MERDE

Hear ye, hear ye! The Wolf has made it for over a week in the real world. We are continuously marveling at how he has changed in the last few weeks. The kid will be a full month old by the end of next week and he's gone from looking like a strange, gangly, hairless cat, to a fat little baby. Even the doctors and nurses think he's just a small, full-term baby.

He's starting to interact a lot more, and he is specifically responding to our voices and everything. He smiles when he's comfortable, usually after a burp or a poop, or when we mess with his feet. I love messing with his feet. He's starting to voice his discomfort, also. He was so quiet when he was born, and in the hospital he only had one or two freakouts when we were around, but now he's starting to let us know when he's hungry or gassy or tired. As I type this, he's in the other room, grunting and squawking. When he does that, I just listen for a minute, see if he calms down, and go back to whatever I was doing. He's done, so he was probably just pooping.

Poop is the main thing right now. Many years ago, when helping my then-girlfriend move across the country, she had a long conversation with her mother, over the phone, about why her cat wasn't pooping. My girlfriend's cat, Harry, was once kind of my cat. He was, rather, a cat that lived in the same apartment as me and my friend, Tony, and had been inherited from one of Tony's ex girlfriends. Harry was old, and somewhat neurotic. Harry was raised around stoners in a house full of stoners in Kent, Ohio. I got the sense that Harry's feeding schedule was non-existent, as he had the habit of bolting his food as fast as he could until he would throw it all back up. The poor bastard just never trusted that there would be more food in the future, so he had to pack it in for the winter. And the winter would be long, cold, and full of pot haze. We worked on Harry's eating disorders in the best, healthiest way we could think of: by scaring the shit out of him. We would fill up the cat food dish, allow him to eat for about 30 seconds, and then scare the shit out of him, so he'd have to run away. Then we'd spend the rest of the day going through some version of that scenario throughout the week. He eventually got it about 80% of the time. And rightfully so, as we rescued him from the stoners, my girlfriend rescued him from us.

Anyway, while we were driving across the country, the cat wouldn't poop. My girlfriend would sit and stare at him and pet him and soothe him and put him in the box, but for four days, he wouldn't poop. He didn't seem to be in distress, so I didn't care. She cared, and she called her mom. And they talked about the cat's lack of pooping for about half an hour. After a long day of driving and other stress, I couldn't take it and kind of blew up on her about it. She broke up with me about a month later, as the long-distance thing wasn't going to work and she ended up marrying the guy she dumped me for and the cat, he survived a few more happy years in the desert. So the poop wasn't a problem.

But now, now all I seem to talk about with my wife is poop, farting, and sharting. I ask Carly at least three or four times a day whether the Wolf has pooped. I announce to her when he poops, and I often describe the color and consistency. We recently started giving him vitamins in his milk, and his poop has changed. Now, it resembles almost completely mustard and vegemite. We laugh when he farts or poops, especially when we're cradling his butt with our hands. He's kind of a fan of the clean canvas... whenever we put a fresh diaper on him he invariably farts or shits it up within moments. Sometimes, I squeeze him a little to make him go. It's hilarious. A few days ago, he had a blow-out and shat down his leg onto my red "Communist Party" shirt from Threadless.com. After I washed it, I was wearing it again and he threw up on it. I guess he doesn't get that kind of ironic play on words. Or he thinks it's not as funny as I think it is. Everyone's a critic.

The one thing I feel bad about is the dogs. I've really been screwing up their schedule. They used to go out more or less like clockwork, morning, evening, night. Three times a day. Sometimes, if the dogs were chill, we'd skip the late night walk and they'd lay around like lazy lobsters. But now, I take them out when I remember. Usually around 8 or 10 AM, and again sometime at night. Last night it was about 3AM. They're due now.

I'm going back to work this week, so the routine's going to change. I just figure that we'll get through it. For now, I'm just going to enjoy Pablo Shreiber with a porn stash humming the Ride of the Valkyries while he tears up a prison bunk on Orange is the New Black. Hilarious.