Month: December 2010

Allegra’s World: Allegra’s First Christmas

There’s been so much cool stuff happening around here, I don’t even know where to start!  For the past week, Mom has been bringing out lots of fun toys:  big rolls of paper, crinkly tissue paper, and, best of all, bows and ribbons!  I actually don’t think she brought them out for me, because she put them on the dining room table, and I don’t usually play up there.  And Mom doesn’t usually play unless it’s with me, but she started playing with those toys, so I, being the good kitten daughter that I am, had to go help her.  Mom said what she was doing is called wrapping gifts.  Whatever – it was great fun!  I grabbed some of the bows and took off with them, making Mom chase after me.   Things got even more interesting when Mom got ready to put some ribbon on one of the gifts she was wrapping.  I tried to help by batting at the ribbon and chewing on the ends, and I couldn’t understand why she kept telling me no (I also don’t think she was all that serious about the “no,” because she kept laughing).   I think eventually  Mom decided that her presents wouldn’t have any ribbons on them.   She said it’s called “the path of least resistence.”  I think those are just big words for spoiling my fun.

But the best thing happened this past weekend.  All of a sudden, there were all these packages under our Christmas tree.  Where did they come from?  Mom said Santa brought them.  I don’t know who this Santa is, but Mom explained that he brings presents to good little kittens, and that on Christmas, we’d be opening the packages together.  Wee!!!  That sounded like fun.  I like this Santa!  I helped Mom open the first package.   It was for me!  It was a really fun toy that looked like a giant piece of cheese.  I love cheese!  And there were little things inside the big cheese, so I had to immediately try to get them out.  I still haven’t quite figured out how yet, but I’ll  keep working at it.

But that wasn’t all.  There were so many other packages!  Since I was happily playing with my big cheese, Mom opened some of her packages without my help.  The stuff in them wasn’t very interesting, but the growing pile of wrapping paper was, so I stopped playing with my big cheese and went to check it out.  I crawled under the paper, rustled around in it, and pounced on it.  Way cool!  After letting me have some fun with the pile, Mom said there were more packages for me, so I helped her open them.  So many fun toys!  I didn’t even know what to play with first.  In fact, to be totally honest, I got a little overwhelmed with everything.  I didn’t know it was possible for a kitten to be so loved and to get so many gifts.  How lucky am I!

After we had opened all the packages, Mom started gathering the pile of paper and the bows and ribbons.  I asked her whether we could just keep them out since they were so much fun to play in, but she nixed that idea.  Humans – they can be such spoil sports.  But I didn’t mind too much since I have all these fun new toys to play with.

After all this excitement, I needed a long nap – and I took it in Mom’s lap, while she was sitting by the Christmas tree.  Mom listened to some music, and I slept.

I love Christmas!

Allegra’s World: Allegra Goes to the Vet’s

Since so much has happened around here in just the last week, Mom is letting me write here again so soon!  Yay!!!

Last Friday, there was a lot of commotion around our house.  Mom was moving some furniture around, and then she brought this big box up from the basement.  It was huge!  Much bigger than me!  It was a little scary, actually.  Then she took all these green things out of the box.  They looked like the branches on the tree right outside our window.  There were so many of them, I really felt outnumbered, so I did what any self-respecting cat would do:  I puffed myself up and hissed at them.  When that didn’t seem to bother them, I attacked!  But they just laid there, not doing much of anything, so I got bored and went to check out what Mom was doing.  She had put a little table in one corner of our living room, and it was covered with a red cloth that went all the way down to the floor.  Now this was interesting!  I went to investigate, and crawled under the table.  It was like my own private tent!  Very fun.   So I stayed under there for a while.

