Impressively Smelly

This post may or may not be about how awful my apartment smells after Bailey takes a poop. Fair warning.

It's amazing, though. For such a small kitten, Bailey manages to produce a staggering stench capable of traveling from one end of the apartment to the other in under 30 seconds, gagging all along the way. Amazing, but not in a good way.

Maybe we need to switch the kind of litter we get. Interesting thought.

When she cleans herself after she poops, Bailey is forced to confront her own ability to produce these massive stenches. And she does NOT enjoy this. When she cleans herself, she literally has to come up for air. Otherwise, I think she would suffocate.

The expression she has when she comes up for air is absolutely hilarious, and I've been trying to get a picture of it for weeks. A couple days ago, I finally succeeded. To some extent. It's not half as hilarious as it is in real life, and you can bet I'm going to try and get a better picture. But see for yourself.

Her mouth is actually open. She is probably gasping for air.

Also, if you don't normally click on my pictures to zoom in on them, please, please do so on that one. It's worth it.

And this is what she does after she's done.

So as much as I complain about how horrible my apartment smells after Bailey poops, I suppose she has the much, much worse end of the deal.

She certainly thinks so.

Sleep Deprived

I haven't gotten a full night's sleep for about a month now, since I started letting Bailey back in my room at night. This seems to be because Bailey is starved either for attention or her daily breakfast of wet food starting at about 4am, give or take a few minutes.

She starts by rolling around on my bed, in hopes of waking me up (which, 99% of the time, she does) by thrashing into my leg.

I've gotten mad at her for this. I've thrown her out of the room because of this. It's super annoying. So now after she realizes she's woken me up because of this, she tries to play it off cool, like she was just doing what kittens normally do.

At this point she just stops caring about how grumpy I am and starts getting really excited because she's on my bed.

And I imagine she's thinking this with the same enthusiasm as these guys:



Change "boat" to "bed," and you totally have Bailey. Although Bailey might have more swagger.

She'll keep all this up for a couple hours. When it fails to get me out of bed, she then takes initiative and gets out of bed herself. In order to stare up from the floor at me. And try to creep me out of bed, I guess.

It didn't take her long to learn that when she does this, I would either grumpily tell her to stop staring at me or just fall back asleep. So then she takes the staring up a notch and jumps back on the bed.

I just ignore her now. I'm hoping that if she doesn't get what she wants (attention and/or food) when she wakes me up, she'll eventually give up and just let me sleep. Here's to hoping that happens, because it hasn't yet.

Also, she has now taken to biting my thumb in the middle of the night, hard enough so that I wake up. It's like being pricked with tiny but very sharp needles. Whenever I wake up to this, I tap her on her nose as punishment, although I don't think she considers it punishment because she just purrs at me the entire time. Any ideas why she does this? Anyone? My thumb would like to know.  :-(

Persistence and Failure

I don't let Bailey go into our kitchen. Granted, there isn't exactly a door to our kitchen, so this is kind of hard when we're not home, but if we are home, Bailey isn't allowed in the kitchen. Especially if I'm cooking.

Because of this, Bailey has taken to just staring at us when we're cooking from right outside the kitchen, where the hardwood floor meets the kitchen tiles. Sometimes she gets bold and walks just inside on the tile. Which I'm okay with, because her food and water bowls are right there, so that's allowed. Anywhere past the fridge and there's some yelling.

I find the staring a little creepy. Nick thinks I'm weird because of this, but I'm uncomfortable with any person/animal staring at me for long periods of time.

Anyway, Bailey will watch us for 10 minutes or so (the entire time, I believe, plotting how she'll get to the food), after which she gets bored or something, and wanders around. While she's wandering, I notice that she:

1. Will go to the bathroom.
2. Will eat some of her food.
3. Will drink some water.

I note these things because then I know that she has done everything she needs to in the half of the apartment where the kitchen is, and that she has no reason for going there afterwards, when we leave our cooked food on the counter and go eat in our living room at the other end of the apartment.

