“Dad, can Minion sleep in our rooms?” asked Miss11. Minion is our cat. Behind Miss11, her eight year old sister was giving me puppy eyes.
Clearly, there’d been a discussion.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I said and quickly came up with a reason. “Minion is used to sleeping in his own room.”
This was not what I was going through my head. What I was thinking was how Minion loves to give Tracey’s face a little ‘kiss’ in the mornings when he’s let out of his room, but how at the same time this is happening I tend to cop a different part of his anatomy in my face.
“But, Da-aaad!!!” came the inevitable vocalization of a kiddy crisis.
And then the whining started, followed by the crocodile tears and, finally, my inevitable surrender, when I reconsidered their request and my need for some peace and decided, falsely it turned out, no harm could come of this.
“Isn’t it wonderful,” I heard Miss11 say, as the girls wandered off to ready their rooms for company, “that he’s going to sleep in my room!”
“No, he’s not,” said Miss7, shaking her head. “He’s going to sleep in mine.”
Have you seen Bride Wars? I have, and for a moment I thought all I’d managed to do was swap screaming at me for screaming at each other – not a win for household tranquility. Fortunately, we skipped the hair pulling and yelling, but there was a flurry of activity as each girl set about working out ways to entice their cat to sleep in their room.
I went out on the balcony and, in a nod to their efforts, gave serious consideration to a cat nap.
Shortly, Miss11 popped her head through the doorway and asked for the cat box.
“What for?” I asked her.
“I want Minion to feel comfortable,” she said. “He knows the cat box so he’ll want to stay in my room and sleep in it.”
I didn’t tell her that for Minion the cat box meant car rides and needles and probing by a big stranger who smelled of dog. Nor did I later ask why, if she wanted Minion to sleep in the cat box, she’d filled it full of kitty litter. Probably because when I walked back into the house I was distracted by the other stuff they’d been doing.
I walked into the lounge room and froze. My brain did a back flip, miscalculated, landed on its head, snapped its neck and called emergency.
“Tracey!” I yelled out. “You’re going to want to see this.” Then I remembered this was sort of my fault. “No, I’m wrong!” I continued loudly. “Stay where you are! You’re not going to want to see…! Oh, hi.”
Tracey only had one question when she looked at the floor (probably because she hadn’t seen the cat box in Miss11’s room yet).
“Why the hell is there cat food everywhere?”
Both girls pointed at me. “Dad said we could.”
In the style of Hansel & Gretel, the girls had decided to entice the cat into their rooms by laying a trail of dry cat food from where Minion sleeps, through the lounge room and hall, and into each of their bedrooms where, I might add, the mother-lode of cat food was deposited. I’m talking a box and a half had been used.
So instead of napping I got to supervise the girls cleaning up.
But I’m still calling this a win because without the ability to roam free during the night the cat still has to wait until morning to show me what he really thinks of me.
I refuse to believe a cat smart enough to work out what a door
handle is for doesn’t know when it’s sticking its bum in my face.
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“Raising a family on little more than laughs.”