This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot. Late Enough and The Home Depot are teaming up to bring a four-part series on building a raised garden. 

We went off to The Home Depot to buy our materials because sadly raised gardens don’t sprout out of the ground by themselves.

Scott and I drawing up plans for our raised garden. We like to think on our feet. Or on the Garden Club’s table.

I would recommend drawing up the plans before heading to the store, but we’ve been building for long enough and are perhaps a little over-confident after we created a small home in our backyard. Our design became more and more complicated as we asked our associate, Will, where the large picket fences were in between debating whether to build it log cabin style from landscaping timber.

I dialed us back a bit when I remembered that I am having surgery next week and maybe we should stick to building one beautiful raised garden now and work on blending it into our front yard after a part of my body is removed.

We went with 4×8 garden with a 6 inch bed and a 12 inch bed. (The simplest raised garden would be a 4×4 garden with a 6 inch deep bed if you wanted to go that route.)

Our multi-level raised garden bed plan. Or as simple as we can be.

The wood frame:

• We chose 5 3/4x6x8 cedar planks for aesthetics but any non-rotting wood works.
• We bought 1 2x4x96 framing lumber to anchor the corners and to create a multi-level bed.
• Optional: We bought thin cedar planks and used hinges we had at home to build a folding trellis at the far end of our raised garden for our vines. (2 3/4x2x8 to form the sides, 4 3/4x1x8 for the cross-beams) I like the idea of a triangular trellis rather than a vertical one because it seems like less pressure on the plant especially when the fruit is near picking time. However, if you aren’t growing vines like cucumbers, watermelons or cantaloupes then you don’t need this and you can buy trellises as well.
• Another option: Buy a raised garden kit.

The tools:

• Screws. We used leftover galvanized deck screws that are a bit too long but whatever. Ideally, you would use 1 inch or 1.5 inch non-rusting (outdoor) screws.
• Circular saw or a handsaw and lots of muscles. However, if you are making a simple raised garden, The Home Depot will make the cuts for you since there aren’t many.
• Tape measure.
• Drill.

The dirt:

• Most bags come in cubic feet so get your math on and don’t be surprised at how much you need. We bought 16 bags of organic soil.

We didn’t even ask for help. I did ask if it was okay to take their picture for this piece.

The plants:

I think for toddlers and preschoolers, planting seedlings, more than seeds, is better because seeds are pretty boring at first. I also recommend buying plants you  and your family eat so don’t buy 8 tomato plants if your kid hates them. However, my daughter only eats tomatoes we grow so don’t not buy them either.

I try at least one new plant each year, and I have my favorites that I plant every year. Finally, have fun with what you plant but read something on them before you go to the store and then at the store read the tag so you know how much you can plant in your garden (the tags state how far apart each plant should be from another plant). Or buy back up pots like me so when you over-buy, you can still grow everything.

• Tomatoes: This year we’ll be planting cherry and a new yellow tomato that is less acidic so my oldest might be more interested in it. Tomatoes are easy and abundant as long as they have sun and every so often you think: Oh gee I should water those guys. I noticed a lot of tomato plants come with tomato cages now. We have our own from previous years in pretty colors that you’ll see next week. Tomatoes need support as they flourish.
• Peppers: Red and yellow and orange (I don’t like green). I would like to do one hot banana pepper because I love them but I’m scared my kids will accidentally pick and eat it. I think I’ll have to pot the hot ones.
• Cucumbers: These are tricky. I haven’t had a good long season since 2005. I get a few good ones but the minute cucumbers are stressed, they turn sour. I need to ask my pickling friends if I could still pickle those. Anyway, I always plant more than one vine because they are so tough to manage.
• Watermelon: My kids love watermelon but the vines are long so our trellis needs to a good size and able to manage the weight.
• Cantaloupe: My kids also love these but I’ve never tried to grow them probably because I don’t like to eat them. We’ll see how it goes this year.
• Sweet Potatoes: I love potatoes and because we have the deep garden, I’m tempted by them this year even though they are a little boring for kids. I did onions last year and even I got impatient and dug one up way to early. Oops.
• Strawberries: I think one of my strawberry plants came back from last year, but I’m not quite sure what’s going on in that pot so if it doesn’t flower, I may throw one into the garden. Strawberry plants are like tomatoes – abundant and easy — except the birds are so much faster than me at getting the berries.
• Herbs: These days, I put all my herbs in pots now because most of them can survive the winter in Richmond, and our raised gardens are not permanent because of the size of our lawn. I have a sage plant from 2006. Also, some herbs are aggressive. For example, mint should never be put in a garden because it will take over the entire thing, but it’s lovely in a pot. However, I think herbs are great in gardens. I once did a themed tea garden with herbs, and I’ve grown all sorts of things like catnip (you really need to like cats to do that though because they will come from miles). The key with herbs is to plant ones you’ll use or you’ll smell. Like I will hug my rosemary plant all day long even if I rarely cook with it so that was a great choice. Thyme? Not so much for me.

