Her second day in the house and she has already ruined one evening…
Please. Let me tell you the story,
So “Annie” has spent a couple nights with us. She sleeps in her basket in the bathroom and rarely ventures out of the play room.
The boys were playing with her (and Russell as well) as has become the norm.
And then, after a bit, Jonah started playing with Daddy’s phone. Jonny started playing with his tablet.
Russell (our 2-year-old kitty) was laying under my chair. 10 minutes or so passed.
It was quiet. Too quiet.
Annie was nowhere to be seen. I went to check on her and I couldn’t find her.
Yes…Tonight, Annie decided to “hide.”
So I started looking and asked the boys where Annie went. Neither boy was very helpful.
She wasn’t in any of her usual spots.
She wasn’t in any of her “unusual” spots (Under the oven, behind the couch, in the PLANTER)…
I checked upstairs. I had told the boys to keep all the bedroom doors closed so she wouldn’t get lost up there… of course, Jonny had left our bedroom door open.
So I checked under our bed. In our bathroom… under the sink… everywhere… she was nowhere to be found. I jingled her favorite bell to play with…
Nothing.
Now I started to worry. I doubled back downstairs and did a thorough investigation of every place she could possibly be.
She was not there. She was simply “gone.”
But she had to be SOMEWHERE in the house! RIGHT?
And then I noticed our bedroom door wasn’t the ONLY thing Jonny had left open. Jonny had cracked the window in the living room (the one with the giant hole in the screen) about 2 or 3 inches to talk with his friends outside.
He hadn’t shut it.
Great.
But a kitten couldn’t squeeze through that right?
RIGHT????
😟😳😤😭
So I put my shoes on and off I went. It was pitch black outside. I tried using a flash light and looking through the yard, in the bushes, anywhere and everywhere I could see…
No sign of Annie.
And now Jonny was starting to cry.
Our first cat, Captain was killed by Raccoons in the back yard after escaping one night when Jonny was only 4.
Our second cat, Chloe just passed away last week.
And now Annie, our 2-month-old kitten had mysteriously vanished.
We did NOT need another kitty drama now.
Now I was the one worrying.
I looked upstairs again.
Nothing.
Jonah was bored of looking for Annie and had moved on to scattering a deck of flash cards around the house.
Great.
Good Lord! It’s already passed the kid’s bedtime isn’t it?
Jonah had also started shutting he lights off… (because, you know… routine)
But Jonny?
There was NO WAY Jonny was going to sleep before he knew that Annie was okay.
I was more and more sure that she had indeed wriggled herself through the open window without us seeing. I couldn’t do anything in the dark to find her…
But I wanted to do SOMETHING for the kid.
(About this time, he was crying about making “Lost kitten” posters. Poor kid.)
So… I decided I just had to tear the house apart just to make sure we had looked absolutely everywhere.
After bedtime. On a school night. The second school night of the school year to be exact.
I started with under our bed. I didn’t see anything when I had looked the first time, but I hadn’t pulled out everything stored under there. That stuff hadn’t moved in 10 years.
Amongst the “junk” are old drawings I made growing up, self-portraits from my college days, and a dismantled hand-painted Japanese glass-top coffee table my wife inherited that we decided to put away until the kids got a bit older (we have since decided to go ahead and just give it away whenever we get around to it)
So I pilulled all they stuff out. No sign of Annie…
But the last thing I pulled out from under the bed was the “top” piece of the coffee table which has about a 3” lip.
And hiding in said coffee table was one 2-month old gray striped Maine Coon kitten who has been given the name “Annie” but so far, responds to nothing.
For over an hour.
The kids were overjoyed. I let them have their moment but then quickly resumed our bedtime routine… the house a dismantled wreck.
I put “Annie” back in her basket in the bathroom and shut the door. But before I did, she looked at me with a look that said, “you may have won THIS time, but I will have my victory…in this life or the next!
Darn cat.