Proceed with caution

"Mom, can I have a kitten" she said.

"Yes" I said.

I admit, it was a moment of weakness. We don't need any more cats. We have two. We used to have four. At one point there were five. Cats, as you may know, are the expendable crewmen on a farm. Don't bother to get the cat neutered. As soon as you do, it goes out in the road and gets run over. And as my husband would say - "that's a mighty expensive pond-liner you got there ma'am."

But, the time is drawing near, when I won't be hearing the desperate plea from my brown-eyed girl that we need kittens. So I gave in.

We have picked up kittens in the most bizarre ways. Cats who have been abandoned by their mothers. Cats who were on their way to cat heaven if we didn't adopt them. Cats who were advertised by signs on the side of the road in a shady neighbourhood. This probably explains the bizarre cats we have had.

One, climbed up a tree and stayed there for 12 days meowing for us to come and get her down. We even had a run-in with the SPCA over her. (Please explain to me sir, how you expect me to climb up a 60 foot tree and put a platform there for my cat to come down to???)

One was so stupid, that you couldn't help but laugh when my husband carried the mouse out of the house and put it down for the cat to "catch" and she chased it back into the house.

We are sure that the one cat we have now is brain-damaged. This could be a result of the dog thinking its name is "hokey pokey". She takes the cat's head in her mouth to "shake it all about". This cat has come to believe that it is a fur collar. Where ever you put it, there it stays. Or stares. I looked out the window the other night and there it was sitting very quietly on the driveway, staring straight up into the outside light. As if it was expecting something brilliant to occur. I almost expected it to start singing "Send the light..the blessed gospel light..."
[This, by the way, is a cat that I took to get neutered. The vet asked me to make sure that it didn't show any signs of depression. How can you tell if your cat who acts like a fur collar in the first place is depressed? Honestly!]

Then there were the cats that were expendable because they didn't move away from the wheels of the van. Try to explain that to your 10 year old who phones you at work to "forgive" you for the heinous deed you committed while pulling out of the garage. Then try and run Hymn sing - where every song is about "all creatures great and small"; or "When I rise to worlds unknown and behold thee on the throne".

Plainly, I was being sarcatstic when I agreed to getting a kitten. She promised that there was no chance of getting a stupid cat from this litter. I was told, that all the kittens in this litter were "outside" cats. In fact, she gave every promise in the book just to make sure the deal was sealed..

So off she went last week to get her cat. She was happy as a clam. I should never have suggested that her younger brother to go with her.

They came back with two.