• I booked our hotels for Rome and Florence in April.  WE ARE GOING TO ITALY!  I can hardly believe it, I’m so excited.  I hope to write another update about my planning soon.
• We’ve turned our cat into an indoor/outdoor cat.  I have a great story about how he fell into the drainage sewer.
• My dishwasher broke again a couple of weeks ago, and we just got it repaired yesterday.  We definitely got a lemon when we bought it a year ago, but it’s pretty much been rebuilt now.  Going a few weeks without a dishwasher over the past few months really makes me appreciate technology.  What an amazing, wonderful world we live in!
• Our six-month-old coffee maker hadn’t been working right for months and I finally got around to calling Bed, Bath, and Beyond about it.  It was still under warranty, but they exchanged it with no questions asked.  I figured I’d have to send it to the manufacturer myself or something.  That was a wonderful surprise.
• Adam has grown a beard.  He had one when I met him, but I asked him to shave it off.  He looks good in a beard, but I’m not a big fan of them, generally.  However, I kind of like it this time around.  Change can be kind of sexy.
• We paid off our second mortgage and refinanced our house.  We actually started off with three loans because Adam’s parents lent us the money for the down payment.  But after paying off two of the loans and the refinance, our monthly payment is reduced by just around $1000.  We have an extra grand every month.  Wow!
• I signed up for a creative writing class at the local community college which starts next week.
• We completed our 2010 Adventure Box.  2010 was not a great year for us.  I guess the best part was that Adam got tenure.  OCON was also a big highlight.
• When we took down the Christmas decorations, Sam was so disappointed (and so were Adam and I!) that we decided that we’re going to start a new tradition of putting up snowmen decorations for the rest of the winter after Christmas.  January and February are really the most drab months of the year, and the Christmas let-down doesn’t help.  Let’s keep the cheer going until spring, when nature will provide the delight.
• We saw a nice performance of The Nutcracker (but it wasn’t a ballet – more like a fancy puppet show with singing and dancing).  Sam seems to really love live performances.
• Speaking of live performances, we’ll be seeing Mary Poppins during our trip to Manhattan in a couple of weeks.  It will be only my second Broadway show, and Sam’s first.  I’m really looking forward to it.
• We tried to take Sam to an elaborate ice-sculpture exhibit (so elaborate that they charged $25 each for tickets!) but she got so scared she wouldn’t go in.  I know another mother who physically forced her sobbing, scared three-year-old to go in and I got all judgmental about what a bad mother she was, but then I realized that she has more than one child, and that makes things not quite so clear-cut.  The other child might have missed out if they hadn’t all gone in.  Maybe I’ll have to deal with those issues someday.
• My slacker-mom tendencies have resulted in Sam getting a staph infection on her bottom.  And I had to suffer the embarrassment of the doctor telling us we should bathe her more often.  Okay, so I wasn’t really embarrassed.  I actually found the whole thing quite funny, except for the infection part.
• Adam and I had a nice adult night out at a party just after Christmas.
• I sent my spit into a company who will analyze my DNA.  I’ll get the results in a couple of months. Fun!

That’s all I can think of for now.  It’s been a very busy time, but mostly good.  I have high hopes for 2011.

Speaking of cats, we almost put ours to sleep today.  He’s been peeing in places other than the litterbox and howling at night and tearing up the carpet and really just doing all the evil things cats do.  We put him on Prozac last week because we’re so desperate.  But he didn’t pee at all for at least two days so this morning we called the vet and they said it would cost $1200-$2000 to unblock him.  (He has a condition where crystals form in his bladder and can block his urethra, a potentially fatal problem which he’s been treated for once in the past.) We are not spending any more money on this cat when all he does is cause us stress, so we prepared ourselves for the worst.  Our only hope was that he might pee out of sheer terror as soon as we put him in his carrier.

We got “lucky” and he did just that.  I can’t say I’m all that relieved.  In that hour or so when I thought this might be his final day with us, I felt a huge burden lifting off of me.  No more allergy attacks, no more dread of cat-urine-smell every time I enter a room, no more unwanted half-hour serenades at midnight and sunrise, no more pawing at Sam’s bedroom door to awaken her to get my attention, no more claw caps, infected scratch wounds, or Achilles-tendon bites (cats must have an instinct about that vulnerable area of the human body), and no more contests to see who can get down the stairs undamaged when six legs are twisted together in unnatural ways.

We’ve decided to give him two weeks to shape up.  If the Prozac doesn’t kick in and help him by then, it’s over.  I’ll miss him a little bit, but not as much as I’ve missed my last cat, Geddy.  (We put him down while I was pregnant with Sam.  He was 17 and he’d been with me my entire adult life.)  I think Adam loves Jinx a bit more than I do, but he’s okay with it, too.

The real heartwrenching part of this is how it might affect Sam.  She loves this cat.  She probably spends an hour a day tormenting him.  (Now you know why he needs Prozac.) We put the claw caps on him because she never did learn to avoid getting scratched.  Actually, she learned, but not the lesson we would want; she learned that if she provokes him, he’ll attack her and she can try to duck out of the way and if she does it is HILARIOUS and if she doesn’t then Mommy or Daddy will give her hugs and cuddles.  Hey, it’s a win-win!

So, I guess I’m pulling for him just a little bit.  And seeing that fat, mean cat in the movie reminded me that I can’t really complain.  I knew what I was getting into when we brought him home ten years ago.  All cats are like supermodels – they’re gorgeous, vain, stupid, vindictive, petty, and prone to hissy-fits.  In other words, they’re entertaining.

Today I heard Sammy say ROLLY-POLLY and it just struck me that there is now a third person in our house who interacts with this cat in the exact same way.  She is a Mossoff.  It’s not her genes that make her so.  It’s the fact that she has lived in this house with us for four years.  She is a part of the Mossoff culture.  That’s what makes her family.

I’m highly focused on this issue of heredity versus environment because it looks like we’re going to try to get pregnant using an egg donor in the next few months. I’ve also spoken to friends who know something about adoption, either as the parent or the child, about how it feels to have a family whose members do not all share genes.  The more I think about it, the less it seems to matter.  Part of that might be me just trying to see the positive in the situation.  I know that it seemed to matter to me greatly when we had Sam, that she was a mixture of Adam and me.  But in reality, the “mixture” that I see every day has so much more to do with the choices we all make and the experiences we have together, than it does with her hair or her eye color, or even her temperament.

A fourth voice in the house saying ROLLY POLLY would be a Good Thing.

Sammy’s school had a field trip to the local zoo today.  We saw some cool things, including watching a python squeeze and then devour a rat.  But the best part was that we got to see Daddy Goat again.  Sammy named Daddy Goat last time we visited this zoo – over a year ago.  She just fell in love with this goat, and we were tickled when she named him after Adam.  She talked about Daddy Goat so much that we actually framed this photo and put it up in her room:

Daddy Goat

So when we arrived at the zoo today, of course we sought out Daddy Goat.  The farm animals are all kept in a big barn and there must be at least 40 goats in there, but we recognized our favorite right away.  He’s the biggest goat they have, and he was just lying there, and wouldn’t eat much food.  I got a little worried when I saw how lethargic he was, but I didn’t say anything to Sam.  After touching his horns, stroking his ears, petting his fur,and trying to get him to eat a bit of those strange food pellets, Sam finally said, DADDY GOAT IS SAD.  WHY IS HE SAD, MOMMY?

I told her that I didn’t know, but that I agreed that he looked sad.  Later, she said:

DADDY GOAT IS SAD.  HE’S SAD BECAUSE NOBODY CAN GET INSIDE THE FENCE AND GIVE HIM LOVIN’.