I know the song is really Monday Monday but it’s Sunday and Mondays aren’t usually worth singing about.

I’m not a huge baseball fan, when I was about nine my grandparents took me to see the Cincinnati Reds play. This would have been 1975  when the Reds had players like Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Sparky Anderson. The team was hot. My grandmother loved baseball and thought it would be great if we all went to see a game. While everyone else had a wonderful time I didn’t really understand the game, what the plays meant and each inning seemed to take an eternity. That was the only major league baseball game I have ever attended. I have been to many minor league games since we have the Saints and Bill Murray has found a way to make baseball fun, and I am now old enough to drink. So I don’t really pay much attention to baseball, except today while the Twins are playing. If they win they win the division. Go Twins!

Yesterday I promised daughter that we would make cookies. Halloween cookies. It’s been raining and cold here for the last couple of weeks and using the oven is a welcome event. We stopped by the local craft store to pick up some cookie cutters and decorations for her pumpkin cookies. My kitchen is small, a one butt kitchen, so I told daughter that we would make cookies after I had organized the kitchen a bit. While I was cleaning up she was in the living room “playing” with the cat.  The cat doesn’t play she just tolerates daughter. Usually it lasts for a few minutes and then the cat runs and finds a place to hide. Daughter isn’t usually rough with the cat but she does pick her up and carry her around. The cat does not really enjoy this but is willing to put up with it. For some reason my daughter decided that the cat needed to go for a walk so she tied a string around her middle and tried to drag the cat around. Needless to say the cat did not like this idea and started to meow, a lot. By the time I entered the room to see what was going on daughter was feverishly trying to remove the string (which was actually the tie from a hoodie). Daughter doesn’t yet understand how knots work and was pulling the string tighter around the cats middle.

Squeezing a cat makes it meow over and over again. It’s really annoying.

After assessing the situation and realizing that I would not be able to untie the know without making the cat make all kinds of loud and screechy noises I returned to the kitchen to find a scissors so I could cut the string from around the middle of the cat. If you have children you know that finding scissors or a working flashlight when you need one is almost always impossible. I grabbed a knife and walked towards the cat and daughter.

Daughter sees the knife and really starts to freak out.

“Don’t kill the cat!” she says, “It’s not her fault”

The cat is making really strange noises now and all I want to do is make it stop. I push daughter away from the cat, who is trying to protect the cat from the crazy woman with the knife, and skillfully slice the hoodie tie from around the cat’s middle. The cat gets up and runs into the basement.*

I turn my full attention to my daughter who realizes that she is so busted that she shouldn’t even try to explain what the hell she was thinking when she tied a rope around the cat and tightened it to about three inches. The cat is not fat but three inches her waist is not.

“I’ll go into my room and think about what I did” Daughter says as she runs into her room. She knows the drill.

Ten minutes later I tell her she can come out of her room so that I can lecture her.

“After you yell at me can we make cookies?” She asks.

Daughter learned several valuable lessons yesterday. She learned that cats really don’t like to have their middle squeezed, she learned that accepting responsibility and apologizing for her bad behavior can result in a ten minute time out rather than longer for making excuses. She also learned that when she is almost off the hook, when she only needs to get through the lecture, to suck it up and not state clearly and publicly that mom is a sucker.

So we made cookies today.

*The cat is fine, she was not injured in any way. Not that I would care all that much since she is still waking me every morning at 3:15 to either enter the house or leave the house.

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