Upon the Occasion of the Murderbrat's First Birthday

And just like that, our wee Ginger Prince--

--is one year old! 

Obviously, this calls for a party. Alas for the pandemic the guest list was quite limited, but nevertheless Syd baked the birthday boy a birthday cake--

--and we served it on doll dishes with one handmade candle and a sprig of catnip:

Syd even made enough for him to share with his frenemies!

We love our glorious murderbrat, while fully admitting that he's also kind of awful. He never fails to speak his mind, and isn't afraid to holler at us when we're not doing his bidding quickly enough. He chases Gracie, who puts up with his garbage, and takes running leaps directly over Spots, the better to piss her off. He spends much of his time lying on my desk next to me, on a cushion that Syd made for him so that he can look out the window or nap in equal comfort. He loves and comforts and entertains our Syd, and is probably her greatest source of joy in this challenging year. 

It's never made me happier to fail at something than it has to be this cat's foster failure.

It would be awesome if he would stop sharpening his claws on my chair, though!

the day they met

on the occasion of his first birthday

We are Foster Failures: Introducing the Ginger Prince

Once upon a time, there was a kid who loved cats. She already had a cat who she was obsessed with, but she also had a great memory, and she remembered that when she was very, very little, we used to foster kittens with our local Humane Society.

So she brought it up. A lot.

Whenever she brought it up, we always had a really great excuse. It was Nutcracker season, and we wouldn't be home enough. It was Girl Scout cookie season, and we wouldn't be home enough. The grandparents were coming to visit, and it would be too busy. We were planning a really big vacation, and we couldn't risk taking a litter and not having them up to their weight minimum before we had to leave.

But then we got home from that really big vacation, and the kid made some more really valid points, and she promised to be really responsible, and we didn't have anymore travel planned for a couple more months...

And so we got a litter of foster kittens. One litter. And if it worked out, we could maybe get another litter later in the year.



First pictures of Buttons, Jones, and Lionheart were difficult to obtain. They were more than half wild, and suffered quite a bit from the wiggles:

The only way that Syd could keep them still enough to weigh them on my postal scale was to pop them into a Tupperware:

Syd weighed them every day, and recorded their weights and general dispositions on a chart. When they wouldn't eat their nice kitten food and wouldn't gain weight, Syd convinced us to buy them chicken baby food. And then when we told her that we couldn't keep doing that (that stuff is something like a buck a jar!), Syd figured out how to take a baked chicken breast and blend it with water to make her own chicken baby food slurry for the kittens to eat.

Which they did until their little tummies were tight, and they thrived!

There is not a lot that's better than having a litter of kittens in your life--particularly if you're not the one taking care of them! Syd was impeccably diligent and responsible with their care, cleaning all the messes and stewarding their delicate health and socializing them so that they stopped being wild beasts and started being snuggly purr machines.

You might notice that in all of these photos, there's one foster kitten that seems to get the most coverage. Whereas Lionheart was the bravest, and Buttons was the sweetest, Jones is the ultimate Capital K Kitten, exactly what you think about when you think about what a puffy little ball of kitten fluff would be like.

It shouldn't have surprised us, then, that after a few weeks, Syd began negotiations to keep Jones. You can do this, of course, but then everyone knows that you're a Foster Failure. Negotiations went like this:

Three cats would be too many cats.

We used to have three cats, until Ballantine died. And we were totally going to adopt Tagalong after that, but then his owner miraculously found him.

Syd already has her own special cat.

True, but that beloved kitty came into our lives nine whole years ago. Will got to pick out her very own dog just a couple of years ago, and Syd didn't make a peep of protest.

Syd would have to do all the work to take care of a new pet. Nobody else is going to lift a finger to help.

Syd was already taking care of all three foster kittens all by herself, and that's even more work than taking care of just one healthy kitten.

Ultimately, the result was inevitable:

Syd finished out her run of getting three little kittens up to adoption weight (and weaning them off of eating only pureed chicken, which was the WAY harder job!), and we let the Humane Society know that we were going to be Foster Failures.

Here are Syd's three little kittens, happy and thriving!

  

And here are their Official Portraits. This is Lionheart:

This is Buttons:

And this is our Jones!

He's close to six months old now, and he's happy and wild, alternately wreaking destruction wherever he goes and stretching out to purr contentedly somewhere in his domain:

I didn't want him AT ALL, and yet I can't stand how much I love him.

