Prufrock and Annabelle are happy Baby Truman made it home without being abducted

Prufrock and Annabelle welcomed home their new baby brother Truman this week. They don’t seem too worried or concerned about this addition to the family, though they don’t really suffer his hunger cries, often vacating the room when Truman starts to howl.  In the months before Truman’s arrival, Pru started to realize something was up when she could no longer make biscuits on April’s stomach before bedtime. Annabelle was pretty much oblivious and for the most part stuck to her routine of food-cuddles-sleep.  Maybe all the extra furniture clued them in to the impending arrival.

April and I also started to prepare by taking a class at the birthing center. Every Wednesday night for six weeks we attended a two-hour class with five other couples. (Pru and Belle weren’t allowed to go, so we relayed important information to them once we came home.) The class was pretty straightforward. We watched movies of different types of birth, learned about the stages of labor, practiced different positions. Most of the class was the birthing nurse answering our unending questions.  The second week we toured the center, stopping in on the family waiting room, the birthing tub, the patient kitchen (all mothers get unlimited  juice), and one of the recovery rooms where they had the bed and a clear plastic bassinet used to prevent baby-napping.

When the nurse started talking about baby napping it took my brain a few moments to process what she meant because my first response was, “Why would you want to prevent your baby from napping?” Then I realized she used the word napping in its connection to kidnapping. As a father to be, I anticipated all sorts of things, diaper changing, car seats, sickness, crying, diaper changing, feeding, playing, reading to him, diaper changing, bathing him, and changing his diaper. But a scenario where someone comes into the hospital to abduct him never crossed my mind.

The hospital goes to great lengths to make sure no one runs off with a baby that isn't theirs. Every baby wears an ankle bracelet with a radio transmitter on it, and if the baby gets too close to the elevator or emergency exit, alarms sound. Babies can’t be carried in the halls but must stay in their bassinets and are wheeled from room to room. Parents are given I.D. bracelets that match the baby’s. (This also helps to prevent babies from being switched with other babies.) If a baby is carried through the hall or the alarm sounds, trained security guards are summoned to tackle the culprit. Most of this is done for the peace of mind of new parents, but I’m guessing every hospital fears litigation if one the infants under its care goes missing.

So is baby napping still a thing? Not much anymore, especially with all the safe-guards in place (there have been just over a hundred cases in the last 20 years). But a quick internet search guided me to some interesting facts. Most abductors are women, and most of those women are overweight. Some may have told others that they were pregnant. What kind of social groups are these women part of? Talk about peer pressure. You gain a few, have to lie about being pregnant, and to make sure the lie sticks, you risk jail time in an abduction attempt. Most abducted babies are black. (See here and here for more info on this.) I'm sure there's more to it than a few facts, but this isn't the place or the author to dive to terribly deep into the socio-economic factors surrounding baby-napping.

And is it really worth it? Babies cost a lot, cry a lot, and require assistance in all things poop related. And if you really want all that, why not get pregnant in the first place? It's pretty fun trying to get pregnant. I guess not all of us are that lucky, and for some the need for a baby without going through the proper channels and procedures is greater than the risk of getting caught.    

Prufrock drinks from a glass

When we moved to the east coast, Prufrock started having pee problems. She’d visit the litter box, eliminate a drop, then return minutes later to do the same. A diagnosis was made only after multiple visits to the vet (multiple vets) and finally a sonogram. She had a bladder stone. She underwent surgery and now must eat what we imagine to be the most boring food ever. One of the side effects of this food—or its main purpose—is thirst. Prufrock chugs water.

A couple of months ago, Prufrock started to drink the water out of the glass I kept on my nightstand. I began to leave a shorter glass with a wider mouth next to mine, hoping that Pru would use this glass instead. Now it is the only way she drinks. Even stranger, she really only drinks at night, when we are in bed.  Every once in a while she’ll drink in the early morning, but I’ve never seen her go into bedroom in the middle of the day to get a drink. She’s also pretty noisy about the whole thing, with three laps of water to every audible swallow.

Her drinking habits are not nearly annoying as the accent she has recently affected. We watched Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, so now she sounds like a raspy-voiced German amazed by the idea that a chicken is not self-aware. 

Prufrock String-Eater

Prufrock trying to pull some vagrant threads from the curtians

Prufrock loves eating string. In an earlier post I mentioned how she doesn’t really care much about food. That’s not entirely the case: she likes treats and she likes string—anything she can get her whiskers around. Tiny nylon threads fray off the edge of the curtain (buy fabric, ringlets with clamps, curtain rod, easy curtains) and Prufrock gets it in her head about twice a year to get some of those threads in her tummy.

