To my dear, sweet baby boy,

You totally and completely surprised your Daddy and me by deciding you’d like to enter the world today instead of on your due date, which is 27 days away. On Friday night, July 30th, 2010, your dad and I (and you, in my belly) went out for Thai food with our friends. By 11:00, I was upstairs folding laundry and talking to your Aunt Lisa on the phone. 4 minutes later, I found myself telling Lisa I had to go call the doctor, because “either I just peed my pants or my water just broke.”

Your daddy was convinced it was the former. I was convinced otherwise. Guess who was right?

I will spare you most of the details of your birth, but I will tell you that the experience of pushing you out of my body was the wildest, most surreal, and most amazing thing I have ever done or will ever do. Labor started out rough, but once we finally got into a Labor & Delivery room (and I got my blessed epidural), it was a pretty fantastic experience. Your arrival was assisted by your dad and three women (2 nurses and a midwife) that I had never met but instantly loved,to the point that I told them my experience felt like we were in The Red Tent, but with one boy in the room (and modern medicine)(I doubt you’ll ever read that book, as it is a more girly one than not, but who knows?).

After the umbilical cord that physically connected us over the past 36 and a half weeks was cut, the midwife placed you on my bare chest to warm you up. When I looked over at your dad, the tears streaming down his face matched my own – and let me tell you, he didn’t even cry at his own dad’s funeral (that’s a story for another day, though, little man).

You are, without a single doubt, the most marvelous person I have ever met. At less than 24 hours old, you already have a personality. You came out of the womb with your fist under your chin, like you were intently thinking about something (by the way,thanks for that elbow-in-the-perineum. Lucky for you, you’re too fabulous not to forgive. Just don’t resent me if you never have a sibling due to my fear of future baby-making activities with your dad)).

. We saw you in this pose on the ultrasound, and you do it a lot in your sleep or when you are nursing. You have beautiful, curious eyes. You have a healthy set of lungs, although you don’t tend to use them without good reason. You are a snuggle-bug, and when I see you cuddling with your Daddy, I’m amazed by how tiny you are. Your dad and I are prone to talking about how much we love you and how we can’t imagine NOT having you. It’s like you were part of our family long before you even existed.

I love you, little man.

I am sitting in a Starbuck’s right now, killing time between my dentist appointment (ouch! Pregnancy-inflamed gums and teeth-cleaning are NOT fun) and my friend Alice’s lunch time, so I am going to try my best not to cry in public again over my kitty.

But yes, it has been done, and oh, I cannot describe how hard that was. Have you ever walked into the vet’s office with a kitty in a carrier and walked out with an empty carrier?

Ugh.

Despite Rob’s objections, I stayed in the room with Alex for the procedure. I felt I owed it to him to love on him as he was ushered into sleep and then into death. I thought it would be unbearable, but it wasn’t. I couldn’t look at his face, though. Did you know that cats’ eyes don’t close, even when they are sedated? Keep that in mind if you ever find yourself in this situation, and position yourself accordingly.

And so Alex was, and then he wasn’t. And there is now a Hurricane Alex, which, in a weird way, makes me smile. And I am the luckiest girl in the world to have had such a loyal, loving boy for 15 years, and I’m even luckier to have a mom, dad, and sister who will each cry on the phone with me and let me sob about what a great cat he was, and I’m also lucky to have a husband who, despite being one who doesn’t form quite as strong attachments to pets as I do, will never ever let the words “it’s just a cat” cross his lips and instead will be sweet and loving and understanding.

And now I am crying in Starbucks and the people next to me must think I am insane.

Deep breaths.

You know what has brought me comfort? Three things: (1) taking Catheroo’s story to heart (I’m sorry I can’t link here – don’t know how, since I’m using a mobile device to type this) and thinking of Alex’s passing as though he were simply making room for another baby to enter my life; (2) imagining Alex frolicking with Charley, my cat who died when I was in law school, and eating apples (thanks for that image, Erin!); and (3) donating money to the local humane society down in Tallahassee, where I first adopted Alex so long ago. And, I suppose, a fourth thing: time.

Rest in peace, my sweet boy. You really were a great, unforgettable cat.

