Tamanya’s surprise morning tomorrow

She doesn’t know it yet, but she gets to return to Ma’adi and play with her three older cat friends for six weeks.

I’ve really been saved by the babysitters. They’ve been wonderfully generous with little Tammy.

Four or five days ago I would have welcomed the break, since we were at a sort of biting crisis at that point. Now she still bites, but it’s somehow more manageable. And her playfulness has become more intelligent in the past few days, showing a more deliberate sense of limits.

Her new favorite thing is to jump into garbage cans and make a mess playing with the garbage. There have been some pretty bad messes a couple of times.

But I’ve also created a sort of amusement park ride for her. When she climbs into an empty plastic garbage bin, I lift it off the ground and run it through the air for several minutes like a carnival thrill ride. I started gently and slowly the first time, but she wasn’t satisfied: she has the thrill-seeking gene, and clearly wanted more of the ride, so I gave her a spin through the air for several more minutes. And now she demands a few rides every day. She climbs into the little garbage bin and gives certain signals that she wants me to pick it up and whirl it through the air very quickly. It doesn’t seem to make her dizzy. Cats don’t seem to get dizzy easily: hold them upside-down, for instance, and there are no discernible ill effects, whereas some humans would become sick for days if that were to happen.