On February 9, 2010, Isabella and I went to the Netherlands for a visit of the family. They had never seen Isabella before, and they haven’t seen me either since 2008, so it was about time to do this. Michelle was unable to join us as she lost all her days off when she gave birth to Isabella.

So I went alone with the baby to the Netherlands. I can tell you that I was really nervous because of that trip as you have to travel for almost 24 hours. Will Isabella cry or not? That was my biggest fear, that Isabella would cry her heart out while we were in a plane full of people. Fortunately it wasn’t all that bad.

Michelle’s last cat, Flamey, also joined us on the trip as she was a present to my mother. Michelle has a pretty bad cat allergy and we decided that we should give this cat to my mom instead, so it would end up in a nice home. That was another factor of my worries, of course, will everything go well with that little one? Cats can be really stressed, and this was a pretty long journey.

Our plane would leave from Honolulu towards Los Angeles at 9.40pm, where it would make a short stop in order to fly on to Minneapolis/St. Paul, where we had to board another plane towards Amsterdam.

We arrived way ahead of time at the airport, but there was already a long row of people who had to be checked in. Because of the cat, we also had to line up in that same row (otherwise we would check in online). Once it was our turn, we had to fill in quite some papers and we had to show them the (health)papers of the cat, and we also had to deal with a broken printer (I wanted to get a receipt for bringing the cat, you never know haha).

So we had to wait for quite some time, and at the end of it all, after a short but emotional goodbye (like said, Michelle would stay all alone on Oahu), I had to hurry towards the gate. Once Isabella and I arrived at the gate, it turned out that everyone was waiting for me, everyone else already boarded, and they wanted to depart.. I can tell you, you will feel pretty embarrassed when you get on the plane at that time.

I quickly installed Isabella in her carseat on the seat next to me, and after one of the flight attendants told me that the cat was also safely on board, we were ready to depart.

Isabella remained pretty quiet during take off. I fed her during the take off, to avoid the popping of her ears. However, she did cry when the seatbelts light turned off. What I personally think is that Isabella was way too tired, she had been awake for most of the afternoon before our flight because her grandmother wanted to see her. Anyways, I grabbed her and walked up and down the airplane with her in my arms, and thankfully that calmed her down (I thought it was terrible, first to hold up a complete plane, and then a crying baby on board.. oh oh oh).

Next to me there was a man, and his family (wife and two kids) sat on the other end of the walkway in the same row. When Isabella and I were walking for a bit, the lady asked me if she could hold Isabella, and try to calm her down. I gave Isabella to her and I got some time to get some things done for myself, and Isabella calmed down even more. The man next to me said he would move to a seat more forward in the plane (the plane was pretty empty), so he could get some sleep and I would have more space to get in and out of my seat. I can tell you that this was very nice.

Isabella calmed down after a short while (fortunately) and I put her back in her seat where she slept for the remainder of the flight. With that, I had two seats for myself (and of course the space under the third seat of Isabella, to stretch my legs) and I had a pretty relaxed flight. Like said, Isabella slept for the remainder of the flight and after about 4.5 hours, we arrived in Los Angeles.

I ate some breakfast in Los Angeles, changed Isabella’s diapers, fed her and shortly after that all it was time again to leave towards Minneapolis.

I was curious to see how the flight to Minneapolis would be, especially because I did not know if I had someone next to me or not. Well, it turned out that this flight was even emptier than the flight coming from Honolulu (and Isabella stayed quiet also, she also slept most of that flight). We left at dawn and a few hours later we arrived in a very white, and very cold, Minneapolis.

In Minneapolis we had to wait for a few hours, which turned out to be ok as the Delta employees needed Flamey’s papers again, the vet that took care of her during that stop needed it. Once it was time to get on board again, we got into a very full flight. Because Isabella didn’t cry so much, I didn’t know exactly what I could expect, it could stay like it was but she could also become restless. The flight attendants were immediately sold by her and didn’t want to give her back, but yeah, they had to work so that was bit of bad luck for them haha.

