Hooray for Dr. Dad!

We are still sad about our lost kitty, Lucas...

Calvin won't even remember him! It makes me so sad :(

...But happily we have some very good news to think about instead!

James' PhD defense at Stanford was last week and he did great! I am so proud of him!

Thank goodness some of James' lab mates took pictures on their phones! I had remembered to bring the camera but sadly I had left the memory card in my laptop. Oops.

Calvin and I were there to watch James' presentation and Calvin only had to be taken out of the room at the very beginning so I was able to watch most of it. Calvin slept through most of it. James' degree will be in mechanical engineering, but his research has had a biomechanics focus. As he presented all the experiments that have compiled his thesis and all the results and conclusions... I was flashing back to weeks when James was spending every other night in the lab running those experiments, days when he was frustrated that something had gone wrong and had to be redone, late nights he spent analyzing results or writing papers or preparing presentations. I know it has been a tremendous amount of work and stress for him and I am just so so proud of him for all of it! At the end of the presentation he thanked the organizations that provided funding for his work, he thanked his advisor and the defense committee, he thanked his lab mates, and he was kind enough to thank me which was very sweet.

The oral defense was closed to only James and the defense committee so Calvin and I waited in the hall with James' lab mates. I was so nervous for him!! An hour or so later the committee members started filing out with smiles on their faces. They told me that James did great. They told Calvin he should be proud of his dad :)

We popped the corks on champagne and fancy beer (and even some of James' own homebrew!) and toasted his success right there in the hallway. Then his advisor took us all out to dinner at a brewpub where we also watched Stanford beat UCLA! Again!

Of course James got lots of messages of congratulations from friends and family. The funny thing was that some people's messages sounded like they assumed James was going to go out and party and get wasted celebrating! We laughed about this as we were on our way home at like 10pm with a sleeping baby in tow! I mean, not only did we have Calvin with us, but James was EXHAUSTED. It had been a totally grueling month for him, especially the two weeks leading up to the defense.

Whew! Completing that thesis defense has been a long time coming and I know James is so relieved to have it behind him. The next day he slept in, then spent the rest of the day watching football in his pajamas and playing with Calvin! Unfortunately, the work is not 100% done. His reading committe is still reviewing his thesis and giving him revisions to make. It will be maybe a couple more weeks of this before it's all said and done. Because the quarter ends next week, James' degree will not officially be conferred until the end of winter quarter in March. But he is still set to start work as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford in January in the same lab where he has been doing his graduate research.

So YAY JAMES!!! The hardest parts are now behind him and he's just polishing up that thesis! We'll have to have a big big party once that sucker is printed, bound and completely finished :)

Come Home, Lucas

Our cat has run away!

Actually, he ran away twice within a week, but this time he hasn't turned up.

The first time we noticed him missing was the weekend before Thanksgiving. I had last seen him Friday afternoon in the upstairs window as I was leaving to go to the store. When I hadn't seen him Friday night or Saturday during the day, I figured he was just still hanging out upstairs. But when I'd still seen no sign of him by Saturday night I got worried and started searching the house. James and Hartley (my cousin who lives upstairs) searched the house too. On rare occasions, Lucas has been known to disappear within the house for 24 hours and then reappear from some undiscovered hiding place so we were all hoping that he was just eluding us.

Still no sign of him on Sunday and it was time to admit that he had gotten out. We think he snuck by my grandmother while she was either on her way into or out of the house. We're pretty sure if it had been me, or James, or Hartley that we would have seen him and been able to stop him.

 I should have called the SPCA that day, but I was kind of in denial so I put it off till Monday, and they ended up calling us first.

A neighbor had found Lucas lying in the street and brought him to our local SPCA. They were able to use his microchip to get our information and contact us. We drove over there immediately.

Poor Lucas was in the SPCA vet clinic. He'd had two grand mal seizures since they'd gotten him the day before.

We had suspected that he'd had seizures before when he was a kitten but they were never officially diagnosed as such. He would have these episodes where he'd drool a lot and be unresponsive, and sometimes he would shake his head in a weird way... then he would snap out of it after a while. It had't happened in a long time. The last time it had been really bad was right after we first adopted him. We had spent that Christmas eve in 2009 at a vet emergency room and the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. We couldn't afford more extensive tests, so we ended up bringing him home fearing the worst. He spent Christmas day looking pathetic and not eating much, but the following day he made a miraculous recovery!

He had more drooling, zoning out episodes that first year, but nothing so dramatic as that Christmas eve. And the episodes seemed to have stopped. We figured it was associated with stress, which would explain why it happened again after he'd gone missing. We think he must have had a seizure out on the street because that would explain him lying in the middle of the road. The SPCA vet said the seizures he had while he was there were clear grand mal seizures complete with the violent shaking. We never saw him do that.

