Kathryn, Stay-at-home mom

So I realized, pretty quickly, I might add, that my new status in the house is not as the invalid with the bum knee but rather stay-at-home mom to four VERY high maintenance cats, who see my inability to fully get around as a purely technical detail, irrelevant to them as long as I continue serving them. And because I'm a sucker, of course I do. I'm not kidding when I say my days are structured around the cats' special needs.

This show features four stars. There's Sebastian, the big kitty:


(Yes, he weighs 21 pounds and is only 1 year old. He could get up to about 25. This is why coons are awesome).

Then we have Isabella, the bald kitty:


(Yes, it's called a lion cut. No, we didn't do it to her on purpose...her fur just got all matted, and since she's a persian, there's a lot of it).

And then Chloe, the queen of the roost (and don't you forget it):


And finally, last but not least, Bagheera, the sick kitty, taking a sniffy attitude to my attempt to get a picture of him:


Now, what keeps me on my toes is that each one has his or her own routines. Isabella, for example, generally doesn't let people get super close to her, but as soon as I get up to do something for another cat, she steals the pillow I use to prop up my leg:


Without fail. So then, being the tool that I am, I don't like to bother her. So I move my act somewhere else for a while, which is less convenient on my knee since I have my whole workspace set up. I offer to share the pillow with her, but she will have none of that and runs as soon as I come back. Which ends up being rather frequent, since Sebastian's main hobby involves either going after the flowers Swathi was nice enough to send me:



Or harassing his siblings on the recreation tree:


And the thing is, we actually do have a second tree (you can see it in the background) to reduce tension. It works overall, but we figured out that often Sebastian isn't hassling Chloe for the actual spot but rather because he wants a playmate. Too bad it's totally out of the question to get ANOTHER coon to keep him in line, hahahaha.

Bagheera stays above the fray on all this, instead he likes to go out on the deck and eat the flowers:


We let him do so because he's too decrepit to get away anyway. The problem, however, as I realized, is that he's a little dim when it comes to the weather. There was basically a MONSOON on Monday, and he was crying at the back door to go out. I tried to tell him he didn't want to, but then I decided I'd shut him up by opening the door to give him a more direct understanding of the crappiness of the weather. Well, you can imagine my consternation when the dumbass actually went right outside, into the rain. At which point I realized that I was downstairs with nothing for my feet but my socks, and I wasn't feeling up to going upstairs to get shoes. But I also didn't want to get my one pair of socks soaked either. I stood there for a minute while the idiot wandered around, but finally he decided that the weather did indeed suck, at which point he came in, totally drenched. So I had to clean him up too. Meanwhile, you can guess what Sebastian was doing (eating my flowers) and Isabella (stealing my pillow).

Nothing is more complicated than managing their meals, however. Because Sebastian is a pig, we have to separate the cats. Sometimes, when Sebastian is being particularly greedy, we have to lock him in the bathroom for like 20 minutes to give the other cats time to eat. When this happens, we call the little bathroom "baby jail" (since he's the baby of the family). Sebastian knows baby jail quite well.

Anyway, three of them take their meals in the kitchen, but Isabella gets fed elsewhere (because Sebastian almost always tries to steal her food and she's too freaked to fight back). The funny thing is that at each mealtime, Isabella tells US where she will take her food. We have a whole routine: she waits for us just outside the kitchen, we come with the plate, and she leads us away to The Chosen Spot. Sometimes it's under the secretary:


Other times it's under the rocking chair or under the coffee table in the living room. In any case, she's the decider on mealtimes, which means we spend half the day tracking down old cat plates we've forgotten about, hahaha.

Chloe gets a special probiotic because she's stressed and has intestinal issues, so you have to remember to sprinkle that on in the morning.

All of this pales in comparison to Bagheera, however, who should really be known as The Endless Stomach. He's on some form of thyroid meds, and we're pretty sure it's made him hungry ALL THE TIME. He almost never strays from the food bowls, and he demands extra snacks throughout the day. This is how it has come to pass that while the others get two wet meals per day, he gets the two wet meals, supplemented by about 3 snacks of baby food per day. He gets lunch whenever I'm home to give it to him.

Now, all this would be kind of annoying except for one absolutely hilarious detail: Bagheera has developed a strange little tic (we think it's excitement) when he's about to get baby food: he spins in circles. Sometimes he'll do it multiple times in a row, at which point we just laugh hysterically at the poor kitty. But damn is it funny. It's even predictable: he knows the routine when we're preparing it, so he does it at key moments in the process: when we get the food out of the fridge, when it's going into the microwave to be heated up, and when it's coming out, just before he gets it. So, for your viewing pleasure (if anyone has stayed awake to read this far), I present to you a video of the stupid animal trick of the day, Bagheera's baby food circles: