Josie stepped on a slug the other day. IN HER BEDROOM. It apparently got in through the tiny sliver of open door to the balcony, then oozed across my bedroom and the hallway into the kids’ room. That’s a distance of about 30 feet, which has to be a million miles in slug. To travel that far, only to be smooshed by the bare foot of a 7-year-old…it seems existentially crushing. (Sic.) Then the other other day, Yoyo killed a mouse. She deposited it, furrily drenched in sweat, at Jonathan’s feet as he sat drinking his coffee in the kitchen. Then this morning, I swept up a swirl of leaves that had blown into the living room, and also cleaned up two discretely textured piles of cat vomit. (One was smooth, the other chunky. Choosy mothers choose neither.)

Perhaps because we are living in filth and effluvia, Josie and I enjoyed Betsy Franco’s haikus about drinking out of toilets and cleaning up hairballs in A Curious Collection of Cats. (Josie’s on a haiku kick. If I can be that annoying boasting mother for a sec, she came up with a game in which we take turns naming literary characters, then both have to write haikus about the characters in our heads.)

Anyway, we didn’t lo-o-o-ve the book of cat poems. Maybe if more of them had been haikus…? The art is spectacular, and we like the idea of concrete poetry, but most of the poems themselves were simply cute and forgettable. I preferred Betsy Franco’s performance on Funny Or Die, explaining why she killed her son James Franco’s cat. (“That cat’s shit was going to kill my new baby! Have you ever seen Sophie’s Choice?”)

Too bad Josie’s not gonna see it. I’m not going to pay for her therapy.