Cat laps

Last evening I stopped by the pet store on the way home to buy some cat litter for our new baby. Not yet two months old, and the furry devil who adopted us less than three weeks ago has taken over our home and our lives, along with my bathroom, my bed, the newspapers, my father’s study and his skin. She seems to be teething, and hones her needle sharp canines and almost-invisible baby teeth on ankles, wrists, fingers and, on one very painful occasion, my nose. Like all very young felines, she is also practicing her instinctive hunting skills, becoming quite the expert at the stalk, ambush and pounce routine you can see lions and tigers do in the wild on Animal Planet or Discovery. In between all this frantic activity, where she chases balls of plastic, paper and aluminium foil with kittenly enthusiasm, she eats vast amounts of food, swigs milk daintily after every fourth bite and then falls into a deep sleep, on her back, her fat pink tummy indelicately exposed, her four little feet curled upwards in the air.

As a natural consequence of this package of overwhelming cuteness, we have succumbed totally to her baby wiles. All she needs to do is hop into our laps for a snuggle, purring like a little helicopter the whole time, or else sit neatly at our feet and look up at us with her huge green eyes, her little head with its enormous ears cocked slightly to one side, and we are reduced to warm puddles that she can lap up with her tiny pink tongue. Now well on the way to being a very spoiled brat, she already has a big paper bag full of toys – her favourite is a long piece of elasticised string with a knotted plastic bag at one end and a wad of paper at the other. She also has a bright red scrunchie she wore rakishly on her head one morning after picking it up from my bed where I had placed it moments before when I was getting ready to leave for work. Another hot favourite is a long pink hair-tie with bells at the ends – they make a delightful tinkling noise as she winds the string around her stout middle. And then there is the small ball of twine that my father fashioned for her, round and brown and very biteable, with the most intriguing loose end that can be gnawed on most edifyingly.

So when I was at the pet shop, stuck in there by a sudden burst of rain, I found much that the baby would enjoy playing with. First off was a set of the smallest and softest chewy sticks I could lay my hands on. It would, I fondly hoped, save our fingers and toes from the agony of the teething process. Did it? Well, in a way - she loved the smell and the taste of the one stick I gave her and did her best to try and get it in her mouth, with not much luck. So she licked it and occasionally nibbled at one end and – oh merciful heaven! – hasn’t sunk her teeth into us too much since then. I also found her a small ball, made of fairly light and flexible rubber in different colours, with lots of projections she can chew on, and an extraordinarily loud bell inside that catches her attention whenever it rolls past. Still a little big for Her Royal Tininess, it is being inspected at intervals, but has not caught on as well as I hope it will when she grows up.

Soon the furry beastie will get her share of restraints, will a little less spoiling and a little more discipline. A belled collar will follow the “NO!” that she is already starting to understand, and her silent assaults will be preceded by at least a minimal degree of warning, letting us duck when we need to instead of losing more blood. And she will, I know, grow into all the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed super-intelligence that a cat who is part of our family can possibly have!