Wally!

Friday turned out to be more eventful than I was expecting.

My kids had the day off of school and my brother had the day off of work. While I was taking Peter to the barber for a haircut,  my brother was next door doing some yard work at my parent's house when he heard a loud mewing coming from our bushes.  He came over to investigate and found this:

As we were driving home from the barber shop, I got a text from Sarah that said, "Uncle Brad found a cat in our bushes."

Lovely.  Just what we need.  Another cat.  This makes the fourth cat that has been lovingly tossed out of a car and into our yard since we've living here.  Two of those cats have managed to make their way into our home.  (One of them died last December and the other one eventually wandered off.)  I was happy with just the one cat in the house and wasn't looking to add to the fold.

This cat though is just the cutest thing.  He immediately let us pick him up.  Has not hissed at us once. He is very friendly and playful (although the annoying neighbor cat came by last night and this kitten puffed up into a giant fur ball and was standing his ground in front of his food dish.) and not the least bit shy.

After keeping him outside this weekend, we took him to the vet yesterday.  He was treated for a little eye infection, tapeworms, and fleas. And he got the first of his vaccines.  He tested negative for feline leukemia so I introduced him to our other cat last night.  That didn't go as well as I had hoped.  The old cat, whose name is Kitten, was scared (she's the biggest scaredy cat in the world) and  Wally (our new kitten) puffed up like he did for the neighbor cat.  So that's going well.

Dan is convinced that Wally is going to turn out to be like our other cats - boring and lazy.  I'm hoping he turns out like the cat that I had when I first started dating Dan. 

Mikey was the coolest cat ever.  He was an indoor/outdoor cat and didn't have a litter box inside.  He came inside when I jingled my keys and yelled "din-din" and was just the best cat ever. He liked being inside just as much as he liked being outside.

 The only problem was that after I married Dan and we moved to our new house, Mikey kept going back to my old condo.  The neighbor would call and say, "Your cat's crying at your front door again." and we would have to drive back and get him and bring him back to the new house.  Eventually we had Peter and Mikey could not deal with a crying baby (and let me tell you, Peter cried A LOT!) so one day he left and never came back.  Although  a couple of days after he left, I swear I saw him walking up Interstate 77 heading in the direction of my old condo.  But being that it was an INTERSTATE, I couldn't stop and check.  And we never saw him again.

Anyway, enough about cats.  After I took Peter to the barber shop, I took Sarah to find a new dress.  We came up empty handed.  Everything out there was cute but it was very bohemian looking and Sarah is definitely not into tho boho chic look.  After trudging from store to store, she finally said, "Mom, I think I can dig something out of my closet, put a sweater over it, and make it work."

Done! 

On Saturday we spent the day doing work around the house.  We (Dan) finally finished taking down the kid's old swing set and we burned it.   He took the trampoline down earlier in the summer and now it's just a regular backyard.  No sign of kids anywhere except the rarely used basketball goal.

It was bittersweet seeing both of those come down but it was also a little depressing looking out the back window and seeing two play things that hadn't been used in ages just weathering away.

And speaking of sad - we watched the horrible Panthers/Patriots game on Sunday.  The Patriots have no defense and not even Tom Brady can make up for that. 

Tomorrow is Dan's hernia surgery.  He was told on his pre-op phone call that I had to wait the entire time and couldn't leave so I guess I will be heading to the library today to find a good book!

Any and all book suggestions welcomed!