Oh, the humanity. Er, felinity.

Poor little Lucy-Lou went for her spay this week. She's 4.5 months old now and they kept putting the surgery off because she was so small. At 4 months they do it regardless of size, so we made the appointment and in she went. We picked her up Wednesday night, completed the adoption to make her officially ours, and brought her home. The good news is that she is in good spirits, surprisingly so. She seems genuinely happy to be back at the house and will climb on top of us and settle down for a nap, purring all the while, the purr amplified through the giant cone on her head. So there is bad news point number one: the cone. It looks like the most uncomfortable thing in the world, though she really does not seem to mind it. We can hear her clunking around the house with it at all hours, and it makes it awkward for her to eat and drink. We also have to leave the basement door open, because she can't fit through the cat door to get downstairs to the litterbox with that thing around her neck. On the bright side, it means she has to take the stairs one at a time, which is good. After you spay a kitten they tell you to make sure the kitten stays as inactive as possible for two weeks. Um, what? Have you ever met a kitten? How exactly are you supposed to do that? So the fact that she can't barrel up and down the stairs is indeed good. The other bad news is that she had an allergic reaction to the stitches, so she has a big lump on her belly, and she had to make a return visit to the vet because of it. And speaking of her belly, they did a real hack job on shaving her fur. She is half naked now but there is a surprisingly small incision for the actual surgery, so why they had to take off so much fur is not entirely clear to me. Also, she's still covered in iodine (?) which I guess we are just supposed to let wear off onto our furniture and carpets... She looks bad enough, between the cone and the belly, that when Mallory first saw her, she grew wide-eyed and silent until she fearfully asked whether Finnegan would have to have the same thing happen to him. I was happy to be able to tell her that it had already happened to Finn, under someone else's watch. Anyway, the important thing is that it's done, she seems to be doing well, and she's officially ours now, which means that in about six weeks and a day, when our free pet insurance runs out, we will probably discover something major that's wrong with her. Or, you know, hopefully not. On the drive home from the vet, Liam commented casually that we'd kept Lucy alive a lot longer already than we'd kept Pip alive. He has a point.