When she was a kitten she was all about the elastic that made up April’s bra straps. We became very good about picking after ourselves (at least in the bra department—low-risk items could be left on the floor unmolested). No bra strap was safe. Anything unguarded was chewed through by the time we found it. I don’t think she ever swallowed much. To get anything down she’d have to chew through one part, swallow some, and bite down to free the elastic from the rest of the garment. This isn’t to say that she was never successful; we found bits of elastic in the litter box, just not as much as we’d expect from all the carnage Pru brought against April’s underwear drawer.

As Prufrock grew older her tastes matured. She moved on from elastic, her refined palate now preferring yarn. April is a knitter. We have a lot of yarn. A lot. About the apartment there are many unfinished knitting projects. The yarn floweth freely and Prufrock doth partake. Unlike with the elastic, it was easy to catch Pru in act of chomping down some yarn. We wouldn’t see her for a few minutes, and then one of us would hear a strange licking sound from behind the couch. April would jump up, scolding, and Pru would attempt to flee, yarn and skein unspooling behind her. Once caught, one of us would hold her as the other pulled lengths of unbroken yarn from her throat and stomach. On one unfortunate afternoon we had to perform this same operation but from the other end.

We were concerned, of course. At all of her checkups we had the vet feel her stomach for anything troubling. There was never a problem. In 2010 Pru had a bladder stone removed, and since then she’s cooled it on the string eating. As evident by the photo, she does get a hankering for thread, but it’s usually the thin, spindly stuff. In the four years we have lived in Massachusetts, she has rendered only one bra inoperable. 

A Brief Introduction to the Lives and Personalities of Prufrock and Annabelle

Annabelle and Prufrock came into our lives in 2007. Prufrock, at first, was a boy. She was larger than her sister, had broader shoulders, and was more outgoing. I know, our assumptions about male character and personality reveal an innate sexism, but I also blame a family member who “worked” at an animal shelter, and, once flipping over, inaccurately sexed Pru as male. I know there is a science and a difficulty to sexing chicks, one that takes years to learn, but in my experience, kittens are almost as hard in determining male or female. (I should also add, I have no experience in sexing anything but humans, and all my knowledge comes from sixth grade “family life.”)

Pru’s masculine undoing came early in her life and could be attributed to her need for belly rubs, especially while one of us sat on the toilet. As I indulged her one day—perhaps also my masculine undoing—I noticed she shared an anatomical likeness with her sister. Prufrock became a girl as quickly as one could jump over a small creek.

Sexism aside, Prufrock did have a particular personality that set her apart from her sister. She was more outgoing, willing to explore, unafraid of unknown noises that fill an apartment in a city. Once she discovered open windows, she would often stare out at the world and emit a small squeak of a meow. And she quickly learned that not all rectangular shapes are window sills, including a large picture frame hanging in the bedroom.

Annabelle in all things was more timid. When she was a kitten she would run and hide under the bed, fall asleep, then wakeup scared because we weren’t around, and come bounding into the living room meowing for us. She once fled from a plastic bag that she caught herself in not knowing the handle was around her neck. She loves the window just as much as Pru, but concerns herself minimally with what’s going on outside, nor does she care about the bugs and moths Prufrock will often chase.

The one thing that Annabelle does regard with the utmost importance is food. Pru never did care much about her food and was content with just about anything we put in front of her. She doesn’t like wet food much; Annabelle eats nothing but wet food—the worse stuff you can buy, nothing natural or organic, manufactured meat bits, and only with the added cheese. If she’s hungry she runs around the apartment, meowing at us, then runs into the kitchen, back out to see if we understand, then back into the kitchen, repeating this move until tuna in gravy with cheese is on plate ready to be lapped up. When they were little we would feed them treats. One time we gave one to Prufrock, and just as she had it in her mouth, Annabelle ran up to her. Prufrock hissed, and in so doing dropped the treat. Annabelle grabbed it in her mouth and scarfed it down.

The oddest thing about these cats is how nice they are. They’ve never purposefully scratched or bit us. When we carry them, they don’t resist. They sleep next to each other, on the same chair or in the same cat bed, especially in winter. On our cross-country trips they sleep in the same carrier. They like to be where we are. I’ve never known cats to be this friendly.

Introduction to Pru and Belle

                                             
Here are Prufrock (left) and Annabelle, sisters and litter-mates, the cats that I am the dad of. This blog is about them, about me, and about my wife, and all the adventures we have staring out the window.