Let me count the ways…

Remember that cat – I call her Clementine – that the next door neighbors abandoned when they moved? Apparently she was pregnant. A few days ago I noticed she didn’t have her belly anymore, so yesterday morning I followed her to her nest. She’d built it in the bush on the fence growing between our apartment complex and the one next door.

Despite fierce opposition to the idea, Curt finally relented to letting me keep her in the apartment. “But,” he snapped, “it’s all you! I don’t want anything to do with it!”

A few minutes after I’d gone outside to reconnoiter, he came wandering out with a box padded with towels and fetched the kittens for me.

We brought them into the apartment with the mother, Curt giving me cross looks all the while. I teared up and explained that the ex-neighbors were assholes, and Clementine was so little and her ribs were showing and that I just wanted to give her and her kittens a chance to make up for the assholery of others. All true! This seemed to soften him a bit.

“What are we going to do here?” he asked. “There’s no way Monkey and George can sleep in here with us like this. And if we keep them outside, they’ll just scratch at the door all night long. There’s no WAY I’m putting up with all that noise.”

So then I said, “Hey, I know! Let’s pump up the air mattress and I can sleep out in the living room! That way Monkey and George won’t freak out because they’re still have one of us and Clementine and her kittens can have some peace and quiet!”

Then my husband turned his big cow eyes at me and said, “You mean we’d sleep in separate beds? We can’t do that…”

And that’s how my husband, the cat opposer, and I spent the night (and possibly the next few weeks) sleeping in the living room. :)