Delicious and sneaky. I can’t resist you cucumbers even if you thwart me in my drought-prone summers.

I can’t wait to show you guys our edible raised garden when it’s done, and I look forward to seeing yours!

It’s home improvement time, and The Home Depot has everything you need to #DigIn for Spring. No matter what projects you want to tackle, they have great values on all you need. They’re ready to help you with renovation ideas and expert advice, too.

Get over $300 in email exclusive savings each year, sneak peeks on new products, monthly lawn & garden ideas for your region and access to The Home Depot’s gardening experts. Click here to join the world’s largest garden community today! Or go to http://gardenclub.homedepot.com/ to see some of the many benefits of membership.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot. I was compensated.

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With my post on Abercrombie and Fitch driving so much traffic to my site, I technically shouldn’t be posting anything. However, I’m not good with rules and all my freaders (friend reader) who were here before A&F and will be here long after it are all: Where’s Alex? (probably)

I’m in the battle of the band-aids.

You should probably buy stock in them ASAP.

Every pain my 4-year-old gets could be fixed by 4-5 adhesive characters stuck anywhere near the boo-boo. But we have a rule in our home that if it doesn’t bleed it, doesn’t get a band-aid.

My daughter: Ouch!

Me: Are you okay?

My daughter: Almost! I need a band-aid.

Me: No, it doesn’t need a band-aid. I can kiss it and give you a big hug, but band-aids are for when something is bleeding.

My daughter: Well, it doesn’t always have to be bleeding to be bleeding.

Me: Hmmm.

My daughter: Blood can be white, you know?

Me: Who told you that?

My daughter: Someone in my class.

Me: Who?

My daughter: That’s her name. Her last name is Class.

Me: So her parents named her Someone In My…

My daughter: …Class. Exactly. Can I have a band-aid?

Now we have an amended rule: Band-aids are for blood or making me laugh with surprise genius. I think I’m going to need a lot of band-aids.

By now, many people have heard the quotes from the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch about only wanting cool kids to wear his company’s clothing and that the clothing line purposefully doesn’t carry larger women’s sizes to keep larger women from wearing it. (source)

One man has decided to fight back by finding Abercrombie clothing in thrift stores and giving it to homeless people.

{click here if you can’t see the video}

Greg Karber ends the video with this before calling us to action: ”I can’t clothe the homeless or transform a brand without your help…”

And then he invites us to #fitchthehomeless where we clean out our closets and donate all our Abercrombie clothing to our local homeless shelter.

While I understand his motivations are probably well-intentioned and Abercrombie burning defective clothing instead of donating it plays a role, giving boycotted clothing to the homeless is not okay.

If a man came up to me and said, “Abercrombie and Fitch thinks only cool people should wear their clothing so I am going to give it to you for free to transform the brand…” I would be mildly offended because it’s fairly difficult to spin that sentence with anything positive. I don’t consider myself particularly cool, but I’m not into hanging around looking to change a brand into uncool.

But even more telling is the video doesn’t show Karber trying to explain to any homeless person why he is giving them Abercrombie clothing. Did they cut that part or did he just assume: Homeless people = HEY FREE SHIRT? Because #fitchthehomeless certainly isn’t touted as a movement where we stand arm and arm with the homeless against, as he puts it in the opening, “a terrible company.” Why would anyone want to wear clothing by a terrible, unethical, offensive company? Or do only people with homes have ethics?

I once tried to give a homeless man a vegetarian sandwich, which he politely declined, and I felt very conflicted as the people around me snickered and stared. I saw in myself then what I see in Karber and in the many replies to anyone who disagreed with the video. How we assume that a hungry, poor person should just be grateful for our leftovers and our ill-fitting causes. We are allowed to dehumanize them a little because they need more than we do. We can use them, give them whatever we don’t want, and they can only say thank you. We walk away telling ourselves, “They definitely appreciated that.”

