These animals.

Sookie the Hamcat crawled up onto the bed during the night to settle herself on the man. She tried to lick her belly, lost her balance, rolled off in slow motion, and got wedged between his torso and a pillow with all her feet up in the air. She recommenced to licking her belly, splayed like a stuffed cat.

My mother brought home another baby bird, this one a homely pigeon.

It lives in a little cage atop the bookshelf, and the cats have taken turns launching themselves off the hutch and dining table in superhero form to tackle the cage onto the floor. They are bad at it, though, so the end result is a rain of cartwheeling cats, knocking over vases and chairs. The little java finches express their disdain for losing the attentions of the cats by pitching all their birdseed into my coffee pot below the shelves. I am going to make leg warmers and hat fascinators out of all of them.

The school is overrun by chickens. The mynah birds work as velociraptors, teaming up to terrorize the hens and eat the chicks, and the herds of fowl abandon sickly babies, so that the kids end up running into the library and presenting my mother with chickens every few days, which she sneaks back to their mothers. Gavin got hold of one and named it Shadow, but the little thing wasn't eating or drinking, and expired in the night. My mother thought it might be good if the boy said goodbye to it by tossing it over the fence for the forest to reclaim, but I took it from him because I remember the panic and heartache of being a 10 year old faced with the disposal of a dead baby animal. It doesn't feel much different than being a 33 year old faced with the same, but it sits lighter on the brain afterward.

Meanwhile

School has let out. The boy saw out the end of 4th grade with a production of James and the Giant Peach. His teacher is very proud of her dramatic productions, which seem to end at sitting the kids on the cafeteria stairs with scripts to read from monotonously. The costumes were good this time, though, thanks to an industrious parent with a big felt budget. Gavin was the earthworm. He looked like a Gary Larson worm.

Or... something.

The boy has no ego or self-consciousness, so dorky he is dead cool. He emoted and whined and flailed while his classmates muttered sheepishly into the microphone. The earthworm owned the show. I was satisfied that my kid was the BEST, which is all any parent wants in a 20 minute school play.

Complaint: it is summer, and nobody makes swim diapers for babies under 16 lbs. And for that matter, nobody makes infant swim suits with handles on them. Which they should, because babies are slippery. Will have to resort to cunning in order to bob my 13 lb dumpling around the pool.

Speaking of, she is 2 months old and getting fists, toys, and hanks of my hair into her mouth now. Genius!