Do You Speak Cat? I Need Your Help.

I'm going to need someone to figure out what goes on inside this little head:

Can I hire a cat translator? Or a feline mind reader? Something?

Little dude is baffles me in so many ways. Max is the sweetest cat we've ever had (Sadly, that's saying something. We're all Cat Lady Freakish up in this place and always have been). He's also the most defiant? Devious? Kerfluffling? I don't even know the word for what he is. I just know that when I walk into a room, he looks at me and waits. I imagine he's thinking, "Will she notice that I'm on the kitchen counter? Will she care? Do I care if she cares? Does that rule still exist? It does? OK, then." He is constantly doing things he knows he's not supposed to do and he only stops when you call him out on it. He instantly complies, but you have to tell him.

So he's like almost like a toddler except that I don't have to wipe his butt. That makes him better than a toddler, don't you think?

Anyway, I need to know what's going on in his head. Then perhaps I could figure out how it is that the kitten (he hasn't had his first birthday yet, I don't think) (I'm a bad Cat Lady who doesn't know the cats' birthdays.) who fears nothing found himself in a bit of a predicament.

Our cats are not allowed outside. Ever. Not at all. The others respect this fact. Actually, Ali is scared to death of the great outdoors, so I don't even have to tell her. She runs and hides any time a door opens around here because she doesn't want to know if something big and scary will come through the door. Powder wants to escape, but I can glare him right back inside. Max, however, just saunters right on out the door as if he was a shoplifter casually escaping Target with a bag full of loot.

Walk.

Walk.

Walk.

RUUUUNNNNN!

Every time.

He doesn't run because he's scared, though. That cat is not scared of anything. That was evident when we had a whole bunch of people over a few weeks ago. He casually lounged in the middle of the chaos the entire time. At one point, he was surrounded by a half dozen kids who were running and screaming as they had a foam sword fight and Max was all ::yawn:: "Hey, anyone want to pet me? I'm right here, just chillin'."

And he was just chillin' when I got home from work yesterday. Just sitting up on the window sill chillin'. I'm guessing that he broke out of prison that morning when Alexis went out the front door to get on the school bus. Her getting out the door in the morning always involves a lot of flying elbows, papers shuffling, backpacks falling, and ridiculous amounts of confusion. I could get Taz from Looney Toons in a jacket and out the door with less chaos. I don't know why. It just is.

So he must have escaped when Alexis opened the door and then spent the entire day outside.

Which is exactly how our neighbor's cats spend every day. They are outdoor cats who are confined to their yard by an electric fence, which obviously works really well considering the reason Max was sitting on the window sill was that the neighbor's cat was acting as his prison guard and not letting him move.

Here's what I know.

1. Max escaped.
2. The neighbor's cat must have been highly motivated to leave their yard. That's actually the first time I've seen it not in their yard.
3. There was some sort of scuffle that knocked over some pumpkins.

That's it. That's all I know. Oh, wait! I also know that Max was scared out of his skull. He was shaking in terror when I pried him off of that window sill. The other cat was all, "Hello! That's mine! Put him down, please!" as I tossed Max into the house. The other cat had no intentions of leaving Max unattended and didn't care what I had to say about it.

There's a story there and I don't know what it is. I want to know what it is. Somebody send me a cat psychic, please.

Lessons In Helicopter Parenting

When you find yourself trapped in a car with three very loud five-year old girls, I think the only appropriate response is to try your damnedest to ignore them.  Which is exactly what I did on Saturday when I had the good fortune of hauling these three to a birthday party:

Three good kids. Really. Even when they're together and their IQs drop by the obligatory way-too-many-points (as often happens when a group of screeching girls forms), they're really very well-behaved.

But loud.

OMG. So loud.

Especially the one that belongs to me. I don't know what her deal is, but she turns into Megaphone Mouth when she has an audience.

I gave them control of the radio and did everything I could to ignore them as they sang Justin Bieber songs at the top of their lungs. It worked really well on the way to the birthday party, but then they ate cake and got to make their own ice cream sundaes. Ever watch a 5-year old make an ice cream sundae? They don't need ice cream. They need sprinkles. All of them. There will be no sprinkles for you because, seriously, they ate them all.

If you thought three 5-year olds were loud, you ain't heard nothing. Three 5-year olds hopped up on a sprinkle-rush are the loudest creatures on planet earth. As I drove across town after the party so that I could drop off the extra ones with their mom, I realized that there was no way I would survive the whole trip. I *had* to give them a chance to run off some energy or they were going to turn my car into a giant bouncing ball.

PARK. PLAYGROUND. ANYTHING.

We took a vote and the loud-mouthed girls decided they wanted to go to a playground for a little bit. As luck would have it, we were just passing one, so I quickly veered off the highway and pulled up to a playground that Alexis and I have never visited.

The playground is in a, well, "suspect" sort of neighborhood. The neighborhood isn't bad by any means, but it has a reputation for being bad. Reality just doesn't quite live up to urban legend. Reality says that the neighborhood is filled with lower income families who are doing their best to get by and you best not do anything to mess that up because they take a lot of pride in their neighborhood. It's clean and it's just as safe as any public playground in the suburbs.

As soon as I let the Three Loud-Mouths escape the car, they took off running for the slides and swings. If I thought I was doing a good job of ignoring them, they quickly taught me that I had much to learn about the Art of Ignoring. They wanted nothing to do with me. Don't look at them. Don't take any photographs. Just go away and let them do their thing.

The very second the Three Loud-Mouths began to mingle with the kids who live in the neighborhood, I noticed it. The difference.

While I was keeping a close eye on the little monsters who were under my care, the other kids were without guarded parental supervision. I was the helicopter *whoop*whoop*whooping* over the scene while the other parents were waaaaaaaay over by the houses chatting with one another. They could see their kids, but they couldn't hear them. They were monitoring their kid's safety, but from a distance.

A distance that I wouldn't be willing to maintain. I work hard to ignore my kid when she's being obnoxiously loud, but I do it at close proximity, mostly so I can take a few photographs.

And she hates it.

Each minute that passed was filled with pleas from the Three Loud-Mouths for me to go get a hobby or something. "You can sit in the car!" they suggested. "You don't have to watch us!" they said. "Moooooooooooom! Check your email or something!" Alexis begged. They wanted to play and jibber jabber and generally be crazy and my helicopter action was cramping their style.

Meanwhile, the other kids were literally begging me to notice them. "Take my picture!" one cried.

"Look at me!" another cried out.

"Can you take my picture, please?" another politely urged.

"Me next! Me next! I look really pretty today!" another said.

A half dozen kids, each clamoring more than the last as they all fought for my attention. They all fought to be seen. They all wanted a moment in the shadow of a helicopter mom.

The moment the Three Loud-Mouths realized I had begun capturing the joyous eyes of the kids who had been at the playground before us (Seriously, scroll back up and look. Are those not the the most beautifully happy eyes you have ever seen?), everything changed. Suddenly they wanted to be the center of my universe.

It turns out it's not that awful to have a helicopter hovering over you as you play after all.

It's A Shame She's Not At Least A Little Bit Photogenic