When I came out, the branches were no longer on the living room floor, but there was a tree on top of the little table.  Huh.  How’d that happen?  My Mom can make magic!  Then all of a sudden, there were all these twinkly lights on the tree.  More magic!  Then Mom hung things from it.  Some looked like little cats made out of wood, and glass, and plastic.  Interesting.  But I liked the little tent under the tree so much, I didn’t even bother to check out the tree all that much.  I sort of get a sense that Mom likes it that way, so I’m going to try and be a good girl.  But it is rather interesting…..hmm….  If I could just maybe bat at some of the little cats hanging from the tree…I wonder what would happen….

But that’s not all.  There was more excitement around here.  On Monday, I had just settled in for a nice long nap on my sunny window perch, when Mom gently woke me up, and picked me up.  She never does that, she always leaves me alone when I sleep, so I wasn’t sure what that was all about.  Next thing I know, I’m inside this big pink bag!  Hello!  How’d that happen?  Now, the pink bag had been sitting in our family room for a while, and I even nap in it sometimes, but this time, Mom zipped up the front, and I was kind of stuck in there.  Very odd.  I wasn’t sure what to think.

You know how I told you last time that when Mom leaves the house, she always takes a purple bag with her?  Well, this time she left the house with the pink bag, and me in it!  What was going on?  The only time I’d ever been outside the house was when Mom picked me up from the animal hospital where I lived for a while to bring me home.  Uh oh.  Animal hospital?

Yup.  Sure enough, after a short time in the car (I remembered the car from when Mom brought me home.  It was a little scary when it first started moving, but then, it was okay), Mom carried me into – oh yes, I remembered this place!  I remembered the smells, but I also remembered that the people there were really nice to me, so I started to get kind of curious about what this might be about.  A few minutes later, Mom unzipped the front of the bag.   I wasn’t sure about coming out, so Mom reached in and pulled me out.  I was a little scared, and I think Mom could tell, because she hugged me and held me close, and that felt really good.  Then a woman came in the room, and she petted me and told me I was beautiful.   Then she took out this weird looking stick thing and asked whether she could take my temperature.  I don’t know what this temperature is, but the woman was really nice, so I figured it would be okay.  Yikes!!!  It so was not okay!!!  I won’t tell you where she put that stick thing, but I will tell you that I didn’t know that woman nearly well enough to let her do that to me!

A short while later, another woman came into the room.  She was really nice, too.  She even took some treats out of her pocket and offered them to me, but after the incident with the stick thing, I wasn’t going to trust anyone there!  God knows what they were going to do next!   After talking to me softly and petting me, the second woman looked into mouth.  Hello?  What did she do that for?  Then she put her hands all over me and squeezed in places that shouldn’t be squeezed if you ask me, but then, nobody asked me!  Then she took this round disk thing and put it on my chest.  It was all very strange, but none of it hurt, so I didn’t put up too much of a fuss – but believe me, I thought about it!

The next part was so not fun!  One of the women held me down, while the other one came at me with something really sharp and poked a hole in my leg with it.  It hurt!  And I started bleeding!  I got really scared.  You’d think they would have panicked, too, but instead of doing something to stop the bleeding, the woman  collected my blood in this tube thing!   What was up with that?  Finally, after what seemed like forever, the woman pulled the sharp thing out of my leg.  What a relief!  Surely, they couldn’t possibly do anything else to me, right?  But oh, no!  Next, she came at me with another sharp thing, and she  stuck it in my hip!  Okay, enough was enough.  I whipped my head around, ready to show them with my sharp little teeth that the woman had admired earlier just what I thought of the way they were treating me!  But they were quicker than I was (which is pretty darn impressive, if you ask me, because I’m fast!).    Thankfully, just when I was getting really mad, the pink bag reappeared, and I ran into it.  I figured they wouldn’t drag me out a second time, and I was right.

Mom says what happened was my annual check up.  It’s to make sure that I’m healthy.  Whatever!  I don’t care how nice the people there were to me, this is not a place I want to have to go back to more than once a year (no offense, nice people).

So that’s all the excitement from me.  I think I’ll go take a nice long tap in my special tent now.