when your siblings say meow...

It was morning, K and I had just finished eating breakfast and I had a ton of things to do before our busy day got underway. K went downstairs and brought up one of the heavy blankets we use for picnics and laid it down on the floor. Next she began hauling dolls out into the living room.

This isn't an unfamiliar scenario. K plays by herself very well, she has to since she has no siblings. The set up process can be time consuming and because of that it's often the longest stretch of quiet time I get during the day. She needs no help to establish her play area. She can get out hundreds, thousands, millions of toys, blankets and pillows without any assistance (putting them away? that's another matter).

Suddenly the silence was broken much earlier than it should have been. There was trouble in the land of K...

K: Maaammmmaa!

Me: What's up babe?

K: Maaaaammmmmmaaaa make him stop it!

Me: Make who stop what?

K: Him. Tell him to leave me alone! This is MY BLANKET and I need him to get off it.

Me: What?

I got up from my very important task *cough* twittter *cough* and went into the living room to see what the big problem was. K looked at me with a face I know I'd made a million times as a child when my brother decided he had nothing better to do than bug me.

K: Maaaaaaaamma... he's just trying to bother me... can't you make him go away?

Sitting there quite happily, perfectly still, poised like a lion was my black cat. I smiled at K then reached down and stroked Spike's fur. He rose to greet me and meowed before stretching a bit and sauntering away. I turned to K, but before I could speak again she was back to the business of arranging her dolls as she snarled:

You know he just does that to bug me

She's probably right.

e-cat is sick...

K has a little striped orange cat with humongous green eyes. It's stuffed. That is to say it is a stuffed animal made of fabric, fill and beads. Not one that has been taxidermied. I know some people enjoy the fine art of dead stuffed things, I know am not one of those people...

So her little striped cat, E-Cat, is sick.

This can really mean only on thing. K isn't feeling well. At all.

Which is coinciding nicely with my aching chest and sore throat.

She sounds a lot like I do, E-Cat that is. If K is sick, E-Cat is sick. If E-Cat is sick, the house is not right.

But I personally couldn't be more please with the timing. You see this cold, this bad bad horrid summer cold that seems to have attacked me, Mr. Kaos, K and of course E cat has come at the perfect moment. We should be all well and recovered by the time we...

You've got it, that's right,

Leave on vacation.

CamiKaos and her fabulous one track mind everyone.


Oh, sorry I had to take a break there for a giant sneeze fest.

Now I have to take another to go take care of E-Cat, and I guess I should check in on K too.

poor spike

I have two cats; Ripper and Spike. First you should know that those are certainly names I am proud of and I would have given them those monikers myself ... but I was not the one to name them. My daughter named them. Ripper when she was 2 1/2 and Spike when she was 3 1/2. Mike and I were both thrilled with her choices... but i have to say they haven't really lived up to their tough boy titles.

Ripper wouldn't rip up anything. He might attack a box, your foot under the blanket or eat a mouse (he did once eat one whole... we were more than a little surprised) but the only "person" he would terrorize is Spike (unless you count him trying to suffocate me by snuggling my head in the middle of the night).

Spike has one of the least spiky personalities I have ever seen. He is an enormous mama's boy who cries for me all the time. If I meow for him he comes running and wants to spend as much time with me as he can. when he is not with me he enjoys sleeping on K's bed, shredding cardboard and getting stoned on catnip... it is Spike that brings us to today's blog.

While I was getting dinner started a while ago K was quietly playing in her room (always a dangerous sign ;). A few moments later I hear Spike's tattle meow. Normally this meow is reserved for things like Ripper not letting him use the cat door or me not sitting with him when he thinks I should... but after a second I saw him out of the corner of my eye still mewing with a scarf my mother knitted wrapped around his neck. Lets just say he didn't look pleased. K was practicing her favorite pastime. Dress up. She doesn't care who is involved in dress up as long as it is going on. She will dress her self up, dress me up, then Mike. If our friends are over they are fair game as well. Then there's the stuffed animals... they get dressed in all manner of things... Today obviously Spike was the object of her dress up obsession. After removing the scarf and sitting K down to explain to her why we don't wrap things around the cats' necks she asked so nicely what she could put on him... which lead to Spike laying on my bed in one of K's preemie t-shirts staring into space wondering when his life took this turn.

I haven't dressed a cat since I was about 8... my poor Spike