Happy Birthday, Cartoonist Husband!

Masheka and Mikhaela celebrating Masheka's birthday at Waxy O'Connor's, London, originally uploaded by M1khaela.

My sweetheart Masheka is 37 today, and not far from celebrating his first Father's Day! The picture above is from a year ago today, celebrating his birthday at a pub in London with a giant fake tree growing up the middle (not pictured).

Today is also the 6th anniversary of our second date, on May 19, 2004--I figured things were going well when I got invited to meet all his friends for his 31st birthday after just one date!

I wasn't feeling well enough yesterday to walk to the store to get him a card, but I made a handmade cartoon card instead, which is always nicer anyway--I'll take a photo of it if I get a chance.

Speaking of birthdays... I'm turning 30 in less than two weeks! Normally I suppose that would be a Big Deal, but I haven't made any plans since I might be otherwise occupied... and I think Cartoonist Baby's birth day just seems more significant.

Naughty Cartoonist Baby!

My little mischief-maker at her 20-week ultrasound this past January

Folks, it's been a rough week here at Polka Dot headquarters. When I wrote about Saturday about how tired and pregnant I was feeling and mentioned I might be slowing down the blogging soon, I didn't mean RIGHT AWAY.

On Sunday I was fully intending to do a fabulous photo shoot of my completed mini-wardrobe plan and wear said completed items to my BurdaStyle Sewing Club meetup. I was sitting at my serger by 7 a.m. (awoken by Cartoonist Baby and her famous kicks). My chartreuse cardigan was almost fully assembled by 9 a.m. ...

But just three hours later, Masheka and I found ourselves in the hospital Labor & Delivery triage unit very worried that our little girl was going to make an advance appearance (spoiler: I'm still pregnant and Cartoonist Baby is 100% A-OK!).

I had been having what I thought were unusual stomach cramps and feeling quite dehydrated since Saturday morning, and it was getting to a point where my reluctance to bother our midwives over the weekend was outweighed by my discomfort. Lesson of the week: apparently I have no ability to tell the difference between stomach cramps and regular (if mildish) contractions coming 2-5 minutes apart. Seriously. When the nurse pointed at the monitor and actually used the word "contraction", I nearly fainted--this is not something a 33-week pregnant woman wants to be hearing.

But it all turned out well in the end. They got me on IV fluids to rehydrate me and did some tests, and five hours later we went home, relieved and exhausted and still totally pregnant. I've been taking it as easy as possible ever since, drinking GALLONS upon GALLONS of water and electrolyte-packed beverages and taking every opportunity I can to sleep and lie around with my feet up on pillows being doted on by Cartoonist Husband.

Unfortunately we found ourselves BACK in triage again last night--not as bad this time, but once again I was totally dehydrated. Still, Cartoonist Baby is doing great and totally healthy, so the title of this post is a bit misleading--it's not HER fault at all we're having all these scares. This stuff just happens sometimes.

Anyway, I've missed the blog and I've missed sewing. I'm going to continue to be completely lazy and try to stay positive--after all, this weekend is my first official Mother's Day!

Meet the Boys, Pt. 2: Ronnie

Ronnie adorned with crown of unpicked serger thread

In the first part of this two-part series, you met Riley, my sniffly, foot-pedal-cord-chewing life-threatening-illness-prone runt of a cat. In this second and final part: Life With Ronnie!

This gray-and-white lapdog of a cat meowed his way into our home in November 2007, a few months after our wedding. We both work full-time and had started to worry that Riley, playful guy that he is, was lonely and bored during the day. Clearly he needed a friend!

Some friends of ours had just bought a house in Bushwick, and discovered they had three cats and a litter of kittens living in their backyard--extremely domestic cats that seemed to think they belonged inside said house. Big heavy metal fans that they are, our friends named the cats Ronnie, James and Dio and gave them food and water, but with three dogs and a cat of their own, there was no room in the house for more pets.

We initially thought we'd bring home two of the kittens--so cute and tiny!--but they wanted nothing to do with us and hid behind the lawn furniture. Ronnie, on the other hand, was aggressively friendly--within seconds he was in our laps purring and talking to us, and we just couldn't resist. He was a bit scrawny when we brought him home:

... but he beefed up in no time. It turned out he was already neutered and our vet was fairly certain of what we already suspected--Ronnie and his brother and sister were abandoned housepets, possibly left behind by the previous owners of the house when they moved away. (GRRR! For SHAME!)

And let's just say he has abandonment issues. When not being held or picked up or petted by us or played with by Riley, he just wanders around the apartment yowling forlornly (good practice for having a baby, maybe?). We can't let him in our bedroom at night for litter box access reasons, and he STILL doesn't understand--some nights he sits outside and cries until the wee hours. Within seconds of either of us (especially Masheka) sitting down, he makes a running jump for our laps. Dislodging him is nigh impossible--he has a magical technique of going limp and tripling his weight when we try to push him off.

