A Mew-Mew By Any Other Name... (Babble)

For anyone interested in the outcome of our recent kitty drama, please read on….
After two weeks of pondering what to do with Mew-Mew Lilly we decided to try passing her on to a good friend of ours.

Mew-Mew had been straying farther and farther from our yard and I was getting really worried about her.  There were a couple of nights we even put out food where we didn’t see her at all, and then we caught a different neighborhood cat eating out of her dish.  I was giving up hope that her owner was ever going to appear, so we decided to invite her into the back room of our house for an afternoon and let her meet my friend Bonnie Jean.  Bonnie Jean is one of the kindest people I know and she has been wanting a pet, so it seemed perfect; my friend could have a pet, the cat would have a loving home, and we would still get to visit her.

It was so sweet for that couple of hours that the cat was in the house.  I promised Ian I would keep her in the back few rooms and then vacuum everything so it wouldn’t affect his allergies.  The cat was nervous at first, but trusted us, and eventually settled into a spot on the love seat where Aden petted her while watching TV.  It was very comfortable and natural having a cat lounging around.  If we ever find one as friendly as Mew-Mew that doesn’t make my husband sick I want it.

Anyway, Bonnie Jean was also taken with the cat, and after putting her in a pet carrier without a struggle, loaded her into the car and off they went.  The next report we got was that Mew-Mew was going by Caramel Cashew and doing fine.



Then Bonnie Jean took her to the vet where they discovered the chip in her ear which said she was registered under the name Toffee and lived a block away from us.  I felt like we’d done some cruel trick on my friend, dangling a sweet pet in front of her like that.   To all the people who commented that I should have the cat checked for a chip, apparently that was excellent advice and next time that’s the first thing we’ll do.  I was reluctant because I knew if we took her to the vet and there were no chip we would still probably have her checked out or possibly spayed and then she would suddenly be ours, and we weren’t ready for that.

The real owners were happy to get their cat back and reimbursed Bonnie Jean for the vet bill, and told her the cat’s name was actually Admiral.  (After running through so many names for the cat I keep thinking of the joke, “I don’t care what you call me just as long as you don’t call me late for dinner.”)

The kids still haven’t gotten around to removing the ‘Found!’ posters of the cat from our block, although it is truth in advertising.

So that was our brief experiment with quasi-pet ownership.  It’s got me thinking about real pets one day.

Oh, and unrelated to this post but worth mentioning:  Mona lost yet another tooth in front! She’s going to look like her baby pictures soon.

Okay, so at what point is this officially our cat? (Babble)

I got home after taking the kids to school and going to the Y the other day and there was a message on our answering machine.  A neighbor a few doors down called to say, “Your cat is up in our pine tree and we thought you should know.”  YOUR cat.  Meaning OUR cat.  Meaning there is a cat in the neighborhood that is our responsibility because it belongs to us because it is our cat.  Really?  It had been hanging out on our deck for fewer than five days at that point.  And the neighborhood was referring to it as our cat?  Does that make it so?

The cat has been living in our backyard since we found it sealed in our deck.  We fed it because we were worried about it.  We’ve posted pictures of it around the block in the hopes that its owner will come get it.  The girls call her Mew-Mew and Quinn calls her Lilly, or sometimes Spotty or Spot (Ian still calls her Spaz but he’s the only one), and Mew-Mew-Lilly shows up in the morning and evening for food, but otherwise spends her days exploring the rest of the street.  She doesn’t seem to let anyone else pet her, but she’s affectionate with us and occasionally comes when I call.  She’s nice to have around, but is she ours?  When does that become official?

Did she become our cat when we fed it?  I feed kids in the neighborhood too, but that doesn’t make them mine.  I turn them loose and assume they go home and don’t feel like they belong to me.  The birds and squirrels aren’t mine if I feed them on my property.  If we stopped feeding it and it continued to live in our yard, is it still our responsibility?  At what point are we wrong if we stop feeding it?  If we decide it is not our cat and stop feeding it after a week I don’t think anyone would fault us, but what about through the winter?  At what point have we been feeding it long enough that we have to arrange to have someone else feed it if we go on vacation?