Isabella also remained pretty quiet during the long flight to Amsterdam. A few times she wanted to cry, when she woke up from some noise for example, but a quick reaction helped a lot. After a long flight we arrived in the dark, and light snow, in the Netherlands. There was only one runway open at Schiphol Airport due to snow earlier that night, and since the wind came from our side, we went from left to right during our approach (I could especially see this when we drove home on the freeway, the planes landing at that time were bouncing a lot).

We got off the plane and went towards customs. At the passport check, I went through ‘all passports’, because of Isabella’s US passport (it turned out later we could also take the other line) and apparently I have a Dutch face because they greeted me in plain Dutch haha.

Near the luggage belt, I asked how it would go with Flamey, where I could expect her, and they told me that she would either be brought to the belt, or to the desk where I was at that time. I then went on to the luggage claim to get our suitcases and once I had those, they also brought Flamey’s crate to the desk. The KLM employee (I think she is from KLM as she was dressed in blue) asked on the radio if it was my cat, and they confirmed it but it looked like there was no cat in the crate…

No cat in the crate? How is that possible? They gave me a confirmation in Minneapolis that she was on board of the plane. But what do you think? Flamey got scared during the flight (I can’t blame her, it is really something for such a creature) and she hid herself under the blanket that we put in the crate for her, so it looked as if there was no cat at all. Luckily she was there, and fortunately she looked healthy also.

The comments from the girls at the desk were nice. Such a beautiful baby and beautiful cat, I had to be a very happy man haha. That was nice, I received a lot of compliments about Isabella anyways, that she is so beautiful, and that she was so nicely quiet during the flight and also because I was so brave to go on such a journey alone with a baby and cat.

One of the ladies offered me to walk me towards the exit, because I had so much with me (you could say I brought too much haha), and once we got to the exit, the customs stopped me. If I had all papers for the cat…

I did my homework and had all kinds of papers with me (USDA papers, EU papers, all kinds of certificates and so on) that one could think of. The woman who asked me for the papers took them with her, and together with 4 or 5 people they looked at them. I really got the impression that they did not really know what they were looking at, or that they knew at all what they were doing. A bit later they told me that they had to make a phone call, and after that call she came back to me and said she was impressed, it did not happen often for someone to have all needed papers.

At that point I felt a bit like “nice, I can see that I am back in the Netherlands”. I also noticed, during my wait time at the exit, that the customs only stopped a certain kind of people for a luggage check.. Welcome to the Netherlands…

Once we were cleared and got out, my mother, sister and daughter Larissa were waiting for us, and after an emotional reunion we went towards Breda.

My first impressions of the Netherlands at that time? It was extremely cold and it looked like everyone was mad on the road. Everyone was in a hurry and went from left to right on the freeway. It is possible that me being tired had something to do with it, but at the other hand, we are not that much in a hurry on Hawaii and we drive a lot easier. I finally could see why Michelle was scared to drive in the Netherlands when she visited me in 2007.

Yes, I could really notice that I haven’t been in the Netherlands for some time, I felt a bit like a tourist in my own country.

Let’s start with not so good news: Last Friday on Saturday night, one of our cats, ‘Stain‘, has been ran over by a car.

I tried to call Stain around 11pm so she could get inside. However, I didn’t see any movement and after a bit looking around and calling, I went back inside. At around 2am, when I wanted to go to bed, I went outside again to call Stain. I called a few times, but nothing, I looked into the direction of the street and noticed a dead cat on the street. A dead cat on the street is a common sight in Hawai’i as we have lot’s of stray cats, and they often speed in our street, but this time I expected it to be Stain for some reason. I called Michelle and told her that I just noticed a dead cat on the street, and that I thought it might be Stain. I walked downstairs after that, and on towards the streetside. And, indeed, it was our Stain. Michelle came down and, a bit stressed, and when she too noticed that it was Stain, she started to cry pretty hard.

