You want to know about my CATS? Oh, they’ll LOVE that. It’s very little attention and love they’ve seen since we brought home the first of our five unusually large, loud, furless kittens. …Sorry, I hate cats’ eye view, too. What’s next? Talking about “their humans”? Referring to the cats as our “furry children”? It’s a slippery slope, my friends: one day it’s “furless kittens” and the next day it’s “My cat walks all over me!” sweatshirts.
We have three cats, all acquired in ignorance of our creature-saturated future. The first one was Ge0rge. (You are going to think I am a PARANOID FREAK for disguising my CATS’ names, and listen, I agree. But on the other hand, I feel like my mother-in-law is EVERYWHERE. The walls! They have eyes and ears! And horns!)
So, this is Ge0rge, who in actual life has an o and not a zero in his name:
We adopted him from a shelter when he was a kitten. Ge0rge is not my preferred kitten style: he was frisky and sunshiney and hypering up and down the walls of his cage. He would run right up our bodies and sit on our shoulders.
The kitten I picked out more my style: sniveling, clinging, cowering. That was OIiver, who normally has a lowercase L instead of a capital I, and who normally does not have a mysterious red scuff on his nose:
OIiver is also a shelter cat, chosen painfully from a litter of four very similar kittens. His mother was also in the shelter, and I still wish I’d taken her, too. She was a very nice cat. And then maybe OIiver wouldn’t spend so much time sucking his own paw. Plus, it turns out I don’t like kittens, even if they’re in my preferred style.
And so the third cat we adopted was a grown cat. She was a stray in our apartment complex, a knocked-up teenager. Someone else took her in (technically, she took herself in: she walked right into their apartment without asking) when she needed a place to have her kittens, and then we took her when her kittens were old enough to be given away. I thought it would be sad to separate her from the kittens, but you should have seen her shaking off the shackles.
We named her Amelia, but called her that about three times before we nicknamed her M0use, and we’ve never called her anything else since then. You wouldn’t know it to look at her now, but when she was younger she was thin and almost all white, with huge ears. So the nickname seemed less silly back then.
cute kitties! I disguise my pet’s names too, I’m so paranoid about my MIL…
GE0RGE! hee! i love that angle for cats.
also: yay for cats named OIiver!
awww, even the cats want to sit in the baby chair.
Awww, they’re all so beautiful. I especially love Oliver’s coloring.
I’m with you on the “fur baby” thing. I told Jason he could punch me in the head if I ever refer to our cats that way. Even though it doesn’t seem like it on my blog, in real life I don’t talk about our cats very much because I don’t want to be that lady.
(Even though I am.)
Awww, they’re all so beautiful. I especially love Oliver’s coloring.
I’m with you on the “fur baby” thing. I told Jason he could punch me in the head if I ever refer to our cats that way. Even though it doesn’t seem like it on my blog, in real life I don’t talk about our cats very much because I don’t want to be that lady.
(Even though I am.)
Awww, they’re all so beautiful. I especially love Oliver’s coloring.
I’m with you on the “fur baby” thing. I told Jason he could punch me in the head if I ever refer to our cats that way. Even though it doesn’t seem like it on my blog, in real life I don’t talk about our cats very much because I don’t want to be that lady.
(Even though I am.)
You all impress me with your ability to have kids and PETS. (Love you kitties, Swistle.)
We are not good pet parents. We found a new home for our dog (just down the street, and we babysit her often) and then our cat snuck outside while we were packing our car for camping. Since we didn’t KNOW she got out, she was on her onw for 3 days, and we haven’t seen her since. I still dream of her, and miss her, and wonder what happened to her.
GUILT. I have a lot of pet guilt.
We had a cat before we had kids (she died soon after my second child was born). My oldest keeps begging us to get a kitten (or a puppy, or a rabbit), but my middle child is afraid of anything with fur so we haven’t given in yet. I’m with you – more into cats than kittens.
I have to admit, I read this in my feed reader first and I am somewhat curious about the changes that were made between that version and this one. But I will not probe. You are just so mysterious.
Also, I don’t see a 0 in the first cat’s name. I see an o. Is it just me?
Marie Green- I’ll bet someone took her in! M0use, we found out later, was left by some people who moved out of the apartment complex, and look what a nice rich life she leads: plush baby seat, her own space on the couch, her own dish of cat food because she doesn’t like to share with the boys.
I LOVE kitties and would have ten if I could (I want a Siamese cat badly!)but our dogs would eat them and if they did not eat one another I would fear the repercussions of that “excitement” in our already crazy house.
As a note, Terriers are yappy little creatures and they do not care when the baby is asleep and that it took four hours to have that happen, damn you dogs I banish you to the backyard FOREVER! Sigh.
Ah, the sweet quiet of cats!
