It's the last time for bath time & our day trip to San Jacinto

On Friday a co-worker told me about an amazing product that would get rid of the fleas on my grown up cats as well as my infant kitties. While I was hesitant to use anything, even water on those little juniors I knew I had to do something before the fleas tied them up and carried them off to parts unknown. So I went to Costa Mesa and bought the recommended product. I went home, read the directions and the ingredients then decided that I would use it on Ashleigh and Uncle Daddy first and then I would tackle the kittens. (How cute I was...look at me thinking I was going to wash kittenS. Plural. Many. All. HA!)

I put warm water in the kitchen sink about 2 inches deep. I have a little tiny mobile home sink so this didn't amount to a whole lot of water. According to the directions on the bottle I was supposed to douse the kitty with the shampoo before getting him wet. And I was supposed to make sure that I got it under his belly, in his arm pits and between his ears because that is where fleas like to hide. At first Lorenzo thought that I was simply rubbing his back and belly and then he felt the moisture of the shampoo hit his skin. MAY DAY! MAY DAY! He was off like a shot but I caught him by the tail. (killing two birds with one stone...I got shampoo on his tail while stopping him from running and jumping on my couch.) I attempted to disperse the shampoo that was already on him but he was acting like the shampoo was burning his skin off. I picked him up and carried him to the sink. His little heart was beating a mile a minute and I knew that he thought that I had picked him up to protect him from any further harm. I felt like a total heel when I lowered him in to the sink. The instant his little pink toe hit the water he was scrambling in mid air. He was screaming and flailing and it is very hard to hold on to a soapy cat who is screaming and flailing. He managed to connect with the screen on the kitchen window and he was not going to let go. In fact, he had planned on climbing UP the screen to safety but since I wouldn't let go of his hind end he changed paths and decided that he'd sit on my head. It only took 2 second and I was covered in flea soap. His tail had hit the water in the sink and that was all over me, too. He had one foot firmly encased in my skull and the other in my back. He had a hind foot STUCK IN MY EAR and the other one was kind of swinging across my face. I let him go so I could assess my wounds. Of course he went straight for the couch so I had to grab him before he got there. I knew that I couldn't just let him go all full of soap so I picked him up and tried to put him back in or even near the sink. The same exact scene replayed it self the following 3 attempts at getting the soap off of him. I have long acrylic finger nails and I didn't want to hurt him so I was trying to hang on to him with the front pads of my fingers. Not an easy task regardless of the wet and soapy factor. I saw a couple of dead fleas in the water so at least I knew that the shampoo was working. No matter how I tried to discuss this with him, Lorenzo just did not want to complete this bathing ritual. He did everything short of writing a letter to his congressman in order to get me to stop putting water on him. When he started to cry in a pitiful, mournful wail I had had enough. I couldn't listen to him cry. I took him out of the sink and tried to wrap him in a towel. Apparently the towel was teeming with invisible flames because he acted, once again, as though I was trying to murder him. He was completely dripping wet so there was no way I could just let him go. I chased him around the house and got as much water off of him as I could.



I figured that if I didn't at least try to bathe Ashleigh then what I had just gone through with Lorenzo would all be for naught. So I emptied the sink and started all over. The debacle with Lorenzo was mere child's play compared to the 4 alarm fire created when I tried to put Ashleigh in the water. She didn't like having shampoo rubbed on her either but she just tried to saunter away. When I tried to put her in the water she pretty much ripped me to pieces. Ashleigh hasn't had her nails clipped in months because she will not let me cut them. I cut Lorenzo's when he's sleeping, just like a human baby, but I can't even get near Ashleigh's toes whether she's asleep or not. I tried everything except throwing water at her from across the room and she tried everything except whipping out a gun and shooting me to get me to stop getting her wet. I got as much of the soap off as possible and then prayed that any residual soap wouldn't harm the babies. I didn't get to dry Ashleigh off at all. She ran and hid under the couch. It was a very hot day so I wasn't worried about her being wet as long as she stayed away from the babies and off of the top of the couch.


I was glad that Ashleigh was hiding because I thought that would give me some freedom to wash the babies. I started with new water in the sink that I actually tested with my elbow. I was so afraid of startling or burning or freezing the babies that I took major extra care to make it just perfect. I got one of the white babies and I put the tiniest bit of shampoo on it and it wasn't 1 second later that the baby was meowing it's tiny little head off. I didn't even have the time to get this baby 25% soaped up before Ashleigh came flying out from under the couch and climbed up my back and started her rescue effort. She kept grabbing the baby by it's entire head and tried to pull it out of my hand. Had I let go of the baby I'm sure it would have fallen in to the water so I had no choice but to try to hold on to this soapy kitten and try to unpry Ashleigh's mouth from it before she pulled it's head off. I had to use all of the strength I had in my fingers to pry her mouth off of the kitten. We went through this in rapid succession approximately 10 times. Ashleigh is nothing if not tenacious. I got Ashleigh off of my back long enough to dip the baby's hind quarters in the water. Then BOOM! Ashleigh is right back up on the sink, scratching my arm trying to move my arm closer to her so she can grab the baby. I rinsed the baby as well as I could with an angry mama cat attached to my arm and then I put the baby in a towel and I dried it and rubbed it as well as I could so that it wouldn't catch a chill. I let Ashleigh see that the baby was still all in one piece and she licked it and cuddled with it and purred to it. This brought Lorenzo out of hiding and he, too, had to console the traumatize baby. While this trauma bonding was taking place I decided to take my wet clothes off. That's when I discovered that one of them had cut me so deep that the wound had bled enough to cause my shirt to stick to my back. Good times. 3 semi bathed cats out of 7. A very poor outcome indeed.




