We recently acquired a new cat – yes, a Chinese hopping vampire cat! My husband Dougal is a fan of any kind of Japanese and/or Chinese anime or action flicks. He particularly likes the Chinese vampire movies, in which the vampires can’t really walk on the earth, because the good and positive earth repels the vampires’ negativity, or negative “chi“. So, the vampires end up hopping around because the earth repels them. Our new cat apparently shares this characteristic – he seems unable to walk on the ground, and must therefore walk over dressers, end-tables, people, etc. to get from one location to the other. His reluctance to touch the ground, coupled with the fact that he is a black cat and completely nocturnal has led us to the definite conclusion that we own possibly the world’s first Chinese Hopping Vampire Cat.

My husband and I have three children, the youngest of which is Claire, our nine-month-old baby. And as we have often discussed, it’s a good thing her older brother and sister were born first, otherwise she might’ve been an only child. Why? Because she is the wiggliest baby you’ve ever met! (According to my mother-in-law, she takes after my husband – an only child.)

Anyway, I had just finished giving her a bottle this evening, and she was doing her usual wiggling all over the place, attempting to roll to the other end of the couch, grab the remote, etc. So I picked her up and plopped her into my lap, with her facing away from me. A few minutes later, my husband walked by and asked if she was being excessively noisy, because she had a sock in her mouth! It had warmed up earlier in the afternoon, so I had taken her socks off and laid them on the couch. I didn’t even see her grab one of the socks and shove it in her mouth! So there she was – staring at my husband and shaking her head with this hot pink sock clenched in her teeth! Ah, the joys of parenthood!