C is for....Cats, cats and more cats

A to Z Blogging Challenge

We are NOT getting a cat...

Since they were old enough to talk, my kids were asking to have a cat. "But we already have a dog," I'd tell them. "We want a cat," they'd respond. So I told them, "If a stray cat adopts us some day, we'll keep it."

Well, you probably know where this story is going, don't you?

As much as I love them, we didn't plan on having cats because much of my family (including me) is allergic. But one cold night in October 2005, my husband was shutting up the house for the night, including the garage, and he yelled, "Becky, come out here! I think I just saw a huge rat run under the car."

Since I'm not afraid of rodents and my husband would rather walk on cut glass than deal with tiny animals with long tails, I headed to the garage just in time to see something dart behind one of the cars.

Then we heard it: a soft, pathetic-sounding meow. And we spotted a tiny, fluffy gray kitten sitting on our old toy box against the far wall. The poor thing couldn’t have been much more than a few weeks old. As we picked it up, another tiny head popped out behind the box. That one was too skittish to catch.

It was late. Our kids were already asleep and the next day was a school day so we didn’t want to wake them. We put the gray

V2 and Claire

kitten into our big dog crate with water and a blanket—we’d figure out what to do in the morning.

The next morning—which happened to be our son’s 10th b-day—we woke the kids and told them, “Come to the garage and see what Dad caught last night.” Our son, being a typical boy, hurried downstairs to see. Our daughter held back. “It’s a giant spider, isn’t it?” she asked, and wouldn’t go to the garage until she heard her brother calling for her.

They were delighted to see the kitten, and my daughter was able to coax the other one out of hiding. The kids wanted to stay home from school that day—“Mom, we just found two kittens AND it’s my birthday!” our son said. Nice try.

Turns out, someone had dumped an entire litter of kittens (five of them) in our neighborhood. Four of them found homes (two with us, obviously) and the fifth cat we could never catch.

That was almost 10 years ago. We still have Claire. Bam (the fluffy gray one), unfortunately, died a few years ago. But last winter, another young cat showed up on our porch. Literally. It sat in front of our door, meowing loudly for days until we finally took it to our vet to have it checked for a microchip. It had one, but the owners on file denied ever having the cat (WTF???). We suspect they just locked it out of their house one day, and it found its way to our neighborhood. We decided to keep her and named her V2 (for  Version 2, because she looks just like our other cat, Claire).

I don’t expect we’ll get another cat anytime soon. Two is plenty. But if one just happens to show up on our front porch…