I decided to reward Ashleigh and her babies for their valor by cleaning out my closet and putting her baby box in there just like she wanted. She was very, very happy, yet I'm certain I could still hear her cussing at me under her breath.

Saturday morning I left my semi clean kitty family and went to my moms and met up with Tori and the kids. I had a play date scheduled with cousin Billie and her niece Trinity. It took me a couple of hours to get Tori's kids dressed and wrangled in to the car but we made it and we were off like a herd of turtles. The kids were starving so I stopped at Taco Bell and we had lunch on the hoof. Jake even got his very own soda and he was thrilled to death. Then we made a quick stop at Walmart so Rebek could get an outfit that actually covered her up and helped to make her look like the 15 year old school girl she is instead of the 40 year old hooker she was impersonating. What I thought should have been a pop in/pop out stop at the store turned in to an hour long whine fest. "I'm not wearing THAT!". "Everything in this store is so ugly." "That's not EVEN cute." I finally left Rebekah on her own to find something that suited her fancy. Had I stayed with her she would have wound up wrapped up mummy style in a "Transformers" beach towel. I told Hannah that she could pick out an outfit, too, and it really wasn't any easier to find something that passed muster with her either. Everything she put on she had to pull down to her hip bones or it would "choke" her. That being done, everything she put on made her look like Dick Van Dyke in the dancing penguin scene from "Mary Poppins". After she tried on 5 things that she didn't like I was ready to give up on her, too. During this whole time Paul, who had Jake in a shopping cart, was no where to be found. Usually all I have to do is call his name and he shows up but that was not working today. Every time I realized he wasn't near me I had to go off and find him. When I found him I would remind him that he needed to stay where I could see him or at least where he could hear me if I called for him. This couldn't have concerned him any less. I was thisclose to telling both of the girls that they would not be getting new outfits because we were going to get back in the car and go home. Then suddenly they both found clothes that we could all agree on, and Paul managed to stay close enough to me that I didn't have to go spelunking to the depths of Walmart in order to find him. Jake and Paul found a mini Etch-A-Sketch and they swore they would share it while on our trip to the desert.

The entire way to Billie's house I had Paul holding the Etch-A-Sketch directly in front of my face so he could show me his works of art. How many times could I show enthusiasm for his show case of criss crosses or stairs? I did my best but then I had to tell him that I could no longer be the judge in his art fair while I was trying to drive a car. He was not amused.

When we got to Billie's house Trinity was taking a nap. I asked the kids to play quietly so they wouldn't wake her up but apparently I forgot that I had Foghorn Leghorn with me. It wasn't 5 minutes later that Trinity had woken up and she was not a happy camper. We had an early dinner and she didn't want anything to eat. We had bought her an outfit to match the one that Hannah got at Walmart and she wasn't impressed. When we finally told the kids to find their shoes so we could go to see "Ratatouille" that's when she perked up. We all filed in to the Billie's car and the two little ones were very happy to discover that their car seats wouldn't fit in the car if we all wanted to ride together. I told Jake that we'd have to take our own car and he was crest fallen. The theater was less than 1 mile down the street so I relented and let him ride without the car seat. Jake and Trinity thought they were all that and a bag of chips! Trinity taught Jake to play "I pye". You know the game where one person finds something that they can see and says "I pye something....(fill in the descriptive word)". It was very cute and I didn't want to tell either of them that the word was "spy" not "pye", however I needn't have worried because Hannah, who is not one for Tom Foolery of any sorts, told them repeatedly, but it was made apparent that that was a whole other game.

Once we got the kids in to the theater we divided up the popcorn and soda and explained one last time that they had to remain in their seats through out the entire movie and that they were not supposed to talk.

The movie was very entertaining and the kids did pretty well, however our very own junior Siskel and Ebert discussed the movie with reckless abandon. Fortunately the theater was filled with mostly children so no one complained. They wound up sitting through 95% of the movie and I think that is excellent for a 3 and a 4 year old.

On the short ride home we discussed the perils and the adventures of "Ratatootie" and I'm happy to say that the little ones had a very good interpretation of what they had just seen.