Summer Memories-- Cookie Dough

One thing I will always remember from this summer was the cat.  When Ruth and Gareth came running in one day announcing that they found a cat, we became a bit nervous.  Okay, who's cat did you steal?  After checking this cat out, it became obvious that it was a stray.  She was very skinny.  A neighbor kid brought it some food and water and fed it right outside our door.  Great.  Now we are going to have a stalker cat.  There is no WAY we were going to adopt this thing.  I can barely take care of my kids.. I am not the type to be able to care for an animal.  So we told the kids to stop feeding it and just leave it alone (i.e. stop holding it).  They put it down and she didn't run away.  (I say 'she' because we assumed it was a girl.... we never actually checked now that I think of it).  They fell in love with her and named her Cookie Dough.  At one point the kids started taking it around to the neighbors to see if it belonged to anyone.  They were becoming very emotionally attached to the thing.  When they got near the field, the cat jumped out of their arms and ran away.  They couldn't chase it because it had gone outside their boundaries.  Gareth started crying.  He was crying so hard his nose started to bleed.  I was able to trace his trail of blood from that spot all the way to our door.  Ruth was crying too.  We sent her to her room to calm down.  When she came out she was holding this:

Cookie Dough

I miss your little eyes that darted around.

I miss your paws that didn't make a sound.

I mis your meaow, soft and sweet.

I miss the box in which you would sleep.

I miss the times we had together.

Now I will miss you forever.

So apparently our little girl is a poet.  We always knew she was a good writer and very expressive, we'd just never seen her do it in the form of poetry.  The best part about this poem is that it comes complete with a picture of the cat and 3 actual tear drops.

So anyway, we thought we were done with the drama.  But we weren't.

The cat came back the very next day.  And the next.  We started worrying about her health.  The thing would just lay on the stairs by our door all day long.  One of the neighbor kids said they saw her throw up blood (who knows if that was actually true or not... you can't go around trusting neighbor kids).  Either way, Jones and I were convinced that she was sick and dying.  We got into the habit of waking up early every morning and poking our heads out the door to make sure there wasn't a dead cat waiting for us. It got to the point that I was not sleeping at all.  I decided that enough was enough.  None of the neighbors had claimed her and she had been wasting away outside our door for far too long.  The next morning, we put her in a basket and took her to the animal shelter.  I thought my kids were going to get emotional again but they handled it well.  I think they had secretly noticed that she wasn't too healthy so they felt relieved when I told them we were taking her to a place that could help her more than we could.

So yeah.  The neighbor kids weren't too happy with me.  They'll get over it.