I LOVE kitties and would have ten if I could (I want a Siamese cat badly!)but our dogs would eat them and if they did not eat one another I would fear the repercussions of that “excitement” in our already crazy house.
As a note, Terriers are yappy little creatures and they do not care when the baby is asleep and that it took four hours to have that happen, damn you dogs I banish you to the backyard FOREVER! Sigh.
Ah, the sweet quiet of cats!
I LOVE kitties and would have ten if I could (I want a Siamese cat badly!)but our dogs would eat them and if they did not eat one another I would fear the repercussions of that “excitement” in our already crazy house.
As a note, Terriers are yappy little creatures and they do not care when the baby is asleep and that it took four hours to have that happen, damn you dogs I banish you to the backyard FOREVER! Sigh.
Ah, the sweet quiet of cats!
Oh Swistle…I love your kitties! So cute. We have 5 cats now. I’ve always had 2 cats, and then the kids *really* wanted a kitten so I told them when the time was right, we’d get one.
A couple of months later, we discovered that the stray cat we’d been feeding had had kittens under our (enclosed) deck. We ended up taking in both kittens and the mom, which was quite an experience! (They were very feral.) We just thought it was some kind of sign to say that to the kids and then have TWO kittens pretty much drop into our laps. LOL!
I had a cat named Mouse when I was younger, too. I sometimes miss the less intrusive nature of cats as pets vs. dogs. They are sheddy and poop inside, true, but they don’t eat ridiculously expensive amounts of food and leave enormous piles of crap in your yard and whine to go out all day, either.
I just wanted you to know that I care SO MUCH about your anonymity that I Control-F-ed the names to make sure that you didn’t type the right ones instead of the wrong ones (Because you can’t even tell the difference between the L and the I.
But BUT! Some of your commenters have used the RIGHT names and Google will be able to tell. Isn’t there some way you can modify comments?
Just lookin’ out for you, Swis.
Beenami- Ha ha! You are awesome. No, I guess I will stop fretting about the cats’ names. The odds of EVEN MY MIL Googling the cats’ names is so, so low.
Loved this: “Plus, it turns out I don’t like kittens, even if they’re my preferred style.”
Either I’m out of the kitty-lingo loop or I’m extremely slow this morning, but when I first read the part about “five furless kittens,” I thought you had five extremely fat, ugly cats. Glad you explained that. : )
And I hate your MIL. Mine is a bit crazy – okay, really crazy – but at least she doesn’t have horns. (That I’m aware of, anyway.)
Your cats are beautiful.
And as long as there are people in the world like my friend M, nobody has to worry about being the crazy cat lady. Here’s her backstory: she is single so she lives alone. She adopted her first cat, Matisse, when she lived in an apartment. The way she told it she went with her mom to a shelter so her mom could adopt a cat but she was under strict orders to be a chaperone and make sure that her mom brought home only ONE cat. Which she did. And so did M.
About a year later M bought a house, and shortly thereafter her mom’s cat Jane got out of the yard and nearly got hit by a car (they live off of a super busy street, and have this weird lot on a hill that can’t really be fenced). So in order to keep Jane safe she went to live with M. “But she’s still my mom’s cat, she just lives here”. Uh-huh.
Soon M. was adopted by 3 other cats who each just showed up and wouldn’t leave, all within the span of a few months. By this point she pretty much gave up, and just started naming them based on their personalities. (One of them was named Cranky, for example).
Now she is down to three cats, and she claims not to be THAT cat lady.
Usually followed up by protestations of “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!”.
I just want to reach down and fiddle with m0use’s whiskers… ahhh..
hehe I put numbers in ch3weie’s name too because I am paranoid about someone searching the combination of all of our names. Pathetic. I am also totally convinced that certain people have already found me.
Your cats are adorable. I especially like the name Mouse for a kitty. Very cute.
This made me SO. HAPPY.
So, so, so happy.
I want to disregard their kitty personal space issues, scoop them up, and hug them. Especially Ge0rge. And M0use.
And OIiver, too.
My husband has a weird cat sense of humor, check this out! http://twitter.com/the_cat
Also, I assume you have seen this one.
http://stuffonmycat.com/
Yummy kitties. I just want to pet and love on Mouse… is she really that fat? Wow… I love fat cats… I love skinny ones too.. :D
THANK YOU!!!
Awww, I am partial to Mouse. She looks sooo sawwwft. Yes, that’s how I say soft in kitty-ese, having one very wirey and one very sawwwft kitty of my own.
We’re a two cat family, and were worried how they would react to Little Elvis. They each have very different personalities. Slappy (our animal shelter cat) is shy and skittish, so she will only get near Little Elvis if he’s sleeping or feeding. Wally (someone was giving kittens away outside of Wal-Mart) is a lap cat who loves people and attention. He’s very tolerant of Little Elvis’ “pats.”
They are all gorgeous, but Mouse took my breath away.
I love your kitties!!