Instead, though, I’m putting all those conversational topics away to talk about the overwhelming sadness I feel right now.  Yesterday when we picked up Alex (you know Alex - he’s my 15-year-old tabby cat) from the vet, where we kennel him when we go out of town, we got some very sad news about his deteriorating health.  Alex has not been well for a while.  First, he developed a thyroid problem.  We’ve been treating that and his blood levels are normal, but he has still been losing weight at an alarmingly rapid rate.  In fact, five years ago, Alex was a whopping 24.6 pounds.  Today, he is a little over 12 pounds.  For a cat, that’s crazy.  When you think about the fact that a good 7 of those pounds have dropped off in the last year or two, that’s even crazier.  His litterbox habits have become increasingly more horrendous, so that we’ve had to line the catbox area with puppy wee-wee pads (and yet he still occasionally goes in inappropriate places like our bathroom or on the kitchen floor).  He also randomly starts howling (sort of – it’s a crazy meow) for no apparent reason, so that I can’t help wondering if he’s in pain.

Well, fast forward to yesterday, when the vet told me she had done a urinalysis on Alex to make sure he didn’t have a urinary tract infection (as I’d requested) and that it turns out his little kidneys and his liver are failing him. 

We don’t really have any options left.  The vet can put him on some special renal-failure diet, but she has no real hope that it will make a difference.  We could isolate him, like have him live in the basement or something, but I think that would be incredibly traumatic for him.  Or, we could consider that maybe it is time to put him to sleep, before he suffers so badly that he loses his personality and is clearly in pain.

It breaks my heart.  What makes it worse is the fact that I’ve let myself get so frustrated with his litter behavior that I have said, more than once, that it might not be so awful if he passed on.  And yet, now that it is probably time for that to happen, I can’t stand it. 

The vet says it’s a personal decision, and that she has some patients that she feels have taken this step too early and some that she thinks maybe have waited too long.  She has said, more than once, that Alex’s medical tests – as well as his behavior when he boarded with her this weekend – show it isn’t too early in this case.  And yet…a part of me feels like it is.

We have an appointment with her on Thursday morning, for now.  Will I be able to keep it?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if I can do this.  In the meantime, I’m loving on him every chance I get and feeding him all of his favorite foods (tonight’s dinner was tuna fish with chopped tomatoes on the side; tomorrow we’ll have apples and grape popsicles fora snack before another tuna dinner and possibly some pumpkin or winter squash). 

Have you guys ever put a pet down?  How did you know it was the right time?  How did you ever get through it?  

In the meantime, I’ll be sitting around sobbing over my cat.  Okay, not really.  I’ve cried a lot today, but at least tomorrow I have a busy day scheduled – haircut and OB appointment – to hopefully keep my mind off things.  Dear God, please don’t make me cry at the hair salon or the doctor’s office.  Pretty please with sugar on top.

For those who are wanting to see Lara-with-pregnant-belly, you can pop over to my childhood friend Sara’s blog, where she so kindly posted pictures from my Florida baby shower.  I share this link with the caveat that I think I look horrible in the pictures – my hair is all flat-y and my face is blotchy because I kept crying like a maniac.  You can also see my precious niece helping me open presents, and learn what we are naming our little man. 

In other news, guess what Rob and I are doing tonight?  We are attending – I kid you not – a monster truck show.  Oh yes we are.  Rob saw the commercial and started going on and on about how awesome that looks, and who am I to say no to a hilarious way to spend an evening?   I will be sure to bring my camera, because I have a feeling we are going to want to document this event for posterity.  Also, can I just say that I love my husband for buying club-level tickets so I can watch these giant trucks do ridiculous things in the blessed air conditioning? 

In other random news, I do not recommend the new Robin Hood movie.  We went last night and I almost fell asleep.    That was a two and a half hour movie that could have been done in one hour.  And the cameras were all shaky during the battle scenes, which made me dizzy.  I can’t decide if they were shaky in order to give us the full effect of how chaotic a battle scene could be or if they were shaky because some sort of cinematographer person sucked at his job.  Either way, it was annoying.

Alright, my little whippersnappers.  I am off to get my hyperthyroid-afflicted cat some medicine and get this lazy Saturday rolling.  Have a great weekend, folks!