Saying Goodbye

This week has been a very sad week for my Grandma and Grandpa Barrett. They lost a very special member of their family: Their kitty cat Bella Arabella. Everyone called her Bella for short.

Bella was a rescue cat just like Sali Dali Cat and Oreo Speedwagon are. One day, my Grandma and Grandpa Barrett were over at the Humane Society dropping off some food for the kitty cats and puppy dogs staying there, and when they saw Bella Arabella, they knew she was part of their family so they adopted her and brought her home with them.

That was a long time ago when she was a kitten and my big brother Josh was a baby and my other big brother Aaron was just starting Grade 1. I didn’t get to meet her until I got born.

My Grandma and Grandpa Barrett were very good owners of Bella Arabella. They always got her kitty cat food she loved to eat. Sometimes they tried new kitty cat food, but if she didn’t like it, they gave it to one of their other friends with a kitty cat or two at their house.

There was this one time, they bought Bella Arabella some new cat food that had different shapes for different flavors. Bella hated the red x’s so she threw them out of her food dish and left them on the floor. When Grandpa gave her more food the next day, she threw those red x’s out of her food dish and pushed them so they were halfway between her food dish and the garbage can in the kitchen. Grandma found them and put them all back in her food dish. A few hours later, Grandpa went to check on Bella’s food dish and those red x’s were sitting beside the garbage can in the kitchen.

They never gave Bella Arabella that kind of cat food again.

Bella Arabella loved watching movies with me and my grandma and grandpa. She especially loved movies that had lots of action in them and explosions. Her favoritest part of movies was watching the end credits rolling up on the television screen. She would sit up and really watch those, and when the last one rolled up off the screen, she almost always went into the kitchen for a drink of water before she came back to sit with everyone again.

Once a year, at the end of February, they would take Bella Arabella to the vet for all her shots. She was a indoor kitty cat, not a outdoor kitty cat, but that didn’t matter. She still got all her shots every single year because that’s what you do when you love your animal children.

This year, the vet said Bella Arabella was so young looking, she never would have guessed she was already 14 1/2 years old. The vet said if Bella Arabella was a human, that would make her almost 75 years old.

She had all of her teeth and zero zip of them were even close to falling out, and her eyes were very bright (that’s what the vet said). She even acted a little bit like a kitten sometimes (also at her vet appointment she was playful like a kitten with the vet).

When Bella was behaving like maybe she wasn’t feeling very well on the weekend, my grandma and grandpa decided if she was still not well on Monday, they would take her to the vet as soon as the vet could make a appointment.

That’s when they found out that sometime in the weeks between her regular appointment at the end of February and this week, Bella Arabella got very, very, very sick.

Grandma and Grandpa Barrett got told that maybe a operation would help Bella Arabella, so they told the vet to do the operation.

But it did not help.

Bella was so sick there was nothing the vet could do to save Bella, and there was nothing my grandma and grandpa could do to help Bella. Also, she was so sick she was in a way lot of pain but Bella Arabella never complained one bit about any of that pain. That’s how loving she was. She didn’t want to worry my grandma and grandpa.

They spent time with Bella Arabella at the vet’s office on Tuesday, comforting her and loving her so much.

The day after that, Bella Arabella crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and then everybody cried because Bella Arabella was way more than just a good kitty cat. She was part of our family, and everybody loved her. Even Sali Dali Cat and Oreo Speedwagon loved her.

I don’t know how to make my grandma and grandpa feel not so sad, so instead I’m just being a listener child.

I know I can’t fix what happened, and I know I can’t make their hearts not hurt so much, mostly because my heart hurts so much, too.  I really loved Bella Arabella just like I love my own cats Sali Dali Cat and Oreo Speedwagon.  You couldn’t help but love her because she was such a loving cat.  Even when she was being cranky, she still was kind of loving because she didn’t stay cranky for too long if your feelings got hurt when she was cranky at you.

Sometimes I just want to cry and cry, but I try not to cry too much because I know that’s going to probably make my grandma and grandpa start crying lots. So when I feel like crying that hard, I just take some deep breaths and try to not cry too much because I know I can’t stop crying a hundred percent. I can only stop crying too much.  I can’t be a good listener if I’m crying too much, so I think about being a good listener and only cry a little bit.

