Petie and the Pratie

So settling back in to the BEF in Aluksne was underway. I don’t think I mentioned, though, that before I was Mamma to a baby, I was Mamma to a kitty cat. Peteris Pirmais (Latvian for Peter the Great), or more commonly known as "Petie," was an orange striped tabby who thought he was a dog. Somehow I end up with cats that act like dogs. First there was Tonto, also orange striped and as faithful a companion as any Native American, then Petie, and now Tuna who is all gray save a white heart on his throat. All of these felines knew how to work a crowd, work over a rodent, and hold their own with raccoons, possums, and I think Petie might have even had a run-in with a wild boar once…


At any rate, I finished the second bedroom of the flat with a potato. At that point I was tired of scouring the country for decent materials, and I didn’t have the time anyway, so I thought I’d go native. Not that Latvians decorated with potatoes, (however I do believe they have 101 uses for the ubiquitous tuberous crop) but native in that for once I was going to use a completely indigenous resource to help make the flat more of a home. Call it embracing my environment.  So I cut stars out of the praties, dunked them in blue paint, and stamped Jameson’s new room full of blue stars.

As I was doing this, I was using newspapers on the floor to blot the paint, my little guy was snoozing in his bouncy seat nearby, and Petie was standing guard over his new ward. Petie thought he was the bodyguard. At one point, I noticed Petie jumping around trying to catch a very fat but very fast fly, and the cat was very agitated—the fly was getting too close to his baby—then the fly landed on our sleeping boy’s head. Oh the conflict on that cat’s face! He wanted to swat and pounce, but he didn’t dare bother the boy! As soon as the fly flew off, Petie bounded after it only to land in paint and add paw prints to the stars on my blotting papers. No harm done, but kind of a cute story and illustration of how this became a family affair.