For Trouble

My God, I cannot believe it has been close to a month since I posted! Time goes by so quickly. Well, we were about to take our trip to San Antonio when I last wrote. We went and Sofia's baptism was beautiful. We got to spend lots of time with family, which was both good and bad. Robert's mom did drive us nuts like she always does, but it was still nice that Sofia got to see her and her other grandparents. We got to see my sister's new house, we took Sofia on her first trip to the zoo, and she spent lots of time with her cousins from Maryland. She bit her cousin on the foot one night too and will forever be dubbed "the biter", I'm sure. She got a bad rap. After all, she is teething.

My cousin stayed with us the weekend we returned. See, he recently informed me that he would be moving to Houston because he had accepted a job here. And he needed to find a place to move into soon. I told him he could stay with us whenever he wanted to come to Houston to look. Well, he called me while we were in San Antonio and asked if he could stay with us so he could go apartment hunting. I told him "sure" and even offered to drive him from place to place over the weekend. I had no idea how tired I would be, but I picked him up from the airport a mere three hours after we had driven in. Well, the weekend ended up being very horrible. See, when we got home our cat, Trouble, was very sick. She had been suffering from a hyperactive thyroid for quite some time and had been losing weight over the past few months. She wouldn't eat when we got back and was vomiting blood. We were both really upset. We took her in to the vet on Saturday. The vet saw her told us that she was likely suffering from a combination of kidney failure and the hyperactive thyroid. That we could opt for treatment, but she was such an old cat and might not respond. It was horrible seeing her so pained and weak and quiet. After much thought, Robert and I said goodbye to our beautiful cat. She was 14 years old, almost 15. She was born in Robert's old house on his sister's bed. We still have her mama, Whiskers.

Yes, that weekend was especially hard. We had to deal with the guilt from leaving the cats for a week (my friend was coming in to check on them, feed them, and take care of their litter but they usually hide anyway, so he wouldn't have noticed), we had to deal with company in the middle of it all, and Sofia would not stop crying during Trouble's last hours. I had to leave her in the waiting room with my cousin so Trouble wouldn't be upset.

I did most of my crying after my cousin left. It was really hard not being able to grieve the loss of her because we had company. I loved her so much. She was such a good cat. I know that the decision was so hard, but I know that we made the right one. I'll miss her so much. Robert and I keep remembering sweet memories of her. The way she would drink water really loudly -- ridiculously loudly. The way she loved eating bread and tortillas. The way she would "talk" to the birds outside the window. She loved to play, and used to fetch wadded up paper when she was little. She was the sweetest, gentlest cat I ever had. Our sweet little Chubble, Chubba. Our sweet Trouble. We'll miss you.