The video implies that homeless people shouldn’t have opinions on Abercrombie or coolness or fitting in or being large or CEOs or corporations burning clothing or not being accepted. They aren’t intelligent enough to want to join the fight. They just want free stuff, and we can help them get it while feeling good about not ever wearing A&F again.

Kaber created another class of people within this Abercrombie controversy. It’s not based on looks or size. We (non-homeless) won’t wear Abercrombie anymore. We are purging our closets and our neighbors’ closets and our friends’ closets as the video encourages us to do. Now we have people who can afford to think or act on their ethics, and people who cannot.

And when we are left with a skid row full of homeless human beings wearing Abercrombie and Fitch clothing, we can finally ask ourselves: Are we sticking it to the CEO of a company or just illustrating how blind we really are?

My friend L calls me in the middle of the afternoon to tell me something very important.

L: There’s a Dr. Kitten. Seriously. I passed a sign for Dr. Kitten.

Now, I had a Dr. Pain as a mentor in medical school so I am not as impressed as she feels like I should be, which means I receive a text three minutes later:

Wait, Dr. Kitten has a laboratory? A lab of LOLs? Kitten lab equipment? Kitten lab personnel?

I finally understand what I missed during our conversation and I knew what I had to do.

Welcome to Dr. Kitten’s lab:

PS. While I was making this photo, I tweeted: “All those people who don’t think blogging is a real job? I’m currently filling a photo of Thomas Edison’s lab with cats.” I didn’t get a chance to break into Dr. Kitten’s lab to verify that this is where Grumpy the Cat was made and continually cloned. I’m too busy blogging to leave my house! Thank goodness for friends like L and wikicommon’s photo of Menlo Park laboratory because now I’m less likely to get arrested.

I get asked weekly: Have you lost weight? You look so skinny.

I don’t know how to respond. I can’t even tell if it’s a compliment because I haven’t lost the weight on purpose, and I worked so hard 12 years ago to get into recovery from my eating disorder that I don’t love how I look now even if I’m at some sort of weird American ideal.

When my weight is mentioned by people I’m close to, it’s not such a big deal, but I don’t exactly know how much medical information to give acquaintances: Oh, I’m skinnier because I’ve been sick for nearly a year now. I’ve had this stomach thing going on and on with severe abdominal pain and nausea when I eat and oh yeah, the diarrhea. How are you? I like your shirt! Does it have any deep significance that would make this conversation less awkward?

But I finally have an answer to my stomach stuff… Here’s a hint:

My friend, @Iknowtiffany, found the set over at World of Mirth. It’s by I Heart Guts.

Before the big reveal, let’s review how we got here especially for those who aren’t following my every move on Facebook and Twitter:

1) June: Out of nowhere, nausea, upset on the other end (when did I get so shy?), abdominal pain that would come and go. Basically, I felt like someone had replaced my GI system with someone else’s, and that lucky bastard now has a sweet, kind and very regular GI system.

2) After a month of this, I told my doctor. She’s was not very impressed and said: Maybe IBS. I just heard BS and was given some pamphlets that I threw away.

3) I learned to live with it, which translated into being tired and cranky on my bad days. I also began to lose weight because I felt sick and in pain every other week. As an aside which would play a big role: I went on migraine medication in November. I’ve had these headaches my whole life so the medication and treatment should be unrelated, but because this particular medication can have side effects, such as weight loss and kidney stones, it allowed me (and several doctors) to confuse and ignore my story longer.

4) I had horrific, can’t-get-off-the-floor, upper abdominal pain one morning in December.

5) When the pain went away, I thought: Oh good, it’s gone. My friends thought: Get to a doctor, moron.

6) I went the next day because my friends (especially K!) are smart. My PCP’s partner (my PCP was off that day) thought: Gallbladder. I wasn’t that impressed since most of my freaders had already made that diagnosis on Facebook.

7) My PCP sent me for an ultrasound immediately after the appointment and the ultrasound didn’t show much except a tiny kidney stone. My migraine meds can cause kidney stones and this is where the art of medicine plays into the story and where I probably should’ve spoken up. I got pushed to a urologist when I should’ve said: I want to go the GI route first since my symptoms and presentation are better stories for GI. All my freaders said so!

