Paige,Paige,Paige.One of the cutest cats ever,but sometimes she can be
a little rotten.She escaped earlier today,but after a few minutes,she
came back inside.She escaped when I was checking if my softball
glove was there,because I play on a softball team,and my
dad just ordered a glove for me.But Max,one of our many
neighborhood cats,a least favorite cat of Paige, was
outside.Paige came back.While she is not active,she is
sleeping,like in the picture.
(Another guest post by Darcy Jo.)
Oh cats. They're cute and furry, and they purr and sometimes let you pet them. They're fun when they play. And then there's 4:30 in the morning.
That's when Paige likes to let us know how desperately she needs our love, how much she misses us in the night, and how empty her bowl is.
But not this morning! Yesterday, before heading off to the deliciousness of our Requa Inn dinner, we bought Paige her very own bed. She's never had a cat bed before, not exactly sure why not, but she hasn't. She'll sometimes crawl in with us for a while, but she doesn't stay long.
It took her a while to warm up to it and hop in (and I had to add a towel she's been sleeping on to coax her interest), but once she did, she stayed in! All night long. At NINE O'CLOCK, when we woke up (thank you, S family for keeping our other early riser overnight!), she was curled up looking very proud of her very own bed. No early morning meows. No kneading me in my sleep. No paws on the face.
She just needed her own little bed to be a wonderful morning cat.
There's a photo I've wanted to share of Darcy and Paige-the-kitten for a while. It is absolutely adorable -- a picture I will love forever. The problem is, the photo was taken just after Darcy got out of the bath and she hadn't yet stood still long enough to get clothes on her. Any clothes. So it seemed like a bad thing to put on the internet.
But it keeps taunting me in the photo stream. So I've cropped it and decided to share:
Paige, as you may be able to tell, will tolerate almost any action of Darcy's. She routinely gets flattened to the ground when Darcy gets home; gets carried around like a sausage, held tight at the middle; and manages to avoid biting and scratching through it all. Maybe the extra toes (seen so clearly in this picture) give her extra tolerance. Or maybe she just knows that Darcy is the One Who Must Be Best Loved.
Paige has had a hard day today. She got scolded by a squirrel for five or ten minutes while she was sunning herself on the deck. Then her terrible mother brushed and cleaned her. And then her even more terrible mother managed to (almost completely accidentally) pour water on her while watering plants.
Luckily, Paige has Sluggy to soothe her. Her favorite toy, for several days running now, is a plastic banana slug. She carries it around, tosses it in the air by its tentacles, and bats it all over the house. I'd say she's probably played with it for a cumulative two hours already today and there will no doubt be more. She's a cat obsessed. Do you think that she would hunt down real slugs if she lived in Crescent City?
At Christmas, Santa Claus left very serious notes in stockings about Darcy getting a cat once we were settled in a house. We visited the local animal shelter a few times, and last week Darcy chose a small tabby-and-white older kitten named Paige:
She's six months old and very sweet, but she hadn't been tested for infectious diseases when we saw her, so we couldn't take her home. For whatever reason, the tests took a long time and our house got more and more ready for the kitten who was not here. A cat door was installed in the door to the basement. A litter box was purchased. Food, too, was added to the Christmas kitten-presents of a carrier and dishes and toys.
For the past few days, I've been keeping my fingers crossed that Paige would be given the ok before the storm hits tomorrow. I can't think of a better way to keep Darcy occupied during a snow storm than a new kitten. And with not much more than an hour left of the shelter's operating hours, we got the call: Paige is negative for all possible diseases and we could come pick her up.
So we did!
She behaved beautifully in her carrier on the drive home and allowed us to pet her for a minute or two before going to explore and hide. But she came around by the end of the evening and played a little before crawling under Darcy's dresser for a bath during Harry Potter. She is still up there now, sleeping, just as Darcy hoped.
During her exploration, she showed good taste in books by draping herself across my cookbooks for a while. Didn't look very comfortable to me, but Paige seemed perfectly happy:
She sports a bow-tie-like mustache and extra toes, one of my favorite traits in a cat! I hadn't noticed them at the shelter, but they're obvious now that she's made it home.
