A cat. As in the animal neither Seth nor I ever really wanted to have in our home.
Don't get me wrong. I really like cats and I loved growing up with one. Seth likes friendly or entertaining cats, but not scary cats who trap him in a basement for 45 minutes (that's a story for another day and better told in person). But the hair and the scratching and the litter box and and the eventual traumatic death that will probably happen while we still have kids in the house who will be devastated were all reasons that we didn't want one.
So how on earth did I end up typing this post with an adorable cat curled up and purring right next to me? I'm asking that question of myself, not you. I'm still in a bit of shock over this.
As far as I can tell, we were tricked into the whole thing by some cosmic force. Maybe the kids have been secretly praying for one when I wasn't listening. Or maybe the cat has been praying for a family. Or maybe naming our youngest kid Francis spurred St. Francis of Assisi, that lover of animals, into finding us a pet for Frankie's first birthday.
Here's more or less how it happened:
When the cold weather hit last week, we got mice in the house. No surprise there, it happens every fall. The thing is, this year, we couldn't seem to catch them. We've always set out traps right away and been done with the whole mouse thing in a week. So Sunday night, as we were lying in bed after hearing what sounded like a mouse the size of a raccoon running around in the walls, I turned to Seth and said, "Should we just get a cat?" And to my surprise, he said, "Maybe we should." And then we went to sleep.
So the next morning I talked with a friend who lives on a farm who said we could borrow one of their young tomcats for a couple of weeks. If we liked him we could keep him, and if not we could return him. That seemed like a safe way to consider getting a cat so we decided to go ahead with it when we got back from vacation in 2 weeks. My only regret was that it was a tomcat. I preferred a female so that, should we decide to keep the cat, we would have the option of exposing our children to the incomprehensible cuteness of newborn kittens.
Lo and behold, within an hour of us deciding that we were ready to try out this furry animal in the house thing, a beautiful, friendly, cuddly, great-with-kids, youngish? female cat quite literally showed up in our front yard. Our neighbor found her out front, handed her to Elena and said, "You want a cat?" Elena ran in and asked Seth who said, "Definitely not." (I found this out later).
While I was trying to figure out if she belonged to someone, Seth went out for a run, stopping to talk with our other neighbor, Kelli, on his way out. It turns out the cat was a stray that they had been taking care of for a short time but didn't really want to keep.
Through a series of conversations between the kids, us and our neighbors (none of which were actually between Seth and me), I was lead to believe that Seth was fine with getting the cat as long as I was ok with it. And he was led to believe that I said I was fine with it as long as he was ok with it.
So we both ended up not wanting to be the terrible parent who said no to the cat after the other parent had said yes. In the end, we both "agreed" with each other's "decision" when in reality, neither of us actually officially made the decision to keep her.
By the time we figured this out, she already had a litter box, food, a name (Coco), a theme song ("Coco the Calico! Coco the Calico!" sung to a tune similar to Waltzing Matilda), and had been baptized. Ok, the baptism thing is an exaggeration but the theme song is 100% real.
So far, she's not even a good mouser, which was the whole reason we got a cat in the first place. Ironically, the day we got her, we suddenly started catching mice in the traps. We've got 6 in the last 2 days. Like I said, tricked. By cosmic forces.
Anyway, I suppose you'll want to see her so here's a picture. We'll take her in this week to find out how old she is and to make sure she actually is a girl and not rabid and stuff.
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