...and stands for Elsa. Although really, Friday morning's calamity was more my fault than hers. A little scene setting: our downstairs is now partitioned by three hinged safety gates, allowing us to confine the girls (but really just Elsa, since Clio stays put) to either the kitchen or to the living / dining room. First thing in the morning, we usually all hang out in the kitchen, so Alastair and/or I can make our coffee, eat our breakfast, not read The New Yorker, etc. The cat and her food dish go on the other side of the gate, safe from the marauding Elsa.
It was just me and the gals on Friday, and after I'd had my raisin bran and poured myself a cup of coffee, we moved operations into the living room. I was sitting on the floor with Clio, looking at some "touch me, pet me, scratch me!"-type books while Elsa slalom-crawled around the chairs and table legs of the dining room table nearby. Clio was having a great time touching the fuzzy yellow chicks, stroking the smooth velvety horse, etc., but I was getting bored -- enough with the farm animals already -- and wanted some new material. I was pretty sure we had some more Touch and Feel books upstairs in the nursery (Touch and Feel Home, Touch and Feel Seasons, Touch and Feel Chemical Manufacturing Plant, etc.) so I ran upstairs to get them. Clio, I knew, would stay put, Elsa was under her high chair eating fallen Cheerios off the floor, and the whole room is pretty much baby-proofed, so I figured all was well.
And it would have been, except that I'd forgotten to move the cat food back into the kitchen. So when I got back downstairs with the books, Elsa was sitting in a puddle of water (from the cat's overturned water dish) shoving fistfuls of cat food into her mouth. Yes, for all my hemming and hawing about whether or not to feed the girls meat, there was Elsa, happily downing horse entrails and veal by-products and fish eyeballs and whatever else it is that goes into cat food. (Alastair, later: "Do we have to give her cat food four days in a row now to make sure she's not allergic?")
After getting what bits of cat food I could out of Elsa's mouth (to her great disappointment), I scooped her up and brought her over to the other side of the room near Clio, shoved a book (Touch and Feel Auto Body Shop, I think....) into her hands, and went into the kitchen for towels to clean up the water and cat food. I got back just in time to see Elsa standing up at the coffee table, knocking over my coffee mug, and spilling (fortunately only tepid) coffee all over the table, the floor, the rug and herself.
That was when Clio, who is developing an excellent sense of comic timing, hit the trombone button on their Leapfrog Music table: "Wa wa waahhhh..."
Why is it I get the feeling there are going to be more and more mornings like these?
