goodbye, emma

Our beloved cat and family member, Emma, passed away in our arms this afternoon.

Emma joined our family seven and a half years ago after she was left during the night at the animal shelter. Once we met her she instantly became our baby and gave us immeasurable love and joy. We always said she was our firstborn. We couldn’t have asked for a better big sister cat for Zuzu.

Some of you know that especially over the past few months Emma had numerous medical complications. Then in early November she was diagnosed with diabetes and subsequently stopped eating. She amazed us with her strength and although we will feel an enormous hole in our little family, we are glad she is now at peace.

We will always remember when Emma would:

• snuggle under the covers with Ty on chilly mornings
• lick Jenn's hair during the night
• faithfully sleep with us every night
• nap in cuddle caves around the house
• lay in the windowsills in the summer
• perk up when she saw squirrels and birds outside
• get a sudden burst of energy playing with a toy mouse
• bat food and twist ties around the kitchen floor like a hockey player
• nestle under the Christmas tree every year
• cuddle up with us when we felt sad -- somehow she always knew when we needed some extra love
• be amazingly patient while Zuzu touched her, played with her food, or splashed in her water dish
  

Emma, may your blanket keep you warm outside where you’ll always be near the birds and the squirrels and never far from our sight. – love, jenn, ty & zuzu

christmas could be different...

for the last several years, we've been wanting to create a christmas experience for ourselves (and now for our little zuzu) that focuses more on jesus - and his coming to earth to show us what he and the rest of the trinity is all about - and less on buying and receiving. honestly... it's not easy and we've made very little progress.

this christmas, however, we're needing to seriously cut back - due to a number of unexpected expenses over the last year or so - which actually ends up helping us to step closer to our goal of spending less time and money buying and more time enjoying the true spirit of the season with our family, friends, and community.

this year, jenn and i rented and watched "what would jesus buy," a documentary that takes an entertaining look at the current consumeristic condition of christmas in america and encourages us to envision what christmas was like "before all the shopping began." if you really think about it, i'm betting that people weren't feeling an emptiness, a void, that could only be filled by material goods. imagine the activities that might have been happening in place of the craziness and busyness of shopping, the buying, and the getting.

recently, i discovered the following video on a couple of friends' blogs and it really struck me as something which captures the hopes i've had growing inside of me, more and more, year after year, christmas after christmas. it's an idea worth spreading, so i thought i'd pass it on.

an ordinary photograph...

this may look like your average everyday snapshot, but in fact, if you examine it closely, it tells you quite a few things about our little zuzu these days:


1. hats. if you haven't heard already, zuzu likes hats. green hats, cowgirl hats, baseball hats - all kinds of hats. now, zuzu is an outside-of-the-box thinker, so hats can be anything that will sit on your head. if a "hat" has straps or an elastic waistband, it's an added bonus.

2. pants. zuzu doesn't want to wear pants. zuzu wants to wear pants. it's up to her. she likes saying "pants," which usually comes out as "panths." she enjoys taking her pants off (see previous post). this has actually been a little helpful for us when getting her ready for bedtime. i've recently realized that we won't have to do everything for her forever (though, i don't mind). special note: a pair of pants can also be worn as a hat.

3. shoes. zuzu likes shoes. she's liked them from a very young age. she seems to have dozens of pairs - each appropriate for its own occasion. she gets that from her momma, i think.

4. fridge letters. zuzu loves playing with the extra large letters on the refrigerator door. her favorite thing to do is to pull them off of the fridge and onto the floor. in october, she enjoyed putting them into her pumpkin basket, one by one. zuzu is getting pretty good at repeating the names of the letters when we say them to her.

5. fridge pictures. zuzu loves looking at the pictures that we've placed on the refrigerator door. there are pictures of her aunts and uncles, her cousins (even a dog cousin), herself, mommy, and daddy. old pictures. new pictures. we thought putting them inside plastic sleeves or in magnetic frames would protect them from her curious hands, should she decide to take them down. well, she decided to take them down - and has greatly enjoyed shuffling through them on the kitchen floor.

6. catalogs & magazines. zuzu really likes to browse through the various catalogs and magazines we receive. for a while, we had a nice stack behind the corner chair in the living room. behind the chair became her secret spot for relaxing and flipping through pages of pictures of other children - some wearing hats, others playing with water toys. another related activity involves tearing pages out of these publications and scattering them around the living room.

7. fridge access. zuzu has learned that she can open the refrigerator door anytime she wants. even if she's flat out refused to drink her milk or water at mealtime, she'll head straight for the fridge handle within 5 minutes of getting out of her high-chair when she's done eating and grab the leftover beverage to sip at her leisure. sometimes she'll even sit on the bottom ledge of the open fridge and say, "chair!" though this could also be classified as "out-of-the-box thinking," it may be time for a fridge lock.

kitchen counter tricks

zuzu's home with a fever today, so i thought i'd take advantage of some time during her morning nap to show you what she has been up to lately.

this is what i found her doing in our kitchen the other day...



look out, christmas tree!

clothes just get in the way

Right this minute, Zuzu is running around the house wearing 1) a fleece top, 2) an orange baseball cap backwards (she put it on that way), and 3) a diaper. Anything important missing?

Zuzu has mastered taking off her pants. She tugs at the waistband, steps out of each leg, leaves them in a heap on the floor and says "Uhhhh oh!" as if it was all a big accident. That's the same thing she said when I found her in her crib this morning and asked, "What happend to your jammies?" (also victim of her stripping antics). Just moments ago this bare-legged girl climbed up on the couch by herself (picture the effort involved in mountain climbing), rolled over next to me and said, "Mommy, I funny."

I love her.