Why You Should Adopt Animals: The Documentary

Y'all, the long-awaited, long-anticipated, long-dreaded, much fretted about documentary on "why you should adopt animals" has finally happened!

Geez, this thing was hard to manage, despite the fact that it ended up being pretty simple--IF you have the equipment and know what you're doing with it. Way back last May, Syd proposed a service project for our Girl Scout troop: she wanted to make a documentary about the animals at the local Humane Society, to get people to adopt them. The other girls liked this idea, and then.... nothing. I just could not figure out how to get five (then six, then eight) girls to film a documentary at the Humane Society, then actually make it into a movie.

I did NOT study filmmaking in college, my Friends.

Finally, I decided that we'd skip, for the moment, the logistics of even asking to film at the Humane Society (all those children, all those barking dogs, all that hand-held video...), and just film animals that had already been adopted, and maybe interview their owners about their experience and why one should adopt.

Even that, of course, was hard for me to figure out, and I went way down the rabbit hole of amateur filmmaking forums before I finally figured out that the equipment that we have--a digital SLR with video recording capabilities, a USB-compatible microphone, Audacity, and Nero--would work just fine for this. We won't be submitting to Cannes, but we could make something that would please and delight little Girl Scouts.

We still have to present this particular idea to the rest of the troop (which means that I still have to figure out how to do it with eight little girls and assorted animals), but as a test case, and for Will's Cadette Digital Movie Maker badge, my two kids made a documentary about Gracie and Spots, fostered and then adopted from our local animal shelter.

Considering that this documentary was Syd's idea, and that Will spent most of an entire year being vocally NOT on board with it, it will probably surprise you to learn that Will did the vast majority of work on the documentary. It doesn't surprise me, as I know that Will tends to get very deeply immersed in projects, but I was nevertheless VERY relieved that she did not just all of the compiling and editing--

--but also the filming of the interview, which was something that I'd expected Syd to be excited about.

So now, without further ado, I present to you the world premiere of the original documentary short film, Why You Should Adopt Cats:



Thank goodness that is figured out and over! Now all we have to do is figure out how to do it again, this time with six more little filmmakers. And I have to buy the patch for my now officially certified Cadette Digital Movie Maker!

An Ode to Gracie

Will deeply desires a dog of her own, and we're hoping to make that happen this summer, but this particular spoiled grey tabby of ours is pretty much Sydney's best friend and soulmate:

She is to be found wherever the children are, often sleeping inconveniently exactly where you'd rather be, but under Syd's dictate, you are not permitted to disturb her, lest that make her uncomfy:

In warm weather, she insists upon being outside with the children, and will even follow us on hikes: 

When the children go outside to play in poor weather, however, Gracie stands at the window and watches them, meowing plaintively. It's pretty pathetic.

Mostly, however, you'll find her somewhere like this:

And yes, she will let Syd dress her up. Here, she's serving as the mascot for Syd's online Girl Scout cookie shop (which you should ask me for the link for, so that you can buy some cookies from her. She takes credit cards! And ships across the US!):

And, yes, she even has her own theme song:

We WILL launch our Hunt for the Best Dog Ever this summer, because I promised the kid, and it's something that she wants very much, and frankly, it's probably something that she needs very much, as well, but I'm nervous about it on several fronts. Will we find a dog that won't eat the chickens? Will we successfully train it not to pee in the house? Will its existence be a giant pain in the ass?

But also... will it, could it, how could it ever possibly be as perfect, as deeply loved, as integral a part of our family as our beloved Spots and Gracie are?

Although I do look forward to one day hearing Will make up and sing a theme song to her dog...

The Amazing Adventures of Tagalong Catdog

We met this sweet kitty back in January, when she politely came up to the porch and meowed for some supper:

I gave her that supper, of course, and then it became part of the kids' daily chores to make sure that Tagalong, as we named her (it was Girl Scout cookie season then, as you might recall), always had food and water. I didn't think she was abandoned, as she was a healthy weight and didn't have the look of a stray; I figured that she was simply a neighborhood roamer, a cat with a family who wasn't averse to hitting up another family for regular snack-times. I mean, you've never seen a more friendly, loving cat than Tagalong; clearly there was someone out there who was treating her right. Our own Spots, you might remember, was infamous for this in our old neighborhood, and even had people who would let her into their houses for a nap on their heating vent.

