Feline Friday

Kindly excuse the delay in today's Feline Friday post! We are having some work done around our house and I got tied up (i.e., distracted) with the contractor. Exciting updates happening!

On that same subject, Lily has had to spend several days recently confined in a bedroom to keep her out of the way of the workers. Once she hung out in our master bathroom. When I came in to check on her, she was perched on the counter!

 

 Mainly she has spent her days in the guest bedroom where she has a pretty comfy setup: Plenty of blankies for her many naps, her own private "bathroom" (litterbox), and even room service! 

 

She seems to love having her meals brought upstairs, but she'd best not get used to it! LOL

 

Happy Feline Friday!

Feline Friday

 Lily had an appointment with her vet this week, the first time in several months! It was the first time that this vet had seen her since her anal gland surgery last July. He was very pleased with how she's doing!

 Lily was due for vaccines so that was the first order of business. In addition, she had a fluid-filled cyst on her chin which needed to be drained for the third or fourth time. He said that it's related to the recurring feline acne on her chin. To be sure, I need to pay more attention to the cleanliness of that area. In fact, when she was a young kitty, I was told to use Stridex pads on her chin. These days, I think I'll just use warm water. I'm taking no chances with her!

I also had the vet take a peek at her rear end because (warning, TMI ahead...) she occasionally has a little blood on the external area after going poop. I've had this problem looked at multiple times and her previous vet (recently retired) was not concerned. The vet she saw yesterday believes she has a build up of scar tissue which occasionally becomes inflamed. That makes sense given what I've observed, so I'm going to cross it off the list of things to be worried about.

Lily has to be sedated to go to the vet and this time when they brought her to the car, she was still asleep. Poor thing hates the vet so much that she was growling while sleeping! Turn the volume up to hear Angry Lily!

After coming home, it took Lily most of the day to feel better. She was obviously sore from her shots and chin procedure, plus she didn't care for the taste of the antiseptic solution they used on her chin. She licked her lips repeatedly (a sign of nausea). I made sure to mix lots of water into her food so she'd be well-hydrated, and by this morning she was back to her chipper self.

Sweet girl. As a senior kitty (age 15!), I'm so glad she had a good report from the vet!

Feline Friday: Up Where We DON'T Belong!

 Occasionally Texas Roadhouse (or just Roadhouse, as they apparently call it in Texas) drops of some of their delicious rolls at Spouse's office. Yesterday was once such fortuitous occasion. We enjoyed rolls for dinner and hid the rest away for safe keeping.

This morning Lily was in full Baked Goods Detector Mode. She knew there were rolls SOMEWHERE...but where? I saw her sniffing around the base of the counter, reaching upward on her tippy toes then suddenly...

UP SHE WENT! Remember that song from the old movie An Officer and a Gentleman? Instead, this was "Up Where We DON'T Belong"!

 

 Nope, not inside the paper towels!

 

She casually strolled around sniffing all the nooks and crannies for the delicious rolls.

Aha! I'm SURE there are rolls in dis microwave, mama!

Amazingly, she was RIGHT!

Happy Feline Friday, friends!

P.S. Lily DID manage to get a tiny taste of the special butter that came along with those delicious rolls! Thanks, Texas Roadhouse!

New Project: My School Albums

 Although I may not have blogged much about it lately, I have been doing a LOT of scrapbooking over the past year. I've worked on my chronological family albums (still not caught up but at least I'm withing striking distance of Bailey's college graduation) as well as my heritage albums.

With my heritage albums, I'm working my way from the oldest photos to the newest, and in that vein I am now at the point where I've scrapbooked my parents' wedding and early life. I'm almost ready to be born! hehe Working on my heritage albums has been the most interesting and rewarding scrapbooking I've ever done, hands down. I'm so happy to have completed many albums so far with more in the works.

 As if those two ongoing scrapbooking projects weren't QUITE enough, I was recently inspired to jump into another album project that's been on my list since I started working on the heritage albums: My own childhood and school years. Katie, a super talented gal who works at the store where I teach, recently shared her own boys' school albums and they were just so succinct and perfect that I felt inspired to make albums of my OWN school years.

