Thursday, September 9, 2010

Life with a Cat

I'm new to this whole cat-person mentality. But I have to be honest, it's growing on me. I grew up in a house with no cats. We had several small dogs, or what we affectionately called "frogs" because they slept with their tongues out.

So when I started dating Emily and found out she was a cat person I didn't know what to think about that. The only cat I knew was a creepy old cat my best friend had. I just knew cats had rough weird feeling tongues and they would claw you when they were relaxed. That was enough to turn me off.

So when I first went to Emily's house with Henry (BFP) and Thatcher I really didn't want to be around them. But for some reason Henry kept wanting to be around me and would snooze next to me during the day. This voided all my ideas that cats weren't snugglers and didn't like to be around people. Henry was as snuggly as my dogs and he loved to be petted. This was extremely unusual to me but I found him fun.

Fast forward to about 2 years and we're sitting around our apartment and Emily is asking me...no, begging me for a kitten. We had gotten in the habit of going to petsmart about once a week to just be around the animals. I'm a big animal person and even seeing a dog on the street will make me happy and wish I had one.

So when Emily asked if we could go to the humane society's event at petsmart I agreed. I'm a sucker. There were two newborn kittens there and I immediately latched onto our Olive. She was so sweet and she was black and reminded me of Henry.

Here are things I've learned about being a Cat-Dude.

-Cats are extremely easy to take care of. They know instinctively where to go to the bathroom, they groom themselves, and they don't eat that much

-Olive is playful and will always play with you if you want to. This is one of the biggest benefits of having her. My dogs are playful but there's always times when they don't want to play.

-She will scratch my legs constantly. I can show you about 10 different scars on my legs right now from her.

-Height is not a limit to her. Yeah, that shelf 10 feet in the air? She'll get inside of it.

-She's hard to find - Because she can fit in every crook and nanny I sometimes think she's lost.

-If you let her out of the apartment, she won't run away. Emily can testify to this, I still have a very hard time letting her out of the apartment if she wants to go. Emily kept assuring me that she will be back when she wants to. Cats don't get lost. This seemed like crazy talk to me so for those first few months when Olive would escape out the front door I would chase after her for 10 mins like a madman worried she would leave forever.

- Cat are NOCTURNAL!!! This still creeps me out because she'll be running around the apartment at 2am and I think people are in the apartment. There are a few times when she will sleep with us but not for long because she will scratch our legs.

-Olive is a snuggler. She loves nothing more than to be held and to have her head scratched. This came as a complete surprise and I couldn't be happier that Olive is such a lovable cat.

- Cats eyes are amazing! If you just sit there and watch them, they change every second.

- It blows me away at how quick she is both vertically and horizontally.

- Cats really do love milk! It's weird. And chicken. Olive tries to steal Emily's chicken every time we have it.

- She will knock anything that's sitting on the table. Yes this includes paper, decorations, glasses, candy, and cameras.

- She hates it when we leave. In fact she will sit in our luggage as we're packing because she wants to come with us.

So after some serious convincing I love our cat. I may not love every cat, but our cat is my favorite and she's shown me that we can have cats in our future. So this blog is dedicated to our little girl, our daughter, Olive.


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