Blogging Belatedly

paperbag
Originally uploaded by GypsyPeach.

Hi. I meant to post this entry, like, six weeks ago. Oops.

The pets made out like bandits this year at Christmas. I love that my friends and family love them. I mean, I love them like crazy, and I buy them toys occasionally, but I'll tell the truth now...

Every year on Christmas, I gently cup their furry little faces in my hands and tell them that they have been given another 365 days of me feeding them expensive food (non-fart-inducing for Bella, non-hairball-inducing-indoor-cat-weight-control-formula for Fred), paying vet bills, scooping their poop and loving them unconditionally. I tell Bella she's been given another 365 days of walks (because really, if aliens are watching me walk behind her carrying her poop in a baggie, which do you think they think is the dominant species here?). I tell Fred I will try not to hold him in the confining clutchy way that he hates (aka the normal, gentle way you'd hold your cat; I'm not Lenny or anything) too often. That's their Christmas present from me every year.

Ah, but they got toys from lots of other people. Crinkly toys and bouncy toys and chasey toys and scratchy toys. (Thank you, lots of other people!)

Bella is a big fan of the toys. The other night she kept jumping out of bed to get just one more toy from the living room before falling asleep. "I want softy pink and purpley bone! I want realistic squirrel! I want tiny, fakey squirrel! Where's Monkey? Monkey is still my bestest one! Gotta get Monkey!" She was not ALL deterred by me pulling the pillow off my head to mutter, "Bella, Monkey won't be lonely in the living room because he has Party Dog to keep him company out there. No more jumping on and off the bed. Sleepy time now."

Yeah, no dice.

Fred on the other hand, he loves trash. He likes the plastic ring off milk jugs, he carries them around and puts them in his food dish. He likes caps to Unisol saline solution. Nothing gets my big white cat off his tush like a dropped saline solution cap. He didn't even break any Christmas balls this year. He just swatted two small durable ones off the bottom branches and placed one in my shoe and one in Joel's, like a freaky little feline version of a Germanic/Scandanavian Santa Claus.

So I went through the cat toys, new and old, deciding which we should keep and which should go to the less fortunate kitties at the best animal shelter I've ever seen, oh my god, they are awesome; give them money. Bella would play with everything, cat toys included, but there's always the fear that she'll choke on the sparkly little mice while running out to get Monkey AND Party Dog, because dammit, I had to go and remind her of Party Dog, didn't I? (Party Dog looks an awful lot like Monkey; he was a replacement for Monkey after an unfortunate beheading took place during a visit with a teething Gunner a few years ago. He's the same size and color, with ropes for appendages, but he's kind of doglike and he has a stuffed cone, like a birthday party hat, sewn onto his head. Shortly after that, an identical Monkey was procured, but Party Dog is still around.)

After half-heartedly chasing an orange ball around and showing passing interest in a few new toys, Fred went and played in a paper bag. For HOURS.