Is it our cat just because we decide it’s our cat?  What if the original owner finally comes to claim it a day after we declare it to be our cat?  At that point of course we would give it back.  But what about a week after?  Sure.  But a month?  Or a year?  Can someone who didn’t own it before simply announce it belongs to him or her one day?  If the neighbors across the street decided the cat was cute and put a collar on her, would we have any grounds to protest?  What if the cat just started hanging out next door instead?  If we have been calling it our cat do we have a right to scoop her up and drag her back to our own yard just because we want to?  That seems strange.  If we don’t feed it and it only steps on our property from time to time, can it still be considered our cat if it’s in name only?
Is it ours when we provide it medical care?  I would do the same for a bird or squirrel or other wild animal that needed help on our property, but that doesn’t mean any of those animals are mine.  Do I have a right to spay or neuter any animal that wanders into my yard?  (What about putting funny hats on them?)

If we ‘let’ the cat live in our yard does that really make us responsible for it?  If it does damage on someone else’s property is that now our concern, even if we don’t officially lay claim to the cat?  How does that work?  Is there some sort of common law relationship status you can have with a pet where if enough people believe the cat is yours it becomes a legal reality?  Can you really have any control over an outdoor cat?

I feel like the cat is ours if we put a collar on it, and we haven’t.   I’m not ready to say this cat is ours.  I think it would prefer to be an indoor cat and with Ian’s allergies we’re just not going to do that.  My first choice is to figure out where it came from and return her; my next choice is to find someone we know willing to take it in so my kids can still visit her.  My last choice is to adopt the cat as an outdoor pet, but with each passing day that seems to be where we’re headed.

I’ve been looking into what’s involved in keeping an outdoor cat, even though I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep an outdoor cat in the city.  I don’t entirely approve of outdoor cats, especially since one killed our first pet bunny while it was playing in the backyard when we first moved to the neighborhood.  I don’t think it’s fair to have a pet that wanders into other people’s space, and I worry for cats near too much traffic.  I’ve also read enough articles about how many birds are killed by house cats to feel good about knowing I’m somehow contributing to that situation.

In my head, having a pet is supposed to be a clearly defined thing.  You have a pet or you don’t.  If you have a pet you care for it, take responsibility for it, you take it to the vet, you name it, you arrange a pet sitter for it if you go away for any significant period of time, and you promise to do the best you can for it for its whole life or until someone else is officially named its owner.  Our relationship with this cat if it becomes ours would be very different from any of that.  It’s more like a random guest.  Lately we don’t even see it when we put out food.  I don’t know where it is most of the time, and I’m not sure what’s expected of us.  The boundaries are not clearly defined because they have been dictated by the cat.  If the cat’s making the rules, what does that make us?

(This post is dedicated to the Eric Carle book, “Have you seen my cat?” which has to be at the top of my list of the most annoying books my kids have ever requested at bedtime.)

Found! (Babble)

So, the first thing to mention that was recently found is Mona’s paper chameleon.   Aden spotted it poking out among some leaves between the school playground and the street.  It’s a little worse for wear, but it’s intact, and the Lizzy drama has officially subsided.  But no one looks at Lizzy anymore because the other thing we found was a cat.  A real live cat.  Sealed inside our deck.

After we had the new garage built, the deck was left in tatters around the edges, so we hired some great deck people to come out and fix it up.  They filled in the gaps between it and the garage, built new steps, replaced a few bad boards, and covered a hole that the kids kept losing balls in.  The deck takes up most of the backyard and has no place to get inside it.  It’s a box with no escape hatch, and when Quinn dropped a frisbee between the slats a couple of months ago we had to tell him it was, for all intents and purposes, gone forever, because there was no way to retrieve it from under the deck.