Because we had four cats, and because Michelle is pregnant, we decided a while ago to get rid of two cats. It takes a lot of effort to own four cats and, when the baby is born, you need to keep an eye on them all at all times. So it is a bit much when you have to do this with four cats, so we decided a while ago to shrink our household a bit (there were a few more reasons, but this was the main reason). We decided to keep both Bender and Stain, and to get rid of both Neko and Flamey.

Bender is a cat that basically needs to be left alone, she doesn’t like human beings much (because of a mistreatment when she was a kitten) and she has a bit of a manual to handle her. We asked about it at the Humane Society and she would not have been able to be adopted but would have been killed. This is something we didn’t wanted, so we decided to keep her (on the condition that, as soon as she even as much as threaten our baby (let alone really scratch her), she would be leaving the house).

As for Stain, we decided to keep her as she is half a street cat. She used to be a stray cat when she was younger, before she came to Michelle, and you could never held her inside. She always wanted to go out and came, during dinner and for the night, always back. Because she was not often inside, we decided to keep her as well.

Neko is one of the children of Stain and she is a very playful, sometimes naughty, cat. Sometimes we thought she was half a dog: whenever we threw a ball, she would fetch it and bring it back so we could throw it again. She was very playful and that is why we just knew that she would be adopted pretty fast. She was friendly enough and so we gave her away for adoption, as we knew for sure that she would end up in a good place.

And then there was Flamey, the sister of Neko and a daughter of Stain also. She is a real house cat, really sweet and with a very nice fur. My mother heard we wanted to get rid of a few cats and told us that she would like to take over this cat as she really liked this cat also. So she will end up in a good home as well

And, well, that’s how we went back from four cats, back to one. Well, ok, two for now, but later this year only one. I can tell you, it did get pretty quiet inside.

Personally I am also really sad that Stain is not around anymore. She was my favorite cat, and a very exceptional animal. She looked big, she had a hip surgery earlier this year and became, as a miracle, better than ever. The vet himself also said that it was a remarkable animal, the power and strength that she showed. She was not easily afraid, she was tough, and even though she would easily be the boss of the pack, she was really sweet to everyone of us, you could do anything with her. She really was an animal with character, I will really miss her.

Here are a few pictures of Stain:

This post should have been about Michelle’s new car, or at least a post in which I showed a few pictures of her new car. I will do this later today/tomorrow. As for the Storm Guillermo, he will miss us on a distance of about 400-500 miles, so that’s a nice distance. It is still a hurricane at the moment (he has reached category 3 before) but they expect him to lose strength quickly. Oh well, I think that the only we will notice from the hurricane, is an increase in humidity.

Like I said in my previous message, Stain received a hip surgery last monday because, like I also said before, her hip was dislocated because of an accident.

We picked her up yesterday and at first we just wanted that her hip would be placed back as that would be the cheapest. There would be a 50% chance that her hip would get out of the socket again after that but a full operation would have cost a minimum of 1500-2000 dollars and at some vets it would have cost an amount of 2500-3000 dollar.. That is not exactly cheap, and especially not for a cat if you ask me. To place her hip back in the socket they asked 300 dollar (at a different doctor by the way, not those expensive ones).

But ok, they wanted to put the hip back the day before yesterday (under anesthesia of course) but at the moment they put it back in, it turned out that our fears would become reality as the hip would fall right out of the socket again. The doctor then advised us to remove the joint from the hip as this could be done for a fair price. After a month, maybe two months, a ‘false joint’ should be created and then she will be able to walk without any problems. And even now she should be rid of pain as the joint isn’t going against the rest of her skeleton anymore. The costs for this surgery would be 500 dollar and he told us that it would normally be 700 bucks but that he took some money from that amout for us.

