Making a start....

Ok, so after many, many months of enjoying the blog postings of almost everyone I know and simultaneously feeling REALLY guilty about my deficiencies in keeping in touch with many of those same people, I have decided to jump into the world of blogging myself.

I will offer a caveat in advance. I am not the world's best at these sort of endeavors. Case in point, my poor child's photo album is completely empty (although the computer has hundreds of pics just waiting to actually be printed) and his baby book is only partially filled out. Heaven help any other kiddos we have! They'll be able to join the CIA and with no fear of anyone learning about their past:-)

A note about the title of this blog. My husband and I got married in September of 2002. At the time, he lived in Colorado and I lived in Texas. Due to the fact that we are not celebrities, a commuter marriage was out of the question and I moved to Colorado. Four months later, we bought our house and decided that it would be incomplete without a kitty cat and promptly started our search. We found our new family members at a shelter in NW Denver. They were about 7 months old at the time, a brother and sister from the same litter. Although the shelter had named them Ricky and Lucy, we renamed them Louie and Nala. Louie after King Louie of "Jungle Book" fame because we are convinced that he too actually wants to be a human (with the schedule of a cat, of course!). Nala's name came from "The Lion King" after we watched the scene where she thoroughly trounced Simba. While Nala is still literally half of her brother's weight, she can take him down in a heartbeat and seems to have periodic urges to "thin the herd" just a bit!

Moving on, we have discovered in the past 5 years that orange cats must have some gene that makes them, well, unique. They are completely crazy and have provided us with entertainment that we've always said was better than cable! However, we have also discovered that Louie is basically a perpetual toddler with all of the behaviors that go along with that, thus managing to babyproof our house FAR in advance of Rusty's arrival by breaking everything of monetary or sentimental value. He doesn't listen when you tell him no and even found our attempts at "disciplining" him with a water bottle to be "one of the best games, ever!!". Nala is almost a polar opposite. She follows the same schedule every day, absolutely HATES to even be scolded, and is the most graceful cat you've ever seen. I'd be willing to put money on her in a china shop while Louie would rack up a LARGE credit card balance in a matter of minutes!

Needless to say, when we found out we were expecting our first child, I started praying that God would give us a child with Nala's personality and not Louie's!! What I got was a kiddo with Nala's willingness to follow a schedule, but a much greater interest in Louie's method of exploring the world. Heaven help us all:-)

As to the "schnitz" moniker....while I was pregnant, my husband, who is quite the creative one, started calling the baby "schnitzel" and I'm afraid that it has stuck. As time has gone by, it has morphed into a more regular "shnitz" when addressing him directly or "the schnitz" when he's being talked about. My mother has expressed regular concern that he is going to be unable to recognize his actual name and may be mocked by others in the future for this. Don't worry, we took her concerns seriously and are in the process of setting up a therapy fund for him:-)

Although, I wondered what it would be like when I left the world of pharmaceutical research to be a stay at home mom, thanks to the three of them, my days are actually filled with a pretty regular stream of entertainment which I will hopefully be faithful at sharing with all of you!

Thanks for taking a look at my first attempt and I promise to do my very best to make it worth your while to come back!