The Adventures of Charlie the Cat

As you know from our previous posts, we adopted a stray kitty in September and have been enjoying her company ever since. She is a unique and wonderful cat, and has had many great adventures already in her young life. She is playful, curious, loving, patient and just a joy to have around. Here are some of the funny things that have happened to her so far.

"Who? Me?"

I work out early in the morning, while everyone else is still asleep, so Charlie and I "hang out" in the weight room together. She runs around attacking imaginary things, and occasionally me, while I go back and forth between lifting weights and running on the treadmill. Charlie has gotten close to the treadmill a few times, even touching the belt with her paw, but never getting on the treadmill while I was running. One day, however, curiosity got the better of her, and she decided to climb onto the front of the treadmill while I was running. She quickly shot to the end of the belt, hit the mirror behind the treadmill, got up and shot out of the room in a flash. She was okay, but hasn't come near the treadmill since.

One night, we were cleaning up from dinner and realized we couldn't find Charlie. We looked in all the usual places (cupboard, pantry, etc) and could hear an occasional meow, but no sight of her. Finally I opened the refrigerator to find her on the bottom shelf. She walked to me and began purring right away. Phew, good thing she wasn't in there too long. I now look in the fridge and/or freezer when we can't find her.

One of many "hiding" places.

A few days later, Dan built a fire to enjoy on a cold fall day. We sat down for dinner, and sometime during the meal, Dan got up to check the fire and we heard him exclaim "Charlie, get out of there!" She had crawled into the fire place WHILE A FIRE WAS BURNING to check it out. She is short a few eyebrows on her left side, but otherwise okay.

No eyebrows!

She is quite acrobatic, often doing somersaults and flips while she plays with fake mice, hairbows, lint, what ever she can find to play with. Her exuberance to play has caused her to fall off the stairs from about halfway up more than once. She is a slow learner.

On her perch.

Despite all her crazy adventures, we are thoroughly enjoying having her as a part of the family and can't wait to see what other crazy things she does.

Who knew a kid AND a cat could fit into a pet carrier?
"Okay Lanna, now what?"

Girls night

Friday nights in the fall are always girls nights as Dan is typically attending football games. Maggie had a friend come home with her after school to hang out for a few hours. They did typical stuff, like play the Wii, listen to music and eat! And then played in the yard like kids do.

Mocking cheer.

Lanna in her "house" jumping on her "trampoline".

Maggie in an Erckle moment.

Charlie and the girls playing Wii.

Monster's Eyes!
In celebration of October starting today, I decided to make Monster's Eyes. It is kind of like a mini-taco made from ground beef, cheese, tortilla chips, sour cream, olives and salsa. If my name was Racheal Ray or Paula Dean, the finished product probably would look like eyes. However, mine looked more like something scavenged from road kill. To show you just how indiscriminant my kids are, they ate them even if they didn't look like "fresh" eyes and said they were really good. They actually didn't turn out too bad because I opened the fridge later and there were three eyes looking at me, it kind of made me jump at first.

Monster's Eye.

They are supposed to be appetizers, making 32 "eyes", 8 servings of 4 eyes each. I say this because after making them (it indeed makes 32) and counting how many everyone else ate, I figured Lanna had about half the batch. When I asked how many she had she said she didn't know, they were just so good!

Charlie

The second week of school we added a new family member. A kitten had been seen running across 15th Avenue and then found refuge in one of the classrooms at Mark Morris. The school had called the Humane Society to come pick the kitten up when Dan overheard the secretary talking about the cat. He called me and asked how I felt about another cat and we decided sure, we can save one more cat. So I picked up the kitten after work and headed home to introduce the kitten to our family.

Charlie the day we brought her home, about 7 weeks old.

She immediately fit in and has become a great addition to our family. On a whim, we named her Charlie and have been enjoying her company. She is a polydactyl, which means she has an extra toe on each front paw and looks like she has mittens. She is very loving and purrs upon contact or just from looking at her. She snuggles with everyone and is soooo patient when the girls pick her up constantly. Dan joked she will have osteoporosis from lack of walking as much as the girls carry her everywhere. We feel so blessed to have her come into our lives and so thankful she is a part of our family.

Using her "thumb" for string attacking.

Very comfortable napping on mom's lap.

We often find her playing in Maggie's soccer bag.

She was definitely a stray as she was treated for many things and we feel good about giving her a loving home. On a sad note, our 4 year old cat Scout was hit by a car and killed just 5 days after Charlie joined our family. Charlie has definitely filled a void in our life, and we are thankful to have her with us.

Labor Day

We headed to Astoria for a day of visiting with the Belmont-Smith family and Nanny and Grandpa. We had breakfast, did some caching, and rode the trolley.

The conductors were really great and let each of the kids sit up front and wear the conductor's hat.

Before heading out of town we stopped at the Goonie's house for a quick photo op.

For those that have read the BS post, you know that gps units do bounce but do not float, and out relatively new Garmin is now sacrificed to the river Gods. It was a day will not soon forget.

School 2010

Another year of school has started and we now have a middle schooler. I can't believe Maggie is in middle school and Lanna is in the 4th grade.

Final day on the water

Tuesday August 24th was the last day of playing on the water for our family. Dan headed out early on a friend's boat and try his hand at the fall salmon run. It was slow going at first, but finally the action picked up, and Dan was rewarded with a great catch! It took him about 35 minutes to haul this one in and weighed in at 32 lbs! We enjoyed grilled salmon the next night for dinner, and oh, how wonderful it was.

32 lbs! Yeah, baby!

The girls and I headed out with some friends to do some tubing and knee boarding. The weather was warm, the lake calm and refreshing, and the time on the boat relaxing. We were treated to great views if both Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helen's on this day. It was a great way to spend the last hot day of summer.

Maggie tubing on Silver Lake, with Mt. Rainier in the upper left corner.

Lanna on the tube on Silver Lake in the shadow of the mountains.

Knee boarding during sunset!

As we docked to load up the boat, we were greeted with this moon rise over Mt. St. Helen's. The picture does not do justice to the view we saw that night. Great ending to a great day.

Summer Soccer

The month of July and the first weekend of August had us busy with soccer tournaments. We traveled to the bigs cities of Tumwater and Federal Way for two, and stayed in our own home town of Longview for one. In our first tournament, we won one of three games, but we had fun in our first tournament of the summer, and were eager for our next tournament. In our second tournament, the toughest part of the weekend was just getting to the field Friday night. A 12 car pile up on I-5 closed the freeway and left many families stranded. However, we all made it and once again the girls won one out of three games. They showed great improvement from the previous tournament, and had a great time.

The final tournament was in Longview, and the girls won every game and took first place in their age group. It was a fitting end to a fun summer and the girls are looking forward to the fall season beginning soon.

We had fun in between our first two games at a team picnic. The girls enjoyed climbing he playground equipment and parents had fun relaxing and visiting.

Maddie off, Maggie on.

Eyes focused on the ball (somewhere).

Lanna was our official photographer, as seen in this self portrait.

Mom and Maggie into watching the game.