So we picked her up yesterday and she doesn’t look so well.. it isn’t much fun to see but oh well, it is for the best at the moment. She has been shaven on her belly because of that surgery a couple of weeks ago (the neutering), and now her right hip is also bald. And on top of that all, she is now wearing something that makes her look like a lamp but that’s done so she cannot pull her stitches out:

The rest of the wounds that you can see in the second picture are also wounds that she got during that accident.

I am saying accident the whole time but apparently it isn’t really an accident. One doctor says that it has been but this doctor thinks it might have been a middelsized to big dog with whom she might have had a fight and who possibly held her leg in his mouth while she tried to get away, hence the dislocated hip. He thinks this because a car accident should have killed her, which often happens.

I think this doctor might be right as our neighbors have a middle sized to big sized dog and that dog lives outside. And it could also be that if she had a car accident that she would have been killed as you can often see some dead cats on the road because they got hit by a car.

Right, we don’t know what it was but I hope she will heal well and that she can walk around in a couple of months again without problem.

The stitches have to be taken out in two weeks and she is allowed to walk around at the moment (which she also does, fortunately. She is doing much better than before although she doesn’t walk long on it, but yah, that shouldn’t be done either as she might overload it. I think we did a good thing by doing this).

All we have to do now is to wait and see how she will be doing in the upcoming days

Fortunately it all sounds a bit worse than it really is… let’s start with the three surgeries. These surgeries (for the cats, of course, took place last week and are basically nothing more than neutering the cats. Since some of them walk outside from now and then, it is needed to have that done since, before I moved here, one cat already had two nests and that is enough if you ask me.

I don’t have much to tell about the surgeries, we left the cats and we could pick them up a day later again, it wasn’t much special (for us). The only thing we really noticed is that the bellies of the cats were shaved. We took some pictures of them of course:

From left to right you can see the mother cat Stain and then her two daughters Flamey and Neko. We think the cats have not much experienced from the surgeries, it doesn’t really look that they are different in behavior than before (which can happen sometimes when an animal gets fixed). So everything is ok with them…

Except for one of them…

The mother cat, Stain, is apparently hit by a car last wednesday.. It was already weird that Stain let her caught so easily last wednesday when she was outside but upstairs.. normally she is really hard to get, she want to get in but at the same time she doesn’t haha. But yah, this time it was really easy, we didn’t really know why, especially since she didn’t cry or anything but was just as quiet as normal. We didn’t think much of it and since we had to go out ourselves that day we put her inside and did our things as usual.

Later, around dinnertime, I thought that Stain was a bit quiet, she didn’t move much and when the food for the cats came out, something they all wake up for, she still remained in her own spot, half sleeping. I thought she might have been tired and left her alone, we still didn’t notice anything.

Michelle picked her up at around nine in the evening, to cuddle a bit with her, something she does more often and Stain usually don’t mind, but now Stain was growling a bit and really wanted to get back on the floor, as soon as Michelle put her down, we noticed that she was walking limp so we took a closer look and found a small wound on her hip.

We called the emergency hospital for animals (I didn’t even know this existed but yah, it seems it is) and asked what we should do and if we could drop by. They told us we could come by but this would cost 105 dollar while if we made an appointment, we only had to pay 39 dollars. Quite some difference if you ask me but since we didn’t know what was wrong, we decided to go directly anyways.

Once we arrived there, we had to fill in a form and they looked at her, we heard that it was the best if they also took an X-Ray, we asked what would be the cost of that: including the 105 dollar that had to be paid for the consult, it would be around the 300 dollar.. nice, and then they didn’t do anything to the animal itself. Right, we agreed, paid up front and they went to see if they could see what was wrong with her hip (they already saw some wounds and stuff and these already showed that it wasn’t a fight but most likely a car that hit her).