I know that sometimes tears are going to just show up out of nowhere for my grandma and grandpa because sometimes something reminds them of something special about Bella Arabella, and all those memories of all the good times with Bella reminds them she’s gone to heaven.

Sometimes the best listening is when nothing gets said because then me and my grandma and grandpa are just thinking of the good times we had with Bella Arabella, and how she’s not sick or hurting anymore.  Rest in peace, Bella Arabella.  You are always going to be part of our family.

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Amazing Stargazing

Libraries are some of the coolest places, and yesterday when I was at the King Family Library on High Street, the latest decorations and displays all over the library showed how true that is, especially where I live.

This summer is the 50th anniversary of when men landed on the moon and then walked on the moon. My Grandma and Grandpa Barrett and my Grandma and Grandpa Two Rivers watched it on television, except not all together in the same house on the same television set. My one set of grandparents watched at their house on their television set, and my other set of grandparents watched in a whole different city in their house on their television set. What’s the same is that they had a bunch of people over to watch men landing and walking on the moon, and both my grandmas made a lot of refreshments and treats for everybody to celebrate this momentous (that word means it was something so big you can never forget it because it’s superly amazing) event.

Anyway, in the library, the librarians worked really, really, really hard to make the library feel kind of like a NASA location for kids with all kinds of neat things and places set up all over the library to make everybody think about outerspace. There’s planets hanging everywhere and a milky way in this one room.

All the way down one corridor, all the planets are put up with their names underneath, and the librarians even remembered to put Pluto up so I am totally loving that hallway a hundred million percent.

There’s also a pop-up café in the Bridgemont Room, and you can buy some delicious alien (as in outerspace not as in made from aliens) food for reasonable dollar amounts.  I didn’t get anything to eat at the Milky Way Café because I already had lunch at home, but I highly recommend the Mikly Way Café because with all that imagination, the food has got to be awesome!

In the main lobby, there’s a display of books that are all space related and plus there’s way more space related books in the other parts of the library, too.  There’s more books in the children’s section, and more books in the grown-ups section, so everybody can borrow a book (or a bunch of books) from the library and learn all about outerspace and all about the moon landing way back in the olden days when your grandparents were way young.

Also, there’s lots of events going on at the library, and not all of them have to do with the moon landing (which actually happened in July, not in June 50 years ago), but my blog today is all about the moon landing and outerspace so that’s pretty much all I’m going to focus on.  Well, that and plus Pluto — the most nicest planet in the whole world wide universe.

There’s even a science week coming up next week.

Click HERE (this goes to the Facebook page all about next week’s event at the library) for all the details and information you need to have your parents and grandparents say you can be part of this fun week of stuff.  And plus, there’s also a lot going on at the Pittman Center branch that maybe you want to let people know about.

So you can see how come I said at the beginning of this blog entry that libraries some of the coolest places ever, right?  Think of all the fun and learning you get to do when you go to the library!  It’s like going to a crazy expensive store and getting a boatload of free swag just for being there, and then getting invited to come back as many times as you want for as much free swag as you can take back home again!  I mean, I know you have to bring books and DVDs and stuff back to the library and all, but all the stuff you learned from those books and DVDs and stuff stay put in your brain so you kind of also get to keep everything you have to bring back to the library.

Here’s what I want everybody to do:  Go to your library and learn all about the moon landing and moon walking that went on 50 years ago.  Learn about other planets and other important scientific stuff that has to do with outerspace.  Take people that never went to your library before to your library (you are going to be a hero when you do that and they see how awesome the library really is).  Hey, even take people visiting you to your library because every single library is different, so it’s a new adventure every single time.

I can hardly wait to start reading some moon books I borrowed from the King Family Library yesterday, and I can hardly wait to start pretending about being on the moon in the old-fashioned days, and writing my own stories about a girl going to the moon to visit her grandma and grandpa living on the moon, and maybe even come up with my own outerspace dinner menu for my family members.  How fun is all that, right?