8) The urologist was unimpressed but did a CT scan just in case I had an atypical kidney stone presentation. However, I asked to do a full abdominal CT scan since I was already getting radiated, and we both agreed that it was just as likely to be my gallbladder. He said yes at first, but his radiologist didn’t want to do it. He went with the radiologist and lied about why he had made the request in the first place (weird right?). The dude was kind of a jerk overall and I didn’t even have kidney stones. (The purple stuffed animal is not a kidney.)

9) Being annoyed about the whole experience, I went back to living sick. However, I finally realized that my weight loss didn’t start with my migraine medication, and I needed to take control of my health because I hated looking and feeling sickly. My life and work were really being affected by this. I wasn’t up for playing with my kids as much, and I wasn’t as productive with writing. I just didn’t feel like Alex some days. I asked to see a GI doctor who was a great listener and thorough. My PCP agreed.

10) In February, I finally met with a GI doctor who wrote in my chart Not IBS. He seemed to think we might find Crohn’s disease but was really looking at everything to figure out what the heck was wrong with me. He also put me on high dose reflux medication with helped a bit. I  began weekly medical tests: five tests plus preps and rides and hospital wait times and fun posts like How To Prep For A Colonoscopy Or The Colonoscopy Eve Celebration Guide

11) However, all my tests were normal except my HIDA scan, which is fancy for a in-depth gallbladder scan. But of course this scan was not textbook abnormal so my GI doctor offhandedly mentioned new research that showed my results could be more-telling for surgery but he’s not a surgeon and moved on to totally unrelated and seemingly off-the-deep end ideas (to me) about how to treat my symptoms. Still being on my THIS IS MY HEALTH AND MY BODY AND I NEED TO ACT LIKE IT kick, I ask to see the best and brightest surgeon to get another opinion on my HIDA scan. My GI doctor agreed and sent me to a surgeon who says no to people (because I obviously don’t want an unnecessary surgery. I just want to feel better.) This surgeon listened to my story and replied (much to my surprise): Based on your history and HIDA scan results, you have a 75+% chance of feeling all better post-cholecystectomy. I can’t promise you anything, but I just got off the phone with two doctors who were shocked that I wouldn’t take out their patients’ gallbladders so I don’t operate lightly. What do you think?

12) My surgery is scheduled for right before Memorial Day weekend. I could’ve had it done the week after meeting the surgeon, but I’m terrible at resting. I will say OH I’M FINE. Go ahead and go back to work. I’ll just push this part of my intestines back into my abdomen while I’m walking the dog. I decided to foil myself by picking a long weekend where I have no excuses and won’t screw up my recovery.

Yes, I spent at least a week imagining what it would’ve been like to have pushed for the HIDA scan in December and for the surgery consult after that and I reimagine it after I pay the multiple bills for each medical test I had in March. It’s amazing that the hospital charges me for doing the scan, the GI doctor charges me for reading the scan and sometimes they also send my scans out to a random radiologist that I’ve never seen and that guy charge me, too. I want everyone to get paid for their work, but I told my husband that pediatricians don’t play the game well enough because he doesn’t charge for reading any results.

Yes, I think it’s unfair that I can’t say: My urologist said the ultrasound wasn’t well done. I shouldn’t have to pay for a bad ultrasound since that’s part of the reason I had to get the CT scan.

Yes, I think it’s unfair that I can’t say: My GI doctor should’ve sent me to the surgeon right after the HIDA scan instead of to another test that was normal and now I have to pay for.

Yes, I think it’s unfair that my PCP’s partner isn’t docked for basing his decision on one bad ultrasound, that he clearly didn’t even look at closely, instead of my history. (But I also know that PCP’s aren’t paid nearly what they are worth so I feel less strongly about this one. I also feel like if I had spoken up, I could’ve very easily been sent to the GI doctor. Sometimes having my MD makes me worry that I will try to take over my healthcare, but I don’t know every answer and I don’t keep up on everything seven years out.)

But I finally able to put all that aside when I discovered that I could buy a gallbladder. YAY!

This way I’ll always have one by my side. Just not INSIDE trying to kill me.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot. Late Enough and The Home Depot are teaming up to bring a four-part series on building a raised garden.

