Blinded by love for thier offspring....

Parents do really dumb things.

 

About a week ago, we acquired a small black kitten that seemingly had nowhere else to go. You could argue that the appropriate thing to do would have been to take him to the shelter, but it's hard to overstate the case when describing how much Owen LOVES this kitten. I swear the first day we had him in the house was the very best day of Owen's life - and how can you take away the root cause of the very best day of your child's (admittedly, short) life? you can't. Hence, we are now the proud owners of kitty the cat. We've tried and failed to explain the concept of proper names to Owen, so it seems that Kitty is, by default, the newest member of our family's name. Good thing we're not letting Owen name the new baby, or we would certainly end up with a child named 'baby'.

Kitty is remarkably patient with Owen. Owen spends most of his time chasing him, and probably catches him about 60% of the time. Clearly, Kitty is letting himself be caught because if he wanted to, he could camp out in the top back corner of the nearest closet and let Owen have nothing to do with him. Instead, he allows Owen to carry him all over the house (frequently upside down), kiss him wetly and repeatedly, roll around on the floor clutching him and giving him hugs, and chase him until they're both exhausted. Earlier this evening I took a series of pictures (which sadly, I cannot make Blogger upload right now) in which Owen manhandled Kitty to the point that I was sure any other feline on the face of the earth would have taken his face off, but Kitty purred and was a good sport the whole time. I have to say, all the reasons we shouldn't have acquired anything new to take care of right now - and you're right, there are many - become totally moot every time we pull up to the house now and Owen starts shouting "KITTY! KITTY! KITTY!". I've really never seen anything make him as happy. So yep, we now have to get a cat sitter when we travel. And with our luck, Owen will be off at college someday and we'll be giving insulin injections 6x daily to our geriatric, diabetic cat. And it will probably scratch up everything we own and shed and drive us nuts all night.

But really, HOW could we say no?