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Happy New Year!

It’s a bit different already. For one, it started three hours fifty minutes after some student renters down the block woke us by ringing in the day with hollering in the street and shooting off bottle-rockets when Nate woke up, jiggled open his door and came upstairs to tell us he was awake by climbing into our bed. Maria finally got him to settle down at five and then he woke at seven to really start the day. I let her sleep and took a nap when he did. For another, I had been up for almost six hours, vacuumed the rugs, dragged the xmas tree to the curb, shovelled the walks, tried to build a snowman with Nate and was watching him play in the snow when a couple of twenty-something guys walked by looking very lost and I overhead one of them say to the other, “Yeaaah! And that’s when you came out in your underwear!” It’s different.

My son already renamed the cat, now he’s renamed his paternal grandfather. We’ve been using the titles “Gramps” and “Nanna” that my folks chose for themselves and Nate went along, but while driving from the airport to their house he decided that “Gramps” is better called “Nups”. He has no problem saying “Gramps” or making any of the sounds so the reason is all his own. He won’t explain and he pays no attention when I correct him. Dad thinks it’s funny so “Nups” it is.

Nathan has given the cat a new name: “Knuckles”.

Why? I don’t know. He says, “Knuckles! Cat!” and giggles. Then he tries to give it a big hug around its rump, which it tolerates but doesn’t work out so well in practice. Why? I don’t know. The cat, back to his fighting weight after sixty days of on-demand dry food and a strenuous regimen of sleeping on chairs and lazing near sunny windows, is non-plussed.

We adopted a cat over the weekend from the local shelter, an affectionate neutered three-year-old tom named “Garfield”, owing to his orange tabby coloring and his previous owner’s lack of imagination. Owing to our lack of foresight, he found the cat door into the basement and spent his first twenty-four hours hiding between the joists. We planned to put his litter box down there but didn’t anticipate the cat seeing it as an escape hatch from his new digs. Last night we coaxed him into the cat carrier and brought him upstairs to his fleece bed, locking the cat door behind us. Today he’s spending most of his time getting acclimated by hiding under beds and behind chairs with forays out for exploration and some head-scratching, chest-rubbing purring with adults. He is tolerant of Nathan and Nathan is gentle but the boy is still a two-year-old and his jumping, running, yelling, loud playing with toys, what-not racket sends Garfield off to quieter rooms.

Nathan will be two years old this weekend and he’s talking quite a bit and evidently putting together some kind of model of the world around him. We are daily witnesses to his organizing and reorganizing things into categories. He knows and uses the words “cake”, “cookie”, “ice cream” and “pop”- for the frozen juice “ice pops” we make in the summer- to refer to the appropriate objects. Beware to the adult who uses any of these words in his presence, he knows what you said and expects you to produce a treat. It seems that his category for all sweets, except ice pops, oddly, is “cupcake” and he tacks on a description of his internal state so he will hear the ice cream trunk and say, “Cupcake! Happy cupcake!” and point outside (he’s had ice cream from a truck once, behold the power of partial positive reinforcement) or get a cookie and remark, “Mmmm. Happy cupcake!”