After the pictures were made we heard (and saw through the photo’s) that the hip was dislocated. They told us that there were two main solutions, one was to put the hip back to his original position, this would be the cheapest option but brings a lot of risk with it, like a 50% chance that the hip would get dislocated again and that there might even be some more damaged, and the other option would be a surgery, this would be the best and safest option and works really well but it is also more expensive.

To pop the hip back in its location, it would cost about 300 dollar at one doctor and about 600 dollar at the one we went to for the research (we called around a bit for different prices) and for the surgery we would have to pay between 1500 and 2000 dollar (even more at others). What to do next.. the 300 or 600 option isn’t so much of a problem but the 1500 to 2000 dollar is quite some money, especially since there are some other things also that have to be paid soon.

We didn’t know that night what we had to do, we received some medication (with a value of 80 dollar, and it is not exactly much if you ask me) and called around yesterday and went to several doctors with her file that we received (for which we also had to pay).

Right, so now it is Saturday evening (and I just at a ‘bitterbal’.. but more about that later) and we still don’t know exactly what we should do. The operation is just too expensive right now, we want to but we don’t want to create problems for ourselves, like said, we have some expensive things coming up soon (like, for example, my adjustment of status (because of the immigration) which can be taken out of our account any time now, which is another 1000 dollars) and, well, popping it back in only brings a lot of risk.. the doctors that we called (everyone we spoke to, even the ones who couldn’t do it themselves) were telling us that it might give troubles later and they all said it would be better to do a surgery.

We also asked a few doctors how the pain is for her and, apparently, it isn’t all that bad.. Some even said that if we don’t do much about it, that she would still be able to walk around everywhere after a couple of weeks, she would limp but other than that there wouldn’t be too much problems. Cats are amazing with these things according to them. Good, that gives us some breathing space to see what we want and/or can do, to just put her to sleep because of a dislocated hip just sounds ridiculous if you ask me. It seems like it is indeed not that bad at the moment, she moves frequently to get some food, drink, to put herself on a different spot and we even found her on a 3 feet high closet..

We will see what we have, want and can do.

Sometimes you hardly write and sometimes you write a lot, and I just realized that the latter is what happens at the moment, just as I was about to start to write this post.

So, I wrote about two weeks ago that we would bring the young kittens for adoption to the the Hawaiian Humane Society, but I didn’t tell you that not all kittens were ready for the adoption yet.. They were old enough (a bit more than 2 months) but not all of them were heavy enough so we could take them back home in the box we brought them at first.

By the way, here is a picture of the Hawaiian Humane Society en one of Michelle walking out of the door at the animal intake:Hier is trouwens een foto van de Hawaïaanse Humane Society en eentje van Michelle die net de deur uit komt lopen bij de dieren inname:

The last week, so about two weeks later, they turned out to be heavy enough and it became Michelle’s and my duty to bring them to the Hawaiian Humane Society again. That was not really fun as I also got a bit used to them (and I think about them sometimes while I ask myself how they are doing and what they do at the moment), and I can imagine it must be hard on Michelle also sometimes, but yeah, like I said before, ten cats at home (by now there were only nine cats left as the most heaviest one was adopted at one of Michelle’s mother’s friends) is a bit too much.

We went to the Hawaiian Humane Society a few more times last week, by the way. One time we went that way because there was a humane trap ready for pickup and we went back twice because we catched ourselves two feral cats.

It might sound a bit weird but apparently it is needed, there are too many feral cats out here and to reduce that population and keep the population levels to a certain amount, people are asked to help a bit when they notice that there are some feral cats in their neighborhood (and we see them a lot over here). The Hawaiian Humane Society lends Humane traps to people in which you can place some food and the cat walks into the trap and the gate closes behind the cat.

What was really nice at the Hawaiian Humane Society was that, the last time we were there, they told us that we could get three of our four cats neutered for free and only have to pay 5 dollars for the microchip which they have to implement (the fourth wont run away, she is too scared to get outside so we’re not worried about that one haha), so, fortunately, we don’t have to be affraid to get more young cats when they run away again some day