Stephanie Says.. Take a walk inside my head

Kenny says to post pictures of the cats, I’ll have to compose five individual entries.  I’ve never posted pictures, so I don’t know.    I think, however, that I’ll write one post and then maybe put five pictures up if I have to.

So here goes:

We got Annabelle and Allie first.  Annabelle is pure white and when she joined our family in November of 2001, she was not happy to be confined to the basement.  She’s still not happy to be trapped anywhere so we have to be extra careful when we open closets to leave them open until she emerges from her explorations.

As much as any of the cats are “mine”, Annabelle is.  Until we got the two boys, she would sleep with me, sit with me on the couch to watch TV and follow me everywhere…even to the bathroom.  If you visit our house when I’m trying to wake up or get ready to go somewhere, you will be able to hear me say “Well…just give me a minute” about a hundred times in a row as Annabelle is howling her head off trying to wake me up or hurry me along.  Okay, howl is the wrong word.  That vocalization belongs to Paddy.  But Annabelle is like me….awfully noisy.

Allie is our shy cat.  She and Annabelle grew up together and joined our family at the same time, but there are times when Allie acts as if she spent her kittenhood alone.  She has a sweet little meow, which she sometimes uses to trick us into thinking she is addlebrained.  For a while, we would fall for her trick of “losing” us, only to rise from the living room couch to find Allie at the top of the stairs, ready to run at the first sign of any human stepping toward her.  

Allie is still the most shy of our cats, but she has learned to nuzzle us and jump up in our laps when no one else is around.  At the first sign of company, however, she is nothing but a flash up the stairs and under one of the beds.  Our good friend Beth came in to feed the cats when we went to Hawaii and almost came to the conclusion that we were lying about having three girls.  Allie didn’t come out of hiding the entire time we were gone.

Paddy is 100 % Kenny’s cat.  She is the result of a trip to PetSmart in March of 2002.  Tiny and black, with a white spot under her chin, Paddy was too adorable to not take home.  She spent her first week jumping on everything she was not supposed to but now she follows Kenny around and waits for him by the door if I am the only one to enter a room.  She is still pretty tiny, but her vocalizations make up for her size.  Kenny swears that his cat has some Siamese in her as she’s woken us both up at night by standing in the living room (a popular spot with our cats, you will notice) and yowling her head off.   Still, she is a sweet girl, for the most part, and had she the fingers, she could type this herself as she is always hanging around someone’s keyboard.

Jonah and Seth are our new cats.  They joined us and the three girls this summer and are slowly making themselves at home.

Jonah has taken over Annabelle’s old place on the couch in front of the TV and can spend all day just curled up watching us as we run around the house.  He is big and grey and looks (as Kenny’s friend Ben remarked) “as if he swallowed a whale”, but he is sweet and affectionate and likes to be right up against our jeans when we sit down.  Jonah is more Kenny’s cat than mine but he’ll nuzzle up against me too when the Daddy figure of the house isn’t home.

Seth is our orange cat.  He’s big and long haired and just a bit more skiddish than Allie when it comes to greeting company.  I mostly see Seth at night, as he likes to lay his head on my shoulder while I’m perusing my pre bedtime novel.  Seth doesn’t like to be picked up and he won’t jump onto our laps, but he is a great reading companion.  Should you come to visit, however, I can’t promise you’ll ever meet him, but this picture should give you some idea of how lovely he is. 

 

This is Jonah and Allie meeting for the first time.  They get along very well.