If anyone can remember back as far as April, I posted my gardening to-do list for Spring and on it was a raised garden, which we are finally tackling this month.

While I’m not a gardening maven, except for herbs, I love growing food so ours will be an edible raised garden, and I think you can do it too as long as they’re okay with asking for help and making mistakes. However, raised gardens can be full of flowers or themed around tea or cooking as well.

The most important part to every raised gardens is THE WHERE, and depending on the yard, it either choses you or you chose it. If it choses you, then it also choose what you can plant. Period. If you’re want an edible garden, you need full sun for a good harvest of almost all popular and semi-popular plants, and even then you’ll be dealing with droughts and weird infestations. Start off on the best footing. If you are working with flowers, you have more flexibility as to where you build your raised garden.

I had to stand in the yard and figure out what areas get at least 6 hours of direct sunlight (which equals full sun), but I honestly recommend finding a place that gets 8 hours.

My first year planting a raised garden in this house, it was as my last project with my son before his sister arrived. That year we built the entire raised garden ourselves rather than using a kit, which is also how we will be doing it this year. (I’ll be going into the specific equipment purchasing in my post next weekend.)

Before (but really after). Mostly to show you that raised gardens can be made on grass although you do have to help it to regrow so I’d pick an already sad spot in your yard.

After but really before. We had some missing grass because of a shed we had removed.

I must’ve fallen asleep that first year because I misjudged the area I chose and mostly got snow peas and strawberries. Everything else didn’t want to flower. Luckily, we went simple our first year, and my toddler most liked rolling and digging in the dirt so it wasn’t a big deal to him. But compared to my permanent garden from years past? I was annoyed at myself.

Last year, we got much fancier with an irrigation system that mostly got me wet, colorful tomato cages and I lying to myself about how long watermelon vines really grew. But what we did right was decide that sun was more important than having a backyard that made any sense.

This is where we had a raised garden last year. It meant no weeding between the pavers. AWESOME.

I didn’t expect to blog about last year’s raised garden from a kit so picture more of these blocking the front stairs of the pergola. They were messy but fruitful. And veggie-ful.

In the fall, we lost our beautiful oak tree in the front year and cannot plant another tree because of the vast amount of roots below the soil. Both dealing with this dead spot in my front yard and a raised garden was on my garden to-do list so a reader suggested I make them into one project.

We miss that old tree.

This year, we will be making the leftover dirt spot from where the oak tree once stood into a beautiful raised garden.

Two birds. One stone.

We don’t have to worry about sun like our first year, and we can’t get away with the sloppy vines and hilarity of last year. I’m a little nervous, but also looking forward to making our first front yard edible raised garden. I hope you’ll join me and help me out with more ideas and suggestions. And get out there! Pick a spot in your yard you want to hide, not weed all summer, or grow something delicious in and let’s get started.

It’s home improvement time, and The Home Depot has everything you need to #DigIn for Spring. No matter what projects you want to tackle, they have great values on all you need. They’re ready to help you with renovation ideas and expert advice, too.

Get over $300 in email exclusive savings each year, sneak peeks on new products, monthly lawn & garden ideas for your region and access to The Home Depot’s gardening experts. Click here to join the world’s largest garden community today! Or go to http://gardenclub.homedepot.com/ to see some of the many benefits of membership.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot. I was compensated.

I didn’t put Lars in charge of my daughter while I was sick, but I considered it.

I got sick right after my daughter so while I’m peeling off those not-yoga pants for the first time today, I’m going to turn over my blog to my hard work elsewhere.

My Other Hangouts (don’t tell my blog):

• From My Childhood to Theirs: On Richmondmom, I recall and reminisce about all the wonderful memories I have of picking buttercups and doing underwater tea parties in the pool and now that my children are older, I can start to share these with them.
• Prayer Changes Me: On Progressive Christianity, I wrote about how prayer works — it first changes the person praying and helps them find the right action to take. This piece is a revision of an older piece I wrote years about but with all the backlash against sending prayers to people, I thought I would revisit the idea.

