The Kitty Whisperer

Baby F. has had lots of adventures lately. The warm weather, or at least the non-rainy, non-frigid weather, has finally arrived in our neck of the woods, so we’ve taken to going out almost every weekend and exploring different new places for her.

Not that she needs to go outside to have any adventures though.

Seeing as she has her own little urban jungle right inside our apartment. Well, maybe she doesn’t have that many gigantic canopied trees to swing from, but she does have a bunch of jungle cats.

Oscar trying to nuzzle a bunny

We have three kitties. In descending order of well, size, there’s Oscar, the orange fatty, Franny, the black and white neurotic, and Polly, the tortoiseshell pygmy of the family.  They all have very distinctive personalities but they all love the heck out of us including Baby F.

They were fascinated by her from the day she came into our apartment, sneaking into her room to look at her, timidly going up to her to smell her and running to her room whenever she’d cry. Yep, they’d run into the room, not out. One might say they were checking on her, if one was feeling so inclined :o)

She for the most part, mostly ignored them at first. I swear it seemed as if they were somehow transparent during her first few months. Even after she could focus her eyes well enough to recognize Mama and Papa-in-Training and certainly Vóvó and Vôvô, still there was no sign of awareness that there were three curious furry creatures running about nearby.

But that’s all changed now.

She knows they’re there.
She knows... and she stalks them.

She’s taken to chasing them around when the mood strikes her, like when they’re just walking by, or trying to nap, or trying to eat, you know, constantly.

I might have touched upon her first word being ‘gato’ or cat in Portuguese. She also says ‘cat’, so is now fully bilingual ;o) What I haven’t mentioned is how she’ll use it as a mantra: ‘gato, gato, gato, gato, gato’. Which I’m sure is not at all disconcerting for the cats – to suddenly look up and see a very fast crawling miniature human coming at them while shrieking ‘GATO!!!’ at them.

She’s also come to be quite boorish when it comes to the kitties, I mean, besides the whole charging them at full speed while screaming like a banshee thing. She’s taken to watching them eat. And then afterwards tries to eat their food. Yep, doesn’t want to eat her own food, but stale leftover cat food? Yum!

Franny catching some zzzzz's in Baby F.'s rocking chair

This past week we had this great little happening:

Scene: Kitchen floor, box of recyclables full of folded up cardboard boxes and paper odds and ends.  Amongst them is a folded up ‘empty’ bag of kitty vittles.

      Baby F: [grabs folded bag and takes it out of the box]

      Papa-in-Training: [casually grabs bag out of hand of baby, but succeeds in upturning it, emptying
      its’ ‘empty’ contents] Crap!
      Baby F: [proceeds to start grabbing various bits of dry cat food from floor]
      Papa: Don’t eat that! [as he removes small tidbit from her hand]
      Mama-in-Training: She’s chewing on something!
      Papa: [removes vittles from inside baby’s mouth]
      Baby F.: [immediately puts another one in mouth]

      [Repeat infinitum until all tidbits have been quickly swept up]

She’s also come in very handy in cleaning up after them.

We just purchased a vacuum cleaner after much research and advice – we thought we could keep the place clean with only a broom and mop (we have laminate flooring and tiles), but 3 cats and a baby have proved to be our undoing. But if we had a couple more babies around like F. we probably wouldn’t have needed to buy one. 
Because she will pick up everything from the floor! The tiniest, most microscopic thing, like for example, a bit of clean litter left behind, will be expertly and minutely picked up by her very precise finger movements. Sigh.

She’s also somehow managed to develop perfect timing and will scare the begeesus out of the cats…on purpose. Earlier in the month, while sitting on my lap on the living room couch, she waited until Polly was walking right next to my legs, underneath her, to let out a big YELP! thereby making the poor cat jump out of her skin and take off running.

Polly checking out her new crib

Yet somehow they love her and watch out for her, with Oscar offering up his belly for a cuddle and nuzzling her with his head, while Polly tries to entice her into playing with her. Franny…well, he’s a bit wearier – I chuck that up to him having been a street cat in his early life. But given the right circumstances, i.e. he didn’t notice ;o) , he’ll let her pet him. Of course, the whole petting thing is still a bit of a struggle, as Baby F. thinks it entails pulling on their fur really hard…but then again, that’s what she does to us as well, so at least we’re all on equal footing ;o)

It’s great to see them with her though, just a couple more members of our family :o)

Raider of every last book

We knew from the beginning, even before Baby F. was born, that we wanted her to be bilingual. I’m originally from Portugal and all of my family speaks Portuguese. A few of the younger members can speak English, but for the most part it’s Portuguese all the way on my side.

We read the articles about how Baby F.’s language development might be slightly delayed due to the dual nature of her learning, but also read about how babies eventually caught up. We thought it well worth the small delay, since to do otherwise would cut her off from half of her family – the larger half too ;o)

The way we’ve managed it so far is thus:

During the day, Mama-in-Training, aka moi, and Baby F., speak in Portuguese…well, I speak and she mostly babbles. Then in the evening when Papa-in-Training comes home, we switch to English. I try my hardest to only use Portuguese during the day, although of course, the occasional English word slides in unannounced. Mostly when I encounter something apocalyptic in her diaper or when the cats have once again rebelled and attempted to take over our flat ;o)

I think it’s going pretty well – she babbles a whole lot, even when she’s just on her own, playing.

But the best part is that she has now spoken her first words!

And Ta Da! -  they’re in both languages!

She can say Mama – which is the same in Portuguese and English - as well as Daddy; but most importantly for her everyday life, she’s said gato, which is cat in Portuguese.  She sort of ignores the hard g and instead says 'ahto', but she definitely says it. She almost said Oscar today (one of the cats’ names), but I think that’s still a bit too complicated. I’m pretty pleased with 'ahto' for now :o)

She can recognize many other words though and point to the objects they stand for, which is just in keeping with a child her age. Today’s recognized item was meia, or sock. She looooooves her socks. Particularly loves to take them off and chew on them. Sometimes she likes to chew on them while they’re still attached to her feet – she’s all sorts of flexy…then again, so is her mama. I could’ve been Daniel Day-Lewis’s stand-in for My Left Foot. Really. It's a bit freaky ;o)

And reading to her / reading while nursing her or while near her, seems to be paying off as she absolutely loves to ‘read’. Loves to look at books - although honestly at this point, she mostly looks at them upside down – and loves to play with and grab them off shelves.

Exhibit A:

'I'll just take a look at one wee little book, shall i?'

Exhibit B:

'Every book in the world...i must haz them!'

Cue Papa-in-Training’s reaction upon entering Baby F.’s room:
'WTF?!?'

What he didn’t see was that after the first bookshelf cube was emptied, Baby F. wanted to start in on the upper one. I told her no, to which she promptly reacted to by wailing her head off.

Ah, the joys of reading  :P