Cat Naps

When we got Mr. Jones and Gracie, we still had Weezy, who was 17. She was really too old for all their kitten nonsense, so she kept pretty clear of them, but we did hear a fair amount of hissing when they'd have an encounter. For that reason, and also because I had never had kittens before and worried that they'd bother Julie, who was born a couple of months after we got them, we decided to lock the kittens in the basement overnight. (Our basement is a finished playroom, with carpeting and furniture and everything; their food and litterbox are there too.) Even after Weezy finally coughed up her last hairball, when Julie was about a month old, we still kept bringing the kittens to the basement every night. As much as Andy and I missed having cats sleeping with us (George and Weezy had slept with us every night), we didn't want to risk letting the kittens wake Julie. (As everyone who's ever had a baby, particularly a baby who has trouble sleeping—and particularly three babies in a row who had trouble sleeping—you never wake a sleeping baby.) So that's the way it stayed. Now, at bedtime, we just clap our hands, and the two no-longer-kittens head for the stairs and find their favorite spots on the basement couch. (This has entered our lexicon, as in "Julie, did you clap the cats down already?")

A year or so ago, Pete asked if the cats could sleep with him. We decided to give it a try, so we let them stay upstairs (they stood by the basement stairs for a good long while at bedtime, looking puzzled) and we left all the bedroom doors ajar. They visited all of us at some point during the night, and we all enjoyed it, except for Steph, who most definitely did not. The next night we closed her door, but that didn't work either, because they pawed at her door and meowed to be let in. So we gave up.

Then, when Steph went on her Girl Scouts' trip to the dude ranch a few weeks ago, we let the cats stay up all weekend. It was so nice! It occurred to me that we could do that whenever she sleeps at a friend's house too, which we've never done. And ... when she goes to sleepaway camp this summer, they can stay up for a whole month! Really, who could resist these sleeping angels:

Comments

[Loren]

Beautiful bookends!