Favorite posts I didn’t read, I mean, write:

• Why Harry Connick Jr. Couldn’t Sit Idle During ‘Idol’: From next avenue, I was pretty obsessed with Harry Connick, Jr when I was in middle school so reading about him schooling American Idol contestants (I don’t actually watch the show) in the true art of singing made my heart sing. (nostalgic)
• Nancy Grace and Ashleigh Banfield Hold Split-Screen Interview in Same Parking Lot: From The Atlantic Wire, I thought CNN couldn’t get more ridiculous but I was wrong. They held a split screen discuss between two reporters IN THE SAME PARKING LOT. (hilarious)
• Sad Cat Diary: From  zefrank1 on youtube, the diary of a sad, struggling, philosophical cats everywhere. (OMG I died watching this video. h/t to Leslie)

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The last 24-36 hours have been hectic because my daughter was up all night sick and we weren’t sure what was wrong. My husband is also sick, but we at least know he has a virus. And I’m pretending I just have allergies because it might be true.

At this point, I’m running on pink furry slippers, dirty pants, and Netflix. It actually took me the last 10 hours to figure out that the magenta stains on my I-have-not-done-yoga-in-six-months yoga pants match the magenta stains on my son’s chest because they are the same shade of lipstick my daughter put on her girl Hot Wheels cars this morning and not because we are all going to die of a very pretty plague.

This happened three minutes AFTER bath. Pretty plagues are like that. PS. He’s making a fake sad face so don’t feel too sorry for him.

Not that it stopped me from wearing them all day.

I must have sat next to her hot Hot Wheels, and E carried them up to bed for her.

Meanwhile, my cats, being cat-like, were feeling left out of the fun so around the high point, which is really the low point because it was at midnight and all I wanted to do was fix whatever was ailing N and have us all go back to sleep, the oldest cat took it upon himself to puke up everything he’d eaten in the last year.

At first, I wasn’t too upset at Loki because he hadn’t puked on my bed or anyone’s only pair of clean underwear or my sick kid. It was on a chest that my husband built many years ago. This chest is hefty and solid and will one day be brought into The Antique Roadshow only to be told: Oh, your neighbor down the street built it when he was bored one weekend.

The lighting and my photog skills do not do Scott’s handiwork justice.

I love this chest, and I show that love by keeping my most treasured clothing in it: my pajamas. Cat puke seemed like something this wooden box of awesome could handle. Except when I wiped up the vomit, I realized what homemade really means: Imperfections. The wood doesn’t quite touch the wood planks next to it. No big deal to pajamas. Very big deal to cat puke. I slowly lifted the lid to find drips that had already met my sacred pjs. I also discovered that I had inadvertently sealed the chest wood with partially digested cat food.

That is not the golden hue of the wood glistening. That’s the puke that I can’t pretend isn’t there.

My cats quickly held a cat convention while I debated what to do, and they unanimously decided to be completely unhelpful.

There’s no Pinterest board for getting puke out of DIY projects so I improvised with paper towels. Many, many paper towels slid carefully in between the wood as I threaded vomit out and listened for Scott and our very sick daughter.

I should have just made this post a puke tutorial and WON PINTEREST.

With my pajamas finally safe, I could go back to thinking my daughter might not survive the night. But she did. We all did. N feels a bit better today because it’s probably a virus, and lipstick and puke are not permanent although I’m pretty sure parental sleep-deprivation is.

Get your crown on.

When my daughter wants to play princesses, we play princesses. I’m not against girly things today even though I grew up pushing away more typical feminine concepts. I hated the color pink. I never cried. I cursed. I stayed out too late. I went too far. I hung with “the guys.” In fact, I aimed to out-do men most of the time. I wasn’t a tomboy. I just wasn’t ever going to admit my arm hurt when I played punch-each-other-in-the-arm with the boy who outweighed me by 100 pound. And I’d have the bruises to prove it.

Over the years, I let myself be the woman who wears pink but prefers red. The woman who cries at Hallmark commercials and with friends but still hates romantic comedies. I understand that I can be who I am even if it’s hard and doesn’t fit neatly in a box. So when I became a mom to a daughter who loves tutus and purple, I became a mom who wears princess dresses.

But when my daughter says to her brother and me, Let’s play Mario and Luigi, and I’m the princess in the tower, I shudder. I don’t want her to be a bystander in her story, and I know enough about girls and culture and princesses to know this is fear-realized of allowing so much tulle in my home.

I don’t want her waiting for a prince charming.

