Month: July 2009

Amber’s Mewsings: Birthday Girl

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Today is my birthday, so I told  Mom I wanted to write something on here.  So far, my birthday has been pretty great.  I got my favorite breakfast (salmon and turkey, in case you’re wondering), and I got this really fun toy (you can see me with it in the photo).  I humored Mom by playing with it when she gave it to me, but most likely, it will be used as a pillow to rest my head on while I nap.  I don’t want to over-exert myself, it’s just not ladylike.

Actually, technically today is not my birthday, it’s the anniversary of the day Mom brought me home.  She doesn’t know my real birthday, and I don’t really remember.  I know some of you would love to hear my story, so I thought today would be a good day to share it.  I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that my sister Buckley gets a whole book to share her story and I get a single blog post, but it’s only part of my story, so I guess that’s okay.

Me and my five kittens were brought to the animal hospital where Mom worked in the spring of 2000 by a client who had found the little family in her barn.  I was hungry, skinny, and scrawny-looking, but my eventual beauty was evident to everyone even then.  My kittens found new homes in fairly rapid succession.  One of my daughters, a beautiful Calico, went to live with Cindy Ingram, the founder of Casey’s House.  Cindy rescued my sister Buckley five years later.

It didn’t seem like anyone was interested in me.  I spent my days in the big adoption cage in the hospital’s waiting area.  People would come and ooh and aah over how beautiful I was, but with the constant inflow of homeless kittens that is typical for spring and summer, nobody wanted to adopt an adult cat, no matter how gorgeous I was.  Mom had recently lost her almost sixteen-year-old soul mate cat Feebee, and the grief over his loss was still very fresh for her – I knew she was still hurting, and she didn’t think she was ready for another cat yet.  But I also knew that it was getting harder and harder for her to go back to an empty house every evening, and more importantly, I knew we were meant to be together.  I tried my best to get her attention, and she’d pet me occasionally, but she just wasn’t getting it.

Finally, on July 29, a Saturday, she took me home.  She said it was “just for the weekend.”  I knew better, but I wasn’t about to share that with her – she needed to figure that out for herself.  Mom said she wanted to give me a break from the abandoned feral kitten they had put in the cage with me after my own kittens had all found homes.  The kitten was a rambunctious six-week old grey tabby, and I was getting really tired of his constant need for attention.  I had done my mommy duty, and I was so over the whole thing.

After living in a cage for all these months, it was a little overwhelming to have an entire house available to explore.  I wasn’t sure what to do, it felt kind of scary to me, even though Mom did her best to make it okay for me.  I spent most of that first weekend near or under Mom’s bed.  I was so stressed I didn’t even eat for a day or two – and if you know anything about me, you know that food is very important to me!  But by Sunday evening, I felt braver and started exploring.

Of course, all weekend long, I’d been working my magic on Mom.  I really didn’t want to go back to the animal hospital.  Thank goodness, Mom started to get it.  She liked having my gentle and peaceful energy around the house, and she decided that I could stay a little longer.  Big sigh of relief on my part when Mom left for work at the animal hospital that Monday morning without taking me back there!  Mom still wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge that I was home to stay.  Instead, she told everyone that she was “just fostering me.”  Yeah, right.

Somehow, the flyers Mom had made up advertising that I was available for adoption never got distributed, and the rest is history.

Amber’s Mewsings: On Purring

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It’s been a while since Mom has let me write something on here, so I thought it was time that I shared my thoughts on life and other things again, in case you’re getting bored with Mom’s writing.

So there’s this woman in England who actually did a study on cats’ purrs.  The conclusion of the study was that cats learn to vocalize a particular sound to train their humans.  They needed to do a study for this?  Puleeze!  Cats all over the world are laughing.  For those of you who really need to see the details of the study to grasp this universal feline truth, here’s the link.

One very interesting aspect of the study was that what the researchers called “solicitation purring” got better results than a loud meow, for example to make the human get up in the morning to feed the cat.  I have to respectfully disagree with this finding.  I sit by my mom’s head and gently purr in the morning to make her get up and feed me.  I’m so thoughtful and patient, and it still takes her forever to actually get up.  My sister Buckley, on the other hand, used to meow at the top of her lungs and walk all over Mom in the mornings, and boy, did that work – there was no more sleeping once Buckley got to work.  I miss my sister (and not just because breakfast came earlier when she was still with us).

I hope everyone is having a good summer.  I love summer – the sunny spots stick around longer and are more frequent in my house.  I’m an air-conditioned kitty and I like it that way.  I spent the first two years of my life outside, and I can’t say I miss the hot and humid summer days and trying to find a cool place to hang out in during the day, not to mention always having to worry about finding enough to eat.  Mom may be a bit slow on the uptake when it comes to feeding me breakfast on time, but I always know that eventually, it’s going to end up in my dish.  For those of you who do go outside in the summer, Mom posted a great article about hot weather tips for pets a little while back.

And speaking of my life – I have a birthday coming up!  Well, it’s not really my birthday, but July 29 is the day Mom brought me home, so we celebrate that as my birthday.  Mom always buys me a cool present.  So to help her out, I’ve marked some items in our Conscious Cat Store for my Wish List.  If you’re a kitty with fabulous taste, make sure you check out the store – you’ll really help your human with gift shopping if you drop little hints about what you want every once in a while.  And remember to use that “solicitation purring!”