October!

We don't really get seasons in this town--there's hot, rainy, cold, rainy, and hot again.... I don't want to jinx it, but I do believe that rainy-between-hot-and-cold has arrived (as opposed to rainy-between-cold-and-hot). It started early this morning (3:30am) with a tremendous thunderstorm--the kind of thunderstorm that wakes a baby in utero. And while I was treated to the sights, sounds, and smells of the storm through the open bedroom window I was treated to knees and elbows and shoulders in my belly. It was an interesting combination, but it didn't deter me from enjoying the storm. It rained until 8:30 this morning, making it the perfect gloomy morning for books and hot chocolate. When I lived on the East Coast, fall and spring were my two favorite seasons, and I find that I pine for them here on the edge of the plains. I have come to enjoy the rainy season because it means open windows, fewer bugs and an end to the heat of summer...or the cold of winter. And now that I don't have to get up in the mornings and go to work, I can enjoy rainy days without ever being cold and miserable. (hooray!) October is quickly becoming my favorite of the 12 available months from which we can choose.
Of course, as a giant pregnant lady, I can't enjoy the dip in temperatures as much as I'd like because I'm overly warm ALL THE TIME. Especially at night, when I've been sleeping less and less as a result of frequent trips to the bathroom and assassination attempts by our cats.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the ways of cats, they enjoy sleeping in warm places...and an overheated pregnant lady is about as warm as it gets.
So there I will be, slumbering away as best I can, and the whisker-faced beasties will slink onto the bed and lie pressed up against me, usually in the leg region. Do you have any idea how much heat can be produced by three cats? A cat's normal body temperature is between 100 and 103 degrees--multiply that by three cats and I’m basically sleeping in an oven. But this is not what leads me to believe that they are making attempts on my life. Even though I will physically move them to the other side of the bed and they will migrate back over to my side. No no--I am referring to their desire at 3:30 in the morning to be let outside. Again, for those of you unfamiliar with cats: cats truly believe that the world revolves around them and we are merely here to do their bidding. Which means they will devise all manner of obnoxious behaviors to get what they want.
Wanting to go outside in the middle of the night is pretty annoying all by itself...but here's the clincher--they wait until I have made my 3am potty break, gotten my giant and ungainly body back into bed and have just about dozed off before they announce that there is a time to go out, and that time is NOW. That time is now, until I actually get out of bed, walk to the front door and open it. And then I have a living room full of cats who have discovered that they have the dirtiest paws in the history of all felines everywhere. You may think that this is the time to go back to bed--but you would be wrong! Because as soon as you settle back into bed, you have one cat at the window rattling miniblinds, and two cats at the foot of the bed making kitty-wrestling noises. What I wind up doing is standing in the door of our house in my underwear, waiting on 3 cats who may or may not decide to go outside before I pick them up and put them outside. I am doing all of this in the dark (because I'm in my underwear), without the ability to see my feet, in my underwear (because I've been sleeping in the kitty-oven). The number of things that could go wrong with that scenario are too large to count! It's like a Hitchcock film waiting to happen, if he ever made a movie about an international gang of cat-assassins whose main character flaw was badly timed fastidiousness.