About three or four days after the deck carpenter left, I was heading out the back door on my way to work and stopped on the deck for a few minutes with my husband to discuss our schedules a bit.  I kept hearing a meowing sound.  We figured it was probably the cat next door, but we didn’t see her, and then Ian thought it might be one in a window across the alley.  But I could have sworn it sounded like it was coming from our yard.  There wasn’t any time to ponder that right then so I went to work and got to hear later how after school the kids were just beside themselves because they had indeed found a cat under the deck.  The afternoon’s entertainment had been dangling a piece of yarn between the slats for the kitty to chase.



Ian tried valiantly to remove some boards to let the cat out, but the old screws were too stripped and the new ones required a screwdriver bit we didn’t have, so I called the deck people.  They came over at the end of the day, unscrewed a couple of boards, and the cat was free.  I can’t figure out how the cat got in there, short of sneaking in while the carpenter was there and not getting back out in time before the last hole got covered.  It didn’t look like a cat that had been stuck in a deck over a three day weekend, but who knows?  The deck people are coming back soon to saw us a hatch, because that just seems like a good idea now.

In any case, it’s an adorable cat with no collar, sharp claws, and the un-savvy mannerisms of a creature that has lived a pampered life indoors.   The girls call her Mew-Mew, Quinn calls her Lilly, and Ian calls her Spaz.  She kind of looks like an Olivia or a Dolly to me, but I don’t think I’m going to have any say.  She responds to everything you call her as long as you look like you might pet her or give her food.  I’m tempted to just call her ‘found.’  Mew-mew-Lilly seems quite at home on our deck, but is very interested in coming inside.  We’ve given her water and fed her some cat food our neighbor was nice enough to hand us over the fence until we get some of our own.  Not that I believe we should have her around long enough to be investing in cat food, but it’s hard to know what to do at this point.

Ian is allergic to cats, so I never even contemplated having one.  I explained to the girls that if the cat was still around after the first night we’d put up posters and try to find its owner.  Someone must be missing this cat because it is too friendly and healthy looking to be a stray.  But what if no one claims it?  It was hard enough for the kids to give up baby squirrels after a night.  A cat that wants to be with them is going to be harder to let go.  I told Aden that I love their dad more than I could love a cat, and it wasn’t fair to him if we kept it.  She agreed that her daddy was more important than a cat, but asked if maybe he could just wear a mask like doctors sometimes do.  I told her that wasn’t much of a solution.  I gave the kids posters to tack up around the neighborhood, but I know they are hoping that effort fails.

We had our neighbor take a peek at the cat to see if she recognized it, and though she’d never seen it before she remarked that it sure looked at home.  When I opened the side door of the deck it made no move to leave.  The cat leaned out briefly, then marched back across the deck to sit by our back door.  My neighbor laughed and said she’s always believed that pets pick their owners and not the other way around, and that it certainly looked like that cat had made its selection.

I wish there were a way to keep the cat in the yard, but it gets too cold in Milwaukee for that, plus loose cats are bad for wild birds.  Ian is already resigning himself to the idea of lots of sneezing or pills in his future, but I refuse to put a cat before my husband’s health and comfort.  I’m still hoping it turns out she belongs to someone in the apartment house behind us and we can hand her over to a place where we know she’ll be safe and loved, but with each new can of food I crack open I start to wonder if this is part of some new pet owning phase we are embarking on.  (If only we could make a little heated cat house for the deck that somehow wouldn’t attract other creatures out there….)

Garage vs Deck (Babble)

Here is my big project question of the moment:  Should we build a new garage?

I love our new house, but the detached garage behind it is becoming an issue.  To solve it by building a new garage we’d have to cut severely into the deck. I’m having trouble deciding what to do.  (This doesn’t qualify as a problem.  I acknowledge our lives will continue to be fine either way, but I could use some input.)