Good thing he has Riley to keep him company. They mostly get along great, but do their fair share of wrestling and play fighting--mostly over who gets to groom who. They have a gross but hilarious fixation on licking the ear wax out of each others ears and our vet always comments on how clean their ears are. But when Riley was deathly ill last year, Ronnie just did NOT understand why his buddy didn't want to play, and we had to keep running interference so Riley could get some sleep.

Also--the dude really likes catnip. Riley could care less, but put a little bit on the floor and Ronnie starts rolling around and dancing and who knows what until he's covered in it:

And that concludes this extremely brief series that has nothing to do with sewing, and everything to do with the fact that I am a crazy cat lady.

I win! I win!

Even though I dropped out!

And I'm not talking about the mini-wardrobe contest. A few weeks ago I mentioned here that I made the painful (but freeing) decision to retire from regular freelance weekly political cartooning. I'd been doing it for 8 years, but the newspaper market had gone sour, I was sick of the vicious hate mail, and my interests had changed.

Anyway, one of my few clients remaining at the end was Detroit's alternative weekly, the Metro Times. Well, I heard this morning that I came in second place for editorial cartooning in the Detroit Society of Professional Journalists' annual awards!

Last year I came in third and the judges said I was a "welcome breath of fresh air with great promise for the future." Sigh...

As you can imagine, while drawing for the Metro Times, I did a lot of cartoons about the economy, unemployment, and the auto industry, and I got some nice emails from laid-off auto workers about cartoons like this one. Here are two of the more popular ones:

Not a bad way to go out, right?

Meet the boys, Pt. 1: Riley!

You've (digitally) met me and Masheka, and you'll meet Cartoonist Baby soon enough. But there are two more members of our little Brooklyn family who deserve your attention!

First up, there's Riley (shown here in 2006 sneezing all over Masheka, and in 2007 participating in a book publicity photo shoot):

Riley first sniffled his way into my life in May of 2004, mere days before I met Masheka. I had just moved to my first pet-friendly Brooklyn apartment, and there was a cat-shaped hole in my life. My parents had tried to lend me one of theirs, but she retaliated for this abandonment by scratching at my legs and peeing on my bed EVERY DAY (plastic tarps were no barrier to her mad urination skills).

So Mombi returned to Massachusetts, and I paid a visit to a cat rescue group. This time I wanted to adopt a sweet, loving lap kitty without vengeful urination habits. Finally, I just asked "who is your friendliest cat?"

That would be Riley. As soon as they opened his carrier, this little orange-and-white guy leapt into my arms and began purring like a steam engine. Instant cat love! His shelter name was actually "Reilly", but I changed the spelling in tribute to the Boondocks comic strip character.

But hours after I got him home, I began to worry. He just huddled on my bed, totally uninterested in food or water. Turns out he had a major respiratory illness, the equivalent of kitty pneumonia. So my first phone conversation with Masheka (before our first date) found me sitting on the kitchen floor with Riley wrapped in a towel as I tried--and mostly failed--to administer chicken-flavored baby food via syringe.

After two weeks at the vet hooked up to an IV and feeding tube (paid for by the apologetic rescue group), Riley recovered. And for the past six years he has brought a ridiculous level of joy to our lives. He's sweet, cuddly and playful, with a loud asthma-enhanced vaccuum-cleaner purr and a penchant for streaking madly around the apartment for no apparent reason.

Still, life with Riley can be a bit of a trial. There is nothing he will not bite, chew, scratch, cough (again, the asthma), sneeze or vomit on. Despite our obsessive use of cord-protection devices, he has twice managed to completely eat through the presser-foot cable on my Viking Platinum 730, occasioning expensive emergency trips to the repair shop. I have to watch him like a hawk around yarn, thread and elastic. I'm just glad he's never electrocuted himself!

And then there is his insistence on developing terrifying life-threatening illnesses on a regular basis. A seriously infected broken tooth (likely due to his unconventional choice of food materials) nearly killed him last spring; by the time he came home from his dental surgery he was a skeletal 3.9 pounds:

He made a miraculous recovery and weighs nearly 8 pounds now... but not so long ago terrified us again by scratching a tiny scab on his neck into a giant gaping bloody wound. I had no choice but to serge him up a rib-knit T-shirt to keep his claws off it while it healed (he had destroyed the vet-provided version in minutes):

Masheka remarked that Riley looked ready to play jazz flute in this little turtleneck... but kitty was just relieved when we finally let him wiggle out of it. So: aside from medical necessity, sewing for cats = not recommended.

Next up in this extremely short series: Life With Ronnie!