Daddy Was Watching Her

My daughter loves cats. She has since she was a toddler.

Honestly, I don't remember how this story starts. My minds' eye doesn't see what I was doing or where her older brother was. He is strangely absent. This particular memory starts and ends with my husband 'keeping an eye on' our daughter while I did something in the house.

About twenty minutes into his voluntary duties, my mom 6th sense told me to go look in the garage and see how he and the three-year-old were doing. They were still alive. He was fiddling with something mechanical and she was sitting on the floor against the wall singing. On the garage floor, where it wouldn't have surprised me to see spiders. The garage floor, which truly wasn't clean enough to sit on. The garage floor, where I saw something that definitely didn't belong.

"Hey! I thought you said you'd watch her."  I whisper/hissed at him.

"Everything's fine," he insisted. "She's just sitting there singing to the kittens."

"Yeah, you're right. She's singing to them." I grabbed his arm and forced his full attention toward his adorable daughter. "Did you not notice that she has broken the necks of all four of them?"

I went over to her and gently removed a limp body from her tight little fists and placed it with the other three unfortunate kittens.

She had made up a lullaby to sing to her kitties. Since they needed to be rocked to sleep while she sang, she had taken them one at a time in a death grip about the neck and swung them back and forth.

How do you explain to a three-year-old that the kitties aren't going to wake up and play?

We took the kittens and a shovel into the trees and had a solemn cat funeral. We had a lesson about stroking kitties and not squeezing them so hard. We talked about never picking an animal up by the neck.

I would have been mad at my husband, but I have to confess that once when I thought she and her brother were playing nicely together in the yard, the mayhem led to my daughter getting eleven stitches.

Parenting is a learn as you go process. What a lot there was to learn.

Like the time I told the eye doctor my son didn't need shatterproof lenses.

CAT BATHROOM

In the early 1980's the County repaved the blacktop road that bordered one of our fields. The road engineer asked if we would allow them to stage some of their equipment near the intersection. This included a cone of sand which was used to spread on the road after it was resurfaced and sealed with oil. When the work was finished, we were left with several cubic yards of crushed rock consisting of particles 1/2" or smaller. The road department didn't want the expense of removing it, so we were stuck with the inconvenience of farming around it.

Occasionally, we thought of a use for the sand and chipped away at the pile.

We had two kids, and they got old enough to play outdoors without constant supervision. I thought it would be fun if they had a sandbox to play in. Their dad thought it would be a lot of work to get the sand from the field to our house.

He must have had a boring day because he gathered up empty seed bags and a shovel and transported some of the pile to the house. Did you know you can put 100 pounds of sand in a sack designed to hold 50 pounds of corn seed? 

Ed proceeded to pour sand into a pile in my flower garden. I cringed but didn't say anything. We found some 2x6 boards to make it an actual sand BOX. I gathered up plastic cups and anything else I could think of for our son and daughter to play with and led them outside to see the surprise. As they were walking down the steps, one of the cats was busily staking a claim. The confused children wondered what was so exciting about a cat scraping the sand over the hole he had dug. 

YUCK! 

Even though mom removed that portion of sand along with the cat poop, the two kids never played in it. Not once.

The cats loved it though, and my poor flowers were never the same.