New Toys!

While my mom was here our neighborhood had their annual garage sale and the weekend after she left the Navy club had their quarterly sale, so we did quite a bit of garage sale-ing the last few weeekends.  [In case you were wondering, getting up early and going garage sale-ing is Jeremy's favorite way to spend a Saturday so he was pretty excited to get to do it two weekends in a row!].  We didn't make out like bandits to quite the degree that we have in the past, but we did get a couple of great toys for Phoebe.  One of the most exciting things we got was an exersaucer - basically a giant circular plastic tray with a seat in the middle and toys all around the outside.  We had wavered on whether to purchase one of these things since they are huge and take up a ton of space.  However, our friends all vouched for the exersaucer claiming hours of baby entertainment.  Having just endured sick baby we were all for anything that promised to allow us to be physically detached from the baby for any period of time, so we took the plunge.  It was the best $10 we ever spent.  Seriously.  Phoebe LOVES this thing.  According to some "experts" (like doctors and what not) apparently the exersaucer is bad for babies' development and puts them in an unnatural position so you aren't technically supposed to use them - especially not often.  We figure that on the whole we're pretty good parents - we only let Phoebe eat paint chips after we have verified that they are lead free and we regularly cut her off after one episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey - so a few minutes in the exersaucer now and then can't be THAT bad for her.  Besides, now that Phoebe is in the exersaucer, Danger has his chair back:

Phoebe: "YAY!" Danger: "Really?  You guys thought this baby thing was a good idea?"

Phoebe does think that maybe the kitty is hogging the bouncy seat these days.  I mean Danger should have to share toys too!

Cat in seat, baby on floor.  Danger sees nothing wrong with this situation.

We did get one toy just for the cats.  While we were on our home improvement streak, we picked up a couple of bird feeders and hung them by our living room window.  The cats were pretty excited ... for about 10 minutes ... then they went back to napping.  We're sure that the bird feeders will be a hit - in small doses at least.  The birds seem to enjoy them as evidenced by the spilled seed all over our sidewalk these days.

The mighty hunters wait for their prey

Jeremy gives me a lot of crap for being a pushover for adorable, sad animals (usually in regards to how we ended up with a third cat) but I have to say he definitely lost some of his moral authority this weekend.  We had to go to Petsmart to get our special cat litter (that's right, not only do our cats need ridiculously expensive prescription food, but there is only one litter that they find acceptable for creating their clump masterpieces).   It just so happened that this weekend was also rabbit adoption weekend.  Each rabbit had its story printed out over its cage - a large number of the rabbits had previously been featured in ads using the words "fryer" and "roaster" and normally the dinner plate would be Jeremy's preferred way of encountering bunnies.  Something about their little beady eyes must have gotten to him though, because as we were heading toward the litter section he said "It's too bad we could never bring a rabbit home to the cats, because those guys were really cute.  And they're litter trained".  After we picked up our two 40 pound bags of Princess Kitty Butt (that's not the real name of the litter, but I always forget what it is actually called) we stopped by the adopt-a-cat room.  There were two absolutely adorable kittens and I made a joking comment about taking them home.  Jeremy must have thought I was serious because he started talking about how it might be a good idea to get the kittens "for Phoebe".  He thought that Phoebe could grow up with the kittens and they would all be great friends.  Now I may be a total sucker for a stray (I did bring Jeremy home after all), but even I am not prepared to own FIVE cats - I think that definitely would put us into a questionable category.  A category that contains most of the people featured on Hoarders.  Luckily, we left Petsmart without a new addition to the family and I am officially no longer taking crap about being the sucker for animals in the family :)