Saturday Morning Cartoons

Dan is a very tolerant man.  I mean, he puts up with -- and even seems to enjoy -- having ten children under foot.  And through the years we've sheltered and cared for various and sundry dogs, fish, parakeets, baby goats (once for a short time), chicks, and dust mice -- but my husband always swore we would never have a cat in the house.  Their litterboxes stink.  They're underfoot, and  unfriendly.  And he was allergic.  Barn cats: OK.  House cats: never.

So, how did this happen?

Meet Gigi. Gigi -- short for Regina Maria. She goes outside visiting occasionally, but she is mostly an indoor kitty. She slips in, she slips out, room to room, silent as the fog.  Every once in a while she may deign to brush across your shins in a swift token of affection. (Or is it just that she has an itch on the top of her head?) The world's best lap warmer, she curls up in the corners of the most comfortable chairs, and suffers being unceremoniously dumped off, with unruffled dignity. She knows it is our loss, not hers; we would certainly be more comfortable with her than without her. She sits in the sun on skinniest windowsills (how she manages the balance is a mystery).  She rides around the house slung around Anna's shoulders, or carried like a baby in Cathy's arms.  She sits on the kitchen floor looking up at me as I brown ground beef for dinner, serene in the knowledge that I will eventually slop some onto the floor and will be grateful to Her Nibs for cleaning up after me.

So, yeah, there's a cat in the house alright.  I'm not sure how the girls got permission from Dan to keep her in.  I seem to have missed that.  But the girls are obsessive about keeping Gigi's litter box clean and sweet smelling.  It's in their bedroom, so it behooves them.  Thanks largely to the lack of cat odor, maybe, Dan just seems to not notice her existence. And it now seems to be the most natural thing in the world to the rest of us to have her slinking around.

 I don't know if Dan knew what he was in for when he let this one slip past him, but the all-boy, baseball-and-dogs world of the old days before the four big boys grew up and moved away, has become a mostly-girl world of skirts and ribbons and hair-do tutorial videos... My husband's worst nightmare has come to pass; he lives in a cat house.

(But we haven't noticed any sneezing....)