As of this writing, I've worked my way from Kindergarten through Fourth Grade and let me tell you, I underestimated how fun and even cathartic this process would be. I've thought about why that may be and here's what I've landed on: I'm actually scrapbooking my OWN memories and activities. By contrast, the events I've included in my chronological albums are often my daughter's activities; for my heritage albums, many times I only have photos and basic information with no memories at all. So with this project, I have the chance to reflect back on my childhood years. It's gratifying to put my own photos, school papers, and memories together in one album -- instead of languishing in a box in the basement!

 I am so grateful to my mom who kept all of my school papers and photos -- and I DO mean all. But I wish we'd taken the time to date the papers and photos. I have consolidated my school papers into a couple of tubs but they are largely undated. Of course, I won't keep them all but the finicky side of me has to have some semblance of order before deciding which ones to discard.

 

I'm sure I'll end up with too many school papers to fit into the scrapbook itself, and many are oversized anyway. If I could pare it down to a smaller, organized box, I'd be happy with that.

Awhile back, I organized my school pictures in a small album with sleeves, so it's been easy to pull out a particular year of photos, pair them with the memorabilia for that year, and make a few pages.

 Here's a photo taken on the first day of Kindergarten. My mom saved the picture I'm holding, too.

She kept a small spiral-bound school album for about three years then gave it up. Inside the binder I found a few treasures for those years.

 

 For each grade, I'm making a 12x12 "cover" page with my school photo, grade, and dates. I'm also making a 12x12 facing pocket onto which I can adhere the class photo, teacher name, and anything else pertinent. The deep pocket is a great place to put those loose papers so they can be pulled out easily.

Mom even kept my nametag so I had to include it, too.

I have fairly detailed memories from my elementary school years so I'm planning to type them up and add them to each year. I even found my mom's old calendars and my diary from those years which is a great way to jog my memory!

 I recently made a Fourth Grade page about my childhood love of reading. I still have all the books I ordered through the Weekly Reader program, so I took pictures of them to include on a page. It's so much fun to think about what interested me back then. Truthfully, I'm pretty much exactly the same as I was in my childhood!

I'll be sure to share more photos as I go along but so far, this has been a thoroughly enjoyable project and one that I'll be really glad I took the time to put together. If you're thinking about starting your own school album, by all means DO IT!

Thanks for stopping by!

Feline Friday: A Watchful Eye

Lily has been doing really well lately. Before her surgery to remove those pesky anal glands, we had been going to the vet every 4-6 weeks. Now she hasn't been seen since last fall!

But I am learning that Lily's needs as a senior kitty have changed a bit. She needs to avoid gobbling her dry food as she is prone to throw it right back up, and if she has a particularly bad episode then she could become dehydrated quickly. 

A couple of days ago, she gobbled her dry food in both the morning AND the evening. Her dry morsels are fairly large (one would think they are TOO large to swallow whole...) and they come right back up, completely undamaged by the brief trip down the hopper. On this particular day, she had a rough go of it and threw up multiple times in the morning and the evening.

 

The next day, I observed that Lily had stopped drinking water. She normally drinks a good amount of water so it was quite noticeable that she wasn't spending any time at her water bowls. In addition, she refused water I offered her by hand. Over the past year, I've learned that kitties can easily become deyhdrated after vomiting and when that happens, they often don't want to drink water -- the very thing they need to do. I suspected that the previous day's events had caused her to become dehyrated and I worried we were on a slippery slope.

As I've done before, I gave her a few syringes of water by squirting it directly into her mouth. She's not a fan of that procedure, but at least it gets water into her quickly. Then throughout the day, I mixed water into a pate food that she's not prone to gobble, making it into a soup-like consistency. This is a tricky way of getting her to ingest more water without her realizing it.

If you suspect dehydration in your kitty, keep a watchful eye on the litterbox, too. You want to be sure kitty is urinating regularly. I've learned that dehydration can also quickly lead to constipation which (believe me!) you want kitty to avoid at all costs, so be sure you check for poop in the litterbox, too. (Constipation can also lead kitties to stop drinking water -- the very thing that would help them!)

This morning, Lily was thankfully back to drinking water on her own. I'd still like to see her drink more, so I may supplement her food with a bit more throughout the day just to be sure we're in the clear. 

The bottom line is this: If you have a senior kitty in your life, keep a watchful eye on water consumption. It can be an important clue that something is not quite right and needs attention. Our senior kitties just need a little extra TLC from time to time!

Happy Feline Friday!