But she always wants to go back to the kitchen. And she KNOWS she won't be allowed to go. I have yelled at her incessantly for it, but she's hooked. Our cooked food is like her forbidden fruit.

She'll start out all nice and behaved, like she's a little angel.

But then she starts wandering off...towards the kitchen.

And then I yell at her and tell her to get her butt back in the living room. And then she kind of looks at me, and slinks back just into the living room, all pouty. 

Then she'll sit right inside the living room, gazing into the kitchen, playing it cool.

And sometimes she'll even pretend she doesn't care one bit and go about her kitten ways. Psh, who cares about the kitchen? Where's the kitchen?

30 seconds later, she get ups and starts creeping towards the kitchen. Which is followed by a "BAILEY!!!" from me.

After she's been yelled at for a while, Bailey starts doing this thing where she crouches down, not quite laying down but not quite sitting. Like she's ready to run at any moment.

And would you believe it, 15 seconds later, she's creeping towards the kitchen again. And I yell again.

Finally, she admits defeat. At this point she just jumps onto this cushion-y chair we have and scowls. At me, mostly. Probably.

Whatever. I win!

Although she made it as far as halfway down the hall one time. I must have been unconscious or something, and didn't realize.

Sleepy Faces of Bailey

Picture-heavy post coming. If you don't like pictures of kittens you should probably read something else.

And get yourself checked out, cause who doesn't like pictures of kittens?

Bailey likes to sleep. A lot. Well, more when she was younger, but still a decent amount now. And she sleeps in really strange positions. Sometimes I can't even imagine it's comfortable, but it seems to work for her.

For instance.

I don't know about this. If I slept like this, my head would probably explode. I can tell you that she genuinely stayed like this for about 40 minutes, until she woke up. And miraculously she was fine.

And then there were the strange but cute positions. That were still questionable in comfort level.

I was honestly wondering if she could breathe comfortably.

She squirmed around for about 10 minutes but eventually settled on this position.

I don't even know. But she was asleep.

We drove to Fargo last summer. It was a long car ride, but I love road trips. Random fact. We brought Bailey along, and she dealt with the car ride surprisingly well. Really well. She just basically slept the entire time. Her litter box took up maybe a fourth of the backseat, but otherwise she had the entire back half of the car to herself. And this is how she chose to sleep.

She chose to sleep with her head almost inside her litter box rather than her bed.

Litter box: 1. Bed: 0.

She did eventually slept on her bed, which was on my lap. Still not comfortably, based on my obvious expert opinion.

And yes, she was embarrassed about the pillow marks on her face when she woke up. At least I imagined there were pillow marks. And that she was embarassed.

I can't say Bailey slept in strange positions once in Fargo, but she did sleep in strange places.

Like ON THE DINING ROOM TABLE once. I don't have a picture of that, because I was too busy shooing her off the table.

Or the laundry basket.

She was in there for an entire movie before we realized where she was. I guess it's a good thing she was tired, because she has this really strange obsession with clothes tags. She probably would've ripped all the tags off with all of her 3 pounds of fury if she was hyped up.

Sometimes, she sleeps in ways that make me feel like she took a few sips of the wine I pour myself after work.

Maybe she did. I wouldn't put it past her to do something like that.

I try to make spots she sleeps in more comfortable. Like putting a blanket there or something, so she'd have something to snuggle up in. I guess she thinks differently than I do.

Complete aversion to intended comfort boost. Pfft. Whatever. I took that blanket back.

Because she clearly didn't appreciate it.

When Bailey was a baby, if she wasn't sleeping, she was hyper. Like, the happiest, bounciest kitten ever. Zest for life in general, you can say. If we accidentally woke her up from a nap, she'd be all

Now, at almost 1 year old, it's a different story. Now, if we ever, ever, disturb Princess Bailey during one of her naps, she's like

I swear, she made her ear like that all on her own. And passed out again with it just like that.

I guess I could say I'm happy she's mellowing out. She could be less of a grumper though.