As winter moved into spring, however, it became clear that if she had some other families out there, she didn't like them as much as she liked us, and she became a fixture in our yard. I put her photo on our town's Lost and Found Pets Facebook page, although nobody on that page or in the newspaper had ever reported her missing. Matt wanted to drop her at the animal shelter, but Syd became hysterical every time he brought it up; those months that Spots was lost last year were hard on everyone, especially this kid who just wants everyone and everything to be happy.

"We can keep her for now," we finally decided, "but she is NOT coming into the house."

It wasn't long after that declaration that I let her into the house. I mean, of course. After that, she spent most of her days completely blissed out on a pillow on the couch, looking comfier than any cat has ever looked before.

The drive-in doesn't open until summer, so we don't see the owners for much of the year, but early in the season, one of the owners, Mark, stopped by to chat. As we're hanging out on the driveway discussing whatever, Tagalong comes strolling past. Mark stops mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open, then says, "CATDOG?!?"

Mark and his family live on a farm a few miles from us, and they have a lot of animals, but Catdog, a large grey tabby, was Mark's special pet. She always seemed to know when he was about to go somewhere in his truck, and she'd jump right in for the ride. But Catdog had gotten lost sometime in the winter, when Mark was working in a different state and relying on his kids to keep things going back at the farm, and nobody had ever been able to find her.

It turns out that during that winter, his boys had taken the truck over to the drive-in to check on it one day. That night was the first night that Catdog never came home to them.

The next day was when a friendly grey tabby came to our door and meowed for some supper.

We'd kept their cat for them for four months without them knowing, right next door to their own drive-in. Catdog had never had a chance to even see Mark, because I make all the animals come in on the weekends before the drive-in opens; I'd shooed her inside, some days, just as Mark was pulling in next door to prep the concession stand and open the gates.

Mark didn't want to take her back from us, because we'd had her so long and the kids clearly loved her:

But I could tell that Mark loved her, too, and frankly, our two cats never did get used to her, and bullied her something fierce. What would they all three do shut up in our house together while we enjoyed our summer travels?

Anyway, she just wasn't our cat, although we sure did love keeping her for a while:

Tagalong finally went home with Mark a few weeks later, and although she didn't want to go (we had to shut her inside an old birdcage of Mark's to get her to go with him), he reports that she's happy as a clam now and back to her usual business.

Our Spots wasn't as lucky as Tagalong when she got lost last year; she did a lot of roaming, and had gotten pretty wild by the time we found her again. She'd clearly also been treated right by a lot of people, however, and the person who called us about her said that she'd been hanging out in his neighborhood for weeks, living off of handouts. As happy as I was that Spots had some help during the time she was lost, and that we had help finding her, it also made me happy that we got this chance to take care of someone else's cat for them, too, to feed her and love her and keep her, it turns out, close enough for them to find her again.

It's lost cat karma, y'all.

One Spoiled Cat

This is the kind of stuff that Syd does to sleepy cats:

On the one hand, Syd is an inveterate cat pesterer, but on the other hand...

Gracie DOES look comfy, doesn't she?

This is Why I Can't Get Anything Done

I've been doing a LOT of sewing lately...skirts, our fashion show dress, another dress, bloomers, two sets of fabric matching games, and after I finish the matching games I'm going to start on a couple of T-shirt baby bibs.

My sewing would go a lot more efficiently, however, if it wasn't for a certain cat named Spots:

This most gregarious cat will begin the morning by making the rounds of the neighborhood, catching one neighbor before he leaves for work in the morning and actually going into another neighbor's house, she confessed to Matt the other day. Who knows where else she goes and whom else she visits?

When her morning work is done, she climbs onto our porch railing, reaches out and puts her front paws on the living room windowsill, and stands there looking at us until someone goes to let her in. It never takes long, because a cat's stare through a window is quite disconcerting. Then she'll come find me, wherever I'm working--at the computer, with the girls, at the sewing table--and plop down for a nap in exactly the spot that makes carrying on with my work the most inconvenient. If there's no likely spot, she'll climb onto my shoulders, switch from shoulder to shoulder in front of my face, and basically refuse to stop until I hold her in my arms like a baby.

And then she purrs, of course.