She’s a princess, but she’s powerless in this story. She is locked away, and her brother and I have to save her. The gentle, loving, sweet princesses must be rescued. This story isn’t just in video games like Mario Brothers. It’s told over and over in bits and pieces, in books and movies. It’s why I fought so hard against pink and tears and romantic comedies and anything typically girly. I didn’t want to get trapped so I believed if I was the exact opposite, I would be free. I didn’t realize that doing the opposite of something made me just as imprisoned.

But after a few minutes of running around attacking bad guy Koopa Troopas, I walk over to her and whisper: Come on out, Princess. Fight the bad guys with us. Save yourself.

The door isn’t locked and you’re stronger than you think.

And she runs forward all arms and legs and giggles and karate chops.

Because it’s not the dress and the crown and the jewels and the shoes and the movies and the games and the makeup and the shaving and the colors and the emotions that keep her in tower. It’s us not learning and teaching there are alternate endings and middles and beginnings to every story. It’s us not fighting for the right to fall wherever we are on that gender spectrum.

My daughter is a princess, but she will not need rescuing.

Masked Princess Crusader

To learn more about the Damsel in Distress trope, which is particularly popular in video games, check out Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency’s blog post and youtube video on it. Video games will never look the same and that’s a good thing. I don’t know if I would’ve seen the opportunity if I hadn’t been following her blog.

Purina One and Late Enough are teaming up to talk and learn more about the true nature of cats. I’m writing a four-part sponsored series on my experience with my cats. This is part four.

Whenever I buy my cats anything expensive, they are hate it. They’re frugal like that so I tend to stay away from fancy cat trees and perches.

This were perches and hideaways for cats at Purina’s Headquarters. They didn’t comes in my box, which is good because mostly my kids would’ve climbed them while my cats watched.

But we do let our cats be cats in our home.

Cats like to be high up. Cats like to see without being seen. Cats like to be near windows. Cats like to spend time in low-traffic areas. Cats are nuts.

Juno hiding in a blanket fort. It was that kind of day although as it turns out, most days are supposed to be those kind of days for cats.

Huckle in window heaven.

My lap isn’t low traffic as often as Loki would like but he waits for me at night and then appears for love.

This wasn’t mentioned in the True Nature of Cats journey but my cats like to text their friends, too. (My iPhone is up near a window.)

And play doctor. (Also, the stethoscope is on the top bunk.)

Basically, letting my cat hang out on the kitchen counters is not gross at all. It’s letting my cats be themselves!

Maybe not so much letting them eat ice cream or write checks for more tuna fish.

So don’t shoo them off everything. Give them spaces that are their own so they can be the crazy, creepy amazing animals they are born to be.

Surprise!

Expanding on this idea, I have found that letting cats have the right kind of space is even more important when you introduce cats and dogs into the same home or introduce new cats into the home. Cats need safe places where they can relax and still be a part of the family without worrying about the new guy.

For example, we have baby gates and kept Lars in the back of the house (the highest traffic area) for his first four months or so. It wasn’t just for his safety (keeping him from chewing things that would make him sick) or our safety (keeping him from peeing on things that would make us freak out) but also for our cats comfort and adjustment.

His doggy jail includes a big screen TV and us most of the time so don’t feel too sorry for him.

Our cats could get in and out to spend time with the dog as they were comfortable, but their food and litter space were away from the dog. However, they had areas in this space where they were high enough to relax around the dog (until the dog grew but now he goes into my areas so they have more perches too).

Some took advantage of visitation rights more than others.

This allowed my cats and dog to become the best frenemies that they are.

And even as we have let the dog have most of the downstairs, my cats still have the upstairs. Our home goes: grownups, kids, cats, dogs, but don’t tell our cats because if they found out they weren’t charge, they’d pee on our beds.

PS. My True Nature of Cats posts on Late Enough are finished, but Purina One has added the True Nature journal online so yours can begin. Check out the Cat Journal and enjoy your fantastic felines.

PPS. Catch up all the other posts:

• Part 1: From Blogger to Cat Assistant
• Part 2: A Giant Box Of Cat Joy (Giveaway) (Now closed although I have added links so you can purchase the toys and feeders. The winner of the big box of cat joy giveaway is Cindy. Congrats!)
• Part 3: Nugget Steals A Shoe, Hordes Feathers, Makes Me Feel Guilty, And He’s My Normal Cat

Disclaimer: My cats don’t care who sponsors posts on my blog, but I was given the material to take them on the True Nature of Cats journey.