Poor baby, he was sickly and pathetic. He'd lost weight and he was sleepy and limp. He'd been drugged with a sedative to prevent more seizures. We brought him to another vet for blood tests. Again, they couldn't tell what exactly was wrong without further testing which again, we couldn't afford. So just like when he was a kitten, we brought him home fearing the worst.

And Lucas might really have nine lives, because he made another miraculous recovery! After lying around and eating very little for about a day and a half, he started getting up, walking around, using his litter box, eating and drinking water. He had sure scared us, and we were so relieved to see him pull through again!

By last Saturday, he was almost his old self again. He was starting to show us that he wanted to get out of the apartment and venture out in to the rest of the house and he seemed well enough so I let him.

But then he never came back!

He got out again! Seriously, fool me twice shame on me! I feel terrible. I had no idea that he would try to get out again. It must have happened the exact same way as the first time. My grandmother is the only one who left the house and came back that afternoon. She says she didn't see him, but I don't see how else he could have gotten out! He must have gotten past her.

This time I was much quicker to call the SPCA and 24 Pet Watch. Both said they would call if his microchip was scanned again. That was on Sunday. We haven't heard anything. We are still keeping an eye out for him in the neighborhood and I every time I look out a window I hope I will see him.

If Lucas still has 7 lives left, then maybe he is somewhere out there still safe and sound. I like to think that maybe a gang of stray cats (of which there is at least one in our neighborhood) has taken him under their wing and that they go around together finding food and singing songs like in a Disney movie.

That seems reasonable, right? Or maybe a lonely stranger came across him and Lucas was so sweet and friendly that the person took him home and is now taking good care of Lucas as a new-found companion. And they sing songs together too.

Our poor Lu baby! I just still can't believe he got out again after all that drama the first time!

Why our Cat is in the Doghouse

Once upon a time, it was just James and me in our little apartment. Then one Winter's day a few years ago we adopted our cat, Lucas. It was right around Christmas and he was the only kitten at the SPCA who did not get to be showcased in the Macy's windows downtown. This was not because he wasn't completely adorable, but because he had been sick - poor little guy! We fell for him immediately and brought him home that day.

Fast forward a few more years and on a rainy Spring afternoon we bring home another new member for our family whom we are even more in love with (sorry, Lucas), baby Calvin! Was Lucas jealous? Maybe he was just curious. For the first few weeks it was all we could do to keep Lucas out of Calvin's things. All Lucas wanted was to curl up in Calvin's car seat... or bassinet... or bouncy chair... After all, those things were new and soft and comfy and the perfect size for a cat! He didn't really try to bother the baby, but whenever Calvin cried, Lucas would come running into the room and stare at us as if to say "Hey! What are you going to do about that crying thing?!"

Everything seemed ok between Lucas and Calvin for the most part. It was annoying to have to clean cat hair off of Calvin's things, but not a huge problem. Sometimes Lucas would try to get in our laps while we were holding the baby and that was also annoying, but also not really a problem.

And then Calvin got something new. Bottles.

Calvin had to switch to bottle feeding because he was not able to get enough milk while breastfeeding - the muscles in his palate don't work quite right and as a result he has a weak suck. So suddenly these new things appeared in our apartment filled with sweet milk (or sometimes not so sweet formula!) and tipped with a tempting rubbery thing that always goes into the baby's mouth... Turned out Lucas wanted to put the bottle nipples in his mouth too!

The first time we caught Lucas chewing on a bottle nipple we figured it was a fluke. We laughed and didn't worry too much about it. The second time, Lucas had climbed onto the counter where the bottle parts were on the drying rack to get one! And each time, he bit the end of it almost clear off. Fool me twice, shame on me! So off to Babies R Us to buy replacements and up the nipples went into a cabinet above the counter out of reach of the - Nope. Lucas got nipple number 3 off the middle shelf of the closed cabinet!

We started tying the handles of that cabinet together to "cat-proof" it but you know, we're busy parents of a newborn and we do actually have to use the nipples so inevitably one day we forgot to tie the string and I walked in and caught him going for nipple number 4: perched with his front paws on the middle shelf and his hind paws on the bottom shelf! I wish I had gotten a picture, but I totally lost it and started yelling at him and he leapt down and ran away. I was so mad at that darn cat!

And that is why Lucas is in the doghouse. He is temporarily banished from the apartment. We put his litter box and food in the garage. But don't feel too sorry for him - he spends most of his time upstairs with my grandmother and cousin and I let him in the apartment during the day as long as I can keep an eye on him!