Anyway. When the time came, my parents decided to get Topsy spayed, and so duly took her off to the vet. I assume I must have been at school as I don’t remember being involved in any vet visits, but I do particularly remember the cat coming home after the op.

She had the standard shaved flank and wound with stitches from the operation. Not only that, but there was dark red BLOOD on her white fur and pale skin. I guess it was perhaps the first time I’d seen a proper wound like that and I was so upset and outraged that someone could do this to my cat!! I don’t know how my naive mind had thought that they would do this procedure, but I certainly hadn’t prepared myself for the horrific (or so I thought at the time!) sight before my eyes. Topsy was so white, and the awful thing was so red and dark – it just looked terrible
I ranted and raved, apparently, at my parents for letting the vet (a) do such a cruel thing and then (b) not clean her up properly – I don’t remember that particularly but I mentioned it to my Dad the other day and he remembers the event well too! I blame him for not telling me what to expect

Anyway. Suzie is being spayed tomorrow. This has brought the memory of Topsy’s spaying back to me, so I’m not really looking forward to picking Suzie up from the vets at the end of the day! Stupid I know, but these deep rooted traumas are hard to get over, you know.
I have made sure I’ve prepared my children

Prize if you can tell which film we were watching when this photo was taken

They all had a wonderful time in their respective places: Abbie and Joe chattered incessantly all the way home from Mill on the Brue, and clearly loved every minute of it. Likewise Anna has been full of her Romania experiences. I can’t persuade any of them to actually write it down for me though

Suzie quite likes having them home, and has transferred her affections to the girls and is sleeping in their room at night, much to Steve’s disgust. She’s getting bigger, hungrier, and more adventurous; we lost her out of the first floor window yesterday, onto the conservatory roof – no-one knew until we spotted muddy footprints on the windowsill after the event! We’ve been letting her out into the garden when one of us is there and she loves it – not sure the guinea pigs love it quite as much though.

We’ve done the horrible back to school shoe shop and topped up on a bit of stationery, so that’s out of the way. I’ve even done some mending; just a couple of new nametapes to sew on. Joe got some new strings on his violin and was impressed with the sound. Suzie tends to stop and stare at whoever is playing music in this house, then dashes off to hide somewhere. I do wonder how it sounds to her?

While I was there, Steve came into the bathroom banging on the shower door to tell me some tale about how our primadonna cat was turning her nose up at her kitten food and pawing the empty bowl where a sardine had been the night before (we’d been trying desperately to get her to eat solid food, turned out she was just being picky). He was laughing at the cat. I, meanwhile, just burst out laughing at him.
He would *never* normally volunteer to get up at 6.30am for anything other than a hillclimb. And he always said he didn’t want pets in the house – but I got out of the shower to find said kitten in our bedroom. There was a cup of tea on the side for me, too, so I’m not really complaining, but it is very funny

Suzie is now racing around the upstairs of the house (music room door and lounge door are still firmly shut, mind) and has clearly already learnt how to wrap people (well, Steve) around her little paw.

I’m so looking forward to the holidays at home with the children and the kitten too

Timings are going to be perfect; we’re going to bring our kitten home in the first week of my summer holiday. Still not entirely sure if it’s a girl or boy, so name is yet to be decided – current names for the two that we’re choosing between are Tigger and Squizzles, but we’ll see whether we keep those or not!

I had a cuddle too – they really are gorgeous

So, this weekend Steve upped and left us all at 5am on Saturday; he has spent the weekend on one of his hill climb jaunts – but some of the rest of us had things on and couldn’t be bothered to be to-ing and fro-ing from Cornwall so we didn’t go. He’s still not home as I write this, I imagine he will be exhausted, having towed his Subaru and slept in the back of the Audi, never mind the motor racing itself, so I may have to update this later if there are any photos or anything worthy of mention!

Saturday was really chilled and lovely here. Anna has been working on a project all weekend – one she was given at half term I think, but it’s due in on Monday and she’d hardly done any of it before now! So that’s been bubbling away in the background all weekend; Abbie and I have helped her with a few little bits of it, too.

We went to Tesco and Pets at Home first thing to pick up a few necessary bits – ended up with some unnecessary ones as well when Josiah decided to spend his birthday money on a new fish tank and another fish to keep Digger company. Came home and started re-arranging the kitchen to accommodate said fish tank, although I might yet move it, as I’m not sure the fish will like being on top of the sideboard directly above the washing machine. On top of the fridge is probably better, but we’ll see. I’ve done all the washing this weekend already in any case!

Josiah was picked up by some friends for a playdate at their house, and we arranged to meet up later on for a walk and geocache hunt … always like to introduce more of my friends to caching as Steve and I don’t ever seem to have the time (or the inclination when we have the time!). Thought it was a bit trickier than the description suggested, especially as the GPS pointed us to the wrong side of the river to start with! Found it eventually though – an empty box! Perfectly big enough for some swaps but there was nothing there, so we put a few little bits and bobs into it for the next visitors to find

Came home from there and after another hour’s project work for Anna, we headed down to Rog & Ruth’s for a BBQ with them and some other friends, so that was really nice. Staggered home and caught up with Saturday night tv

On Sunday we started early with the China project again. It annoyed me in the end, as there was so much that they were supposed to include that it was a sketchy overview, rather than a detailed study of any particular bit – I would have preferred her to be able to choose a particular focus rather than try to cover everything. Ho hum. I helped a fair bit to get it finished so that we still had a little bit of weekend left!

We didn’t make it to church because we were taking Anna down to some auditions, for the Northcott Theatre pantomime children’s chorus. Not sure what the standard is or whether she stands a chance of getting in, I guess time will tell! They have said they will let us know this week. While she was there we walked along the river for a geocache

We came home and have tidied up, put washing away, sorted out, and are now lazing around watching tv and waiting for Steve to get back.