Five year olds love to talk about dead pets. At Sparks sometimes pets will come up at circle time and first I'll be talking about my cat and then suddenly one of the girls brings up her cat who was run over my a car. Her father was the driver. That will spark another memory of a hamster that perished or a dog that died a year ago. It's actually quite fascinating to listen to them go on about their pets, because rarely do they want to talk about live pets, no the dead ones are much more interesting.
Which got me thinking about pets in general. I can't remember too clearly a time when we didn't have pets in our house. I know there was a time, but we got our first cat when I was pretty young.
Napoleon was the best cat for children. He was so tolerant. Living in a house with four young girls can be quite the trial fora cat. What with all the petting, and pulling and being picked up. But he took it all like a good cat, very calm and hardly ever scratching us. He was great.
I vaguely remember when we first got that beautiful grey and white cat. It was around my dad's birthday and we had somehow convinced him that a great gift would be a pet cat. We'd never had any pets before aside from some goldfish (named Cleopatra and Anthony and Cleopatra II and Anthony II) who didn't last very long. So we drove to the SPCA and left with Napoleon.
I believe one of our foreign exchange students from France, Pauline, named him. She was fan of the human Napoleon (I never got why they called him by his first name... everyone else is known by either their full name or last name. But not Napoleon Bonaparte).
After that came Midnight. I'm not sure how he came about but I think we adopted him. I hope he came with that name, because I'm not a fan of over-used pet names.
I think then we got Josephine (as in Napoleon and ...), who was a kitten and around the same time Raven. This could be wrong as the memories are a little foggy. Raven was quite the opposite of our gentle Napoleon and we soon learned to stay away from him. Far away. He hissed and scratched and was overall unpleasant.
When we left Ontario we left our cats, but we eventually found another one. Or rather, he found us. He followed us home one day, and after we fed him he never left. He never really got an official name. He's had many but usually he's known as The Cat. Right now I'm trying to get Pritty-Kitty to catch on, but I'm not getting much progress.
I could go on, Pritty-Kitty was not the last pet to come into our home but I'll just list the rest because.
- I haven't done a list in a while,
- I feel like I may be boring you (not that I care too much about that) and
- I'm getting a bit on the long side already and I fear if I go on I may lose some of you.
So hear are the rest of the pets in somewhat of a chronological order:
- Maggie, dog, 14 years old, acquired in 2006 (?)
- Geronimo, gerbil, deceased, acquired in 2006 (again, kind of foggy)
- Chai and Mocha, gerbils, deceased, acquired 2007
- Skunk, gerbil, 2 years old, acquired 2007
- Snitzlefritz, gerbil, deceased, acquired 2007 (brother to Skunk)
- Mimi, rabbit, deceased, aquired 2007
- Caramel, guinea pig, deceased, acquired 2007 (ish)
- Bruce/Troy, fish, deceased, acquired 2007 (ish)
- Fred and George, rabbits, 2 (ish) years old, whereabouts unknown, acquired 2007
If I have forgotten any (which, given the number of pets is likely) then I apologize. No disrespect to the pets, I loved you all, even though Maddy got tired of you all eventually and stopped feeding you.
Oh and if Geronimo's out there somewhere reading this in gerbil heaven or whatever I'm really sorry. We were young and stupid.
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