Some kitty pictures...

I'm still waiting for the latest belly shots that J took just last week, including some with dear kitty I think, but here is one from last month. So this was on Feb. 21 I think, at just 30weeks. (Today I'm 34 and 3 days.) You can't see too well anyway because I was lying down, but this gives a good idea of how my sweet black cat spent much of his last weeks. The other black and white cat would try to squeeze her way in when she could. Obviously both of them had to find a space other than my lap.














And this is a picture of sweet cat last year, even before his hypoglycemic episode in April. Notice his two cute little white whiskers - I loved those!















Finally, to be fair, I should post a picture with all three. The other two are brother and sister from the same litter and they will be 12 next month. But the black cat was always pretty indifferent about them, and was much more bonded with me. I miss him so much - I can't believe how much it hurts. But the other two sweeties are sitting here next to me as I type this, and I know that I am lucky to still have them to keep me company.

Sad day

This is going to be very brief because I just don't have it in me to write much, but wanted to post that we lost our dear sweet kitty this morning. He had been getting sicker and was back in the hospital this week. When I visited him yesterday, I knew that today we would have to put him down, but was surprised when the vet called so early in the morning to say that we should come in as soon as possible. We hurried over. I got to hold him in my arms the whole time and I hope he knew that I was there for him. This was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and that includes all the sadness I've had in the past few years of infertility, especially because he had been there to comfort me through all that pain.

I don't have any pictures to post at the moment since I lost my hard drive info and haven't put stuff back on this computer, but I will post some belly shots from last week with kitty in them as soon as J can get them downloaded.

As hard as this is for me, I am also feeling a guilty sense of relief, as the stress of his illness and all the care I've had to give him was really beginning to wear me down. Hopefully now I can find some sense of peace and move on to the next stage of my life as we prepare for our joyous event next month.

Rest in peace dear sweet kitty.

I am a terrible, very bad blogger!

I cannot believe it has been a month since I posted last. I really suck. But it has been an eventful month. Nothing bad as far as Mr. Bean is concerned, but I have had a sick kitty who has been keeping me on my toes. I'm going to cheat by copying the story from my update post on IVFC, since it is a long story.

My oldest cat is 17 1/2 years old and has been diabetic for 7 years, though it was pretty well managed until the scary hypoglycemic incident almost a year ago. About a month ago he had stopped eating - I noticed because he started to have another slight hypoglycemic incident, but I caught it in time and took him to vet, so not a big crisis. But she recommended that I start checking his blood glucose at home, which I did (got a regular human meter and test strips, etc). Turns out he just wasn't eating regularly so I stopped giving him insulin and eventually took him back to vet where they did an abdominal ultrasound and admitted him for IV fluids. Seems he had/has pancreatitis, most likely related to the diabetes. So we changed his dry food to a high fiber diet (Hills WD) and have been monitoring him closely. He was in the hospital for two days, where he started eating again and seemed better. But once he came home he still wasn't eating well ( I was even resorting to giving him baby food, and even dropper feeding him - he has lost so much weight!) so the doctor suggested that maybe he was dehydrated (in the hospital had been on fluids the whole time, which seemed to help), so now we are giving him subcutaneous fluids once a day at home. I have to say, going through multiple IVFs has made me quite a trooper with needles and such, otherwise I don't think I could do all this poking with him. The first time I ever gave him a shot for diabetes 7 years ago, I almost fainted. And you guys may have heard my stories of bad blood draws and other such things - I was quite a wimp and have come a long way! Anyway, I can't believe I'm actually doing this, but it does seem to be helping.

Since I'm home so much, I'm able to follow him around and make sure he's eating. I've been trying to get him to eat some wet food as well as dry, and it is challenging since we have 2 other cats who I have to keep out of his wet food. They have been getting so fat lately since we've been bribing the old guy with any kind of wet food treats, so finally we had to cut the others off, for their own good. They are now on restricted calorie diets. So, it has been very challenging lately and I've been thinking about whether this is the end for our old guy, which makes me very sad. I have never lost a cat before, and have had him since the year after I graduated college. He is doing better though - we added an appetite stimulant that seems to be helping, and he is eating little bits throughout the day. And I have also noticed that he just has problems eating dry food due to bad teeth, even though he does like it and tries to eat it, rather ineffectively. So my latest fix is to crush up the dry food and add a little warm water, which basically makes like a cereal mush. He happily eats it, and the other cats aren't interested in eating it since it is the same dry they have in their bowls, so I can leave it out for him to eat whenever he wants. With the wet food, I have to monitor him constantly to see if he is eating it and to keep the others away.

Oh, and here's another crazy thing I've done lately with regards to the cat - since we were planning to buy a video monitor for the baby, we went ahead and got one and I set the camera up to look at the cat's favorite chair, where I put his food and he spends the night. After we go to bed, I can keep an eye on him to see if he is eating. Two nights in a row now I've woken up around 5 to see him eating, which makes me feel much better.

Second crisis of the past few weeks is that my hard drive crashed, I lost all my data (including photos from past 4 years), and of course I'm an idiot who didn't back up her hard drive. J had given me an external drive for Christmas LAST year (not this past Christmas) and I just hadn't gotten around to doing it. Since I have a Mac, I guess I thought I was invincible, but these things die too. So while I could still try to send the drive off to some "clean lab" to have it dissected in an attempt to get data off of it, that would cost me $1300 and I've decided to just deal. Many of my pictures J also has on his computer, and my dad just sent me an external hard drive with all our family pictures on it. I also took it to my office where I had left my old laptop and was able to copy a bunch of old photos and documents off of that, so that worked out kind of ok. But the crash came on the heels of my cat's hospitalization, so that was a bad week. And it kept me off my computer for a while, another reason for not posting.

In terms of the pregnancy (oh yes, there's that too!), things are going pretty well. I am now 32 weeks, which just seems crazy to me. I had my 32 week appointment yesterday and everything looks good. I had had some intense lower back pains a few weeks ago and told her about them - she said they could have actually been contractions, but it doesn't sound like I'm about to go into labor. What really freaked me out was that she said that if it did seem like I was going into labor, for the next 2 weeks they would do something to stop it, but after that they would let me go. Wow. I can't believe we are getting that close.

We have done a lot of shopping and have been setting up the nursery. We got the crib last week and J put it together this weekend. I still need to get a mattress for it. I'm not sure why I didn't realize it wouldn't have a mattress with it. And we ordered our glider a few weeks ago and hopefully it will be here by mid-April. I'm realizing that the room is even smaller than I thought and we are going to have to be resourceful about storage space. We may have to have some custom shelves built for the remaining small nooks and crannies that we have. All we have left to get is a rug and window coverings (probably shades and curtains...)

Phew! I'm sorry for the long post. I will really try to get back to shorter, more frequent posts. I want to post new belly pics too, which I was waiting to do but finally realized I just needed to update. J got a nice new camera to photograph the baby and has been taking some good belly shots, so I'll get those up soon.