Here, Kitty-Kitty

I originally thought this blog was going to be about mice, but apparently, any animal is up for grabs. This collection of stories is in response to a friend's question about keeping her cat out of her newborn's crib, so it does have some mousy relevance.

So if you hadn't guessed from my enthusiasm about our rabbits, I'm not exactly an animal person. And I have to admit (this will upset some of you) that I'm especially not a cat person. I don't have anything against other people's felines, I just agree totally with my friend, Megan who firmly believes, "If a cat was big enough it would eat you." But the great thing in this world is we can disagree and still be friends. I don't have to like cats, we can all parent differently and it really doesn't matter if coke is better than diet coke if you're drinking the one you like.

So back to my love/hate relationship with cats. (Why can’t I stay on topic?) I got bitten by a cat on my honeymoon. Really. On a sweet potato farm in the smack dab middle of St. Lucia, a cat bit me. We were hiking towards the rainforest and I saw the cat over 100 yards away and I mentioned they weren’t my favorite animal and out of nowhere, it runs over to us and bites…me. So I consider myself very lucky that I am here to tell you about my mice. (Although nothing happened other than I had a small puncture wound on my leg, and it probably sounds a lot worse than it really was.)

As I mentioned before, our first house was a cute little rental on an 800 acre farm. Sassy Mouse (my mom) would disagree that it was cute. Anyway, our landlord’s mother lived in the house before we did and the only thing she left there was a lot of dust and her black cat, Shadow. Shadow lived in the house alone for a few months before we did, so as it was understood by the cat, the house was not ours, it belonged to her. Shadow did not like being evicted so she would patiently hide in the bushes until you came home and the second you opened the door, she would dart into the house and curl up on your bed. We nicknamed her "Satan," because if you came within a 3 foot radius of her, she would hiss and spit at you. If you got any closer (maybe to move her off the bed, heaven forbid you try to get her out of your/her house) you took a very good chance that she would scratch the fool out of your arm. Poor DM got bitten more times than you can count and I probably shouldn't tell you how many times DM kicked her, just because you are probably on the phone with the PETA people right now... but our landlord told him to.

After about a year of marriage, we decided to buy a house of our own and one of the most exciting things to me was moving into a cat free neighborhood. Not the case- in fact, it would not be a stretch to say our new neighborhood was infested with cats. While I’m sure this was not entirely true, all the cats were related- they all looked exactly the same. Two of them belonged to our neighbors across the street and one lived directly next door. And then there was “the one with the really small head,” who was the neighborhood bully cat and would literally beat up all the other cats. Almost nightly, there was a catfight outside our bedroom window. Now that’s a noise you don’t want to fall asleep to. One of (or all four of?) the cats must have been in cahoots with Sha… I mean, Satan because it (they?) regularly tried to sneak into our house. What is with cats wanting to sleep on my bed?!?!?!?

I have to mention at this point that DM is a pretty noisy sleeper. One weekend, DM and I went out of town and went straight to bed when we got home on Sunday. Around 4am, I heard this faint squeaking noise, but didn’t really think too much about it because I just assumed it was DM. It continued and I looked over at him and he was sound asleep. The noise kept getting louder and it began to sound a little more like a cat. I still thought it was DM, so I nudged him and he woke up to the sound of a very distinct, “Meow.” Meaning:

1. there was a cat spending the night in our house
2. that had been there since we had left 3 days earlier.

The only good news in this scenario is that I never found any evidence of kitty going to the bathroom in my house. There are no cats living in our current neighborhood, and I couldn't be happier.