

Currently his favorite meal is a slice of bread, torn up, and a chunk of cheddar, cut into little pieces. I try to mix it up some with apples and grapes and blueberries and broccoli but it is only bread and cheese that gets reliably devoured.

So, I’m doing Rock Band singing and I gave him the Logitech microphone. for the PS2.  While I was setting up with the controller he was trying to grab it from me. As soon as I picked up my microphone he went over and grabbed his. And then he spent the whole song looking between me and the tv and his microphone. Heh heh heh.

Actual real blood freaks me out. When I was a kid, injuries in myself and others (other than scabbed knees) that bled caused me to panic. It was a nice controlled panic, a ‘run to an adult and weep at them’ panic, but still a panic. Now, twenty years of intensive menstrual therapy later, I’ve learned that blood isn’t always a Very Bad Thing. Sometimes it’s just a little badness.

All the same, taking Hannah outside to pee today was nightmarish. If I can go my entire life without again being sprayed by warm blood forced between sutures over an amputated limb by sudden movement and pressure on the nearby area, that would be nice. Maybe tonight I should tape a temporary bandage over her tail stub before we do a reprise.

Part of me, deep inside, is taking notes for writing. A lot of it is cross-checking things already discovered by heroes and heroines throughout the ages. The warm sticky splash. The way so little blood can spread so far.

After we’d taken her outside, I took a shower and then hid under the covers. When I got up a second time, the pad under her butt was covered in gore, but her injury itself was dry and clean. A pad soaked in blood didn’t bother me nearly as much. Thanks menstrual therapy!

Hahahahah. Hah. Hah.