Here’s the story on the existing garage:  It’s a single car garage, not in great shape.  The automatic door has no sensor to stop it from potentially squishing kids.  There is no second exit from the garage, so if a kid got stuck inside, well, he or she is pretty stuck.  The past owners it didn’t have kids so it didn’t matter, but as a parent it makes me nervous.  The garage is in an alley, but the entrance faces a small driveway.  Right now what happens is I park the small car in the garage and the minivan in the drive, which blocks the small car in.  With Ian away it’s not like we’re using both cars all the time, but I can see this getting annoying fast once he’s back.  It’s certainly not the end of the world, but I don’t like parking the minivan outside where I’m going to have to dig it out of the snow all winter and worry about it potentially getting broken into in the summer.  A simple, two car garage is within our budget, and it makes sense that if the current garage will need to be replaced at some point anyway, we should just get it done now so it better meets our needs rather than be frustrated.  I do not want to sink any money into the existing goofy garage.  It would be nice to have a good garage.

This is the garage (it’s in worse shape than it looks in photos for some reason):

But!  To build the garage means drastically changing our backyard.  To conform to regulations about setting it back from the alley, etc., it would cut into the deck about 8 feet or more, and a good chunk beyond that would have to be destroyed just to make space for building to happen.  Plus the finished result is a garage that would feel like it’s practically in our family room.  We’d lose a birch tree, and we’d go from a spacious feeling when we step out the back door to one that is very closed in and cramped.  I don’t see any point in bothering to build a new garage if it can’t hold both our cars, but the amount of space that would take up is more considerable than I first imagined.

This is the current view of the garage from the family room, looking across the deck:  (And yes, I know that looks like a door that could be used to exit the garage on the left, but it doesn’t lead to anything on the inside.)

See that flower pot on the deck on the far right in the above picture?  That’s about where the new garage would come to.

That’s just a lot of space to lose and I don’t know if it’s worth it.  I’d have to figure out something positively gorgeous to do to that garage wall, too, since we’d have it right in our faces.

It’s not like there is no more yard past the deck, but what little yard there is has been kind of taken over by the play set.  The only decent space in the backyard left for adults is really on the deck.

Side note:  In case anyone else is about to assemble such a play set, here’s something we did with ours that’s worked out well.  We put hooks on the top of the rock climbing wall instead of bolting it in place, and we didn’t bolt down the slide.  Everything is safe and holds together just fine, but we can rearrange the set when we want to.  We can pull both things off if the kids need better access to the little picnic table, and we can put the slide pointing in a new direction periodically (which gives some of the grass a break).  At the moment the kids like the slide coming right off the deck.  (We’re also able to switch out a swing for a trapeze bar easily.  It helps to keep them from getting bored with the set if we can keep changing it.  Not that they get bored easily–To my kids the playhouse area is either a ship or a clubhouse and there are elaborate games with rules I can’t follow and there is always something busy going on there.)

(Oh, and I have a friend who has older kids who don’t use their play set anymore, and she had the brilliant idea to string a hammock on it, and the clubhouse area is covered with plants, so now it’s her own little relaxing spot in her backyard.  Doesn’t that sound cool?)
Okay, so back to my quandary:  On the one hand, it seems stupid to give prime space to cars when we should just put up with the parking inconveniences and enjoy our deck.  On the other, we can only hang out on the deck certain months of the year and we would use the garage all the time.  A decent garage would be extremely practical for us and safer for the kids and the cars.  Parking on the street in Milwaukee costs money and you have to move cars to the opposite side each night, plus our smaller car has had the radio stolen twice while parked on the street, so it’s not a great option.  (I’m sure my husband who created a pro-public transit site called “Milwaukee Without a Car” is in his heart thinking “Let’s just get rid of a car,” but I remember the days before we had the third kid that necessitated our getting the minivan.  There were a lot of Army Reserve weekends where he drove off and I was stranded with small kids and few options.  For a family of five that second car comes in very very handy.)

So, garage or deck?  Any opinions or ideas?