The Conley Family: December 2007

Trish and Jake gave Caelun this toy and Abbi a gift card- such a nice aunt and uncle

Abbi is such a good big sister-better than Cae deserves!

At least here he isn't yanking her hair

Trish and Jake

We have a brunch on Christmas Day for Clint's Dad and Step-Mom and any grandpas, grandmas, siblings, Aunts, Uncles, in-laws, and out-laws or other way word lost souls who are crazy enough to wander in off the street. This year it was Mary, Floyd, Grandpa Floyd, Trish, and Jake. I was to busy running around getting food and talking to everyone to take many pictures. In addition my new camera was being passed around and oooed and ahhhed over, but I did get one picture of Trish and Jake before they headed to the next relative on their rounds. Trish noticed a little sign we have in a frame on a shelf in our living room- "Cats are just children who eat off the floor" and she enjoyed that. Their children are of the furry with tail persuasion. I can relate. The mini-van driving, diaper changing, driving to horse camp life is not for everyone. I have a group of essays my students call "Tow's Tales" that I started as kind of a running commentary /journal of my observations of life- Robert Fulghum style. We started using the classroom appropriate stories for improve and the kids seem to love them. I don't bring them out until I have a request and it never fails that I have a request. This is one of those essays - keep in mind it was written before I had children-and it is for my friend and sister in-law Trish.

My Cats
Pets are amazing. Now there are all the regular and usual things like they are good companions and highly entertaining. I have another reason why to have pets. As I stated before my husband and I are DINKS (double income no kids). This is a choice. A choice my grandmothers in the 1920s and even my mother in the late sixties didn’t really have and I am aware of the power of having that choice. My career and education are very important to me. Having an associates degree with an emphasis in child development and a secondary ed. teaching certificate and having taught everything from preschool to college students I am fulfilling my parenting needs. When people ask if I have children I say yes lots if it is debate season I have seventy-eight which is the number on my team or if it is forensics season I say forty-three which is the respective members of that team and this is really enough. Besides this my children come potty trained and sleeping through the night at least most of the time. I occasionally get a two a.m. phone call from a hysterical student with a life catastrophe but certainly not every three hours. In fact half of my children come driving and some one else has to buy the car and pay the insurance. Someone else has to pay the medical bills, provide the braces and pay the ticket to college I just have to love and educated them which is the fun part. My children are borrowed and go home when the bell rings or some time there after. I enjoy borrowing children so much that I have an entire play room in my house full of toys for the children on loan: nieces, nephews, god-children neighbors and any strays that wander in to play. Any time I have gotten the maternal urge I simply borrow someone’s children until the urge goes away. The parents of said children; our siblings and friends, are just as happy for a weekend away. They don’t ask a lot of questions. I then can be the favorite aunt. I take the kids, feed them chocolate and junk food, let them stay up until all hours, let them watch scary movies they aren’t supposed to watch and then when I and they are tired I send them home. This usually quiets the urge to pro-create quite sufficiently. But most of the children in my life have been progressing along in age and becoming even more fun than work so I needed something new. I examined our savings account with a balance of $16.54. Looked at our one bedroom apartment of 600 square feet and decided that real human children were just not in our price range. This is where kitty number one enters the picture. His name is Pokey. You see pets make wonderful surrogates for children. This was fine and wonderful and then we bought a house with lots of space. We considered a second kitty but we were concerned about the psychological ramifications on kitty number one. We kitty sat for a friend while she went to Colorado for a week and Pokey had a ball. It was kitty summer camp at our house. He seemed very lonely and depressed when the visiting kitties returned to their respective home. At this same time two of our god daughters found a stray in need of a home and they couldn’t keep it due to allergies. The allergies were on the part of the kids not the cat by the way. Thus entered kitty number two. Her name is Nutmeg; the god daughters named her. We had some litter box issues at first but after a short time they seemed to resolved themselves with no kitty therapy required. So now they are the best of friends and are very self reliant as long as the food bowl is kept full. Now for the part why they are better than children. Neither of my kitties will ever want to go to kitty college. Neither needs braces nor wants the latest in clothes or make up. There will be no grand kitty wedding and no son or daughter in law that I may or may not like. I have made sure they can’t get knocked up. They won’t let you do that with real human children; though many parents might like to. There is no new kitty music I may not like. Christmas is easy. A can of tuna fish and the world is wonderful. There are no kitty shoes to out grow/wear out. I don’t need to worry about marring their psyche and then having them write a tell-all book. They have yet to equip a keyboard to work for kitty paws. No expensive kitty summer camp is required though I hear it is an option. I never have to worry about them getting messed up on drugs. I have not heard of a single cat in rehab from catnip, so we are safe there. There are no kitty driver’s licenses and thus no expensive teen kitty car insurance and no car accidents. My kitties don’t go out side unaccompanied and thus their only encounter with a car involves being chauffeured to the vet or grandma and grandpa’s. When I am busy working long or weird hours and my children at school need me I don’t worry about kitty day care or if they will be damaged from lack of quality time. All have to do is open a can when I get home and all is right with the world. All in all they make good surrogates. This leads me to my next point which is I want to be one of my cats. It doesn’t matter which one just one of them. Now I don’t want to be any cat. I know that many animals are brutalized and treated cruelly but not my cats. I want to be MY cat. My kitties are the best of friends and they have an entire four bedroom house to play in. They have an enormous basket full of toys they can get out and spread all over the house and never have to pick up. Their food bowl is always full and they at no time have to cook it. There are also no dishes to wash once again this is all taken care of. They are regularly brushed and washed and every need is looked after. I especially think I would like to be my cat when I am leaving for school some bleak morning. There is a foot of snow on my car that has to be cleaned off. I have been up most of the night grading papers and I am no where near done. The basement is full of dirty laundry, the sink is full of dirty dishes and the refrigerator is empty of edible food. There sit both of my kitties snuggled in the down comforter on the bed clean warm dry with their bellies full and not a care in the world. Such the life. Of course my kitties have never read Shakespeare, experienced the joy of a job well done, had an ah ha moment of realization and clarity, or explored the concepts of history or future. All in all I guess there is a reason why I am me and they are them. Sometimes things in the universe are just the way they are meant to be.
Now if you have ever owned a cat you can appreciate this next section if not you won’t understand why cat lovers tolerate this. I am home for about two weeks on winter break. Amid the hustle and bustle of the end of school I picked up a cold, not surprising when you are surrounded by children. They are walking petri dishes but at any rate I digress. Having a sore throat I took a couple of aspirin put on a pair of sweats drank some juice and crawled under my down comforter to sleep it off. I awoke a couple of hours later with not one but two kitties laying on my head and one was holding my head down with both front paws and fervently washing my face. Now I was not aware when I crawled into bed that my face was especially dirty but apparently Miss Nutmeg could see something I couldn’t. Now this is not the first experience I have encountered with this cat on the head phenomena and most of my cat owning friends say they have similar experiences. My question is why? What is it about a human head that is so very appealing to a cat? Now I will tell you it is not always an unpleasant experience for the human. There are plenty of times when I have had a raging sinus headache and having a soft warm vibrating kitty (they do that when they purr) plunk down on your throbbing head is a very pleasant feeling indeed. Still, I wonder what it does for the cat. So far my kitties have never clued me in. If you ever figure it out let me know.

Now this being said- I am not looking to return my children but I can appreciate Trish's point of view.