Sunday Scribblings: Family and Camera Critters too

The Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is family. With this topic I could have focused on my immediate family, school family, or my extended family. Instead I chose to focus on my pet family. If you have read my blog at all you know we have two dogs and seven cats. Each of them provides entertainment and unconditional love on a daily basis. Here is our critter family tree: starting at the top left is Finnigan, Sweet William, Lily, McDuff, Annie and Shelby, Kit and Isabelle, Kit, Iris, and Isabellebaby McDuff

I love to call JEJ the cat whisperer. He has a certain way with cats. When he moved across the street to my house when we were married, he tried to bring his cats. They did not appreciate our dogs and never really made the move. That was eleven years ago.Ten years ago our neighbors had a mamma cat that would just show up at their house to give birth to kittens. We decided we were ready to have cats, thus Cosmo and Camille came home with us. They are no longer with us, but they turned me into a cat lover and I saw what a cat whisperer JEJ really was.

A year later that same mamma cat showed up at our neighbors to have kittens and we knew we HAD to have two more kittens. McDuff and Finnigan came home to join their siblings and they are now almost ten years old. It is hard to imagine all four of these cats came from the same mother.

In the spring of 2001 I got a call from my sister saying that The Princess had found two kittens in a box behind the grocery store. They couldn't keep the cats and she wondered if there was any way we could take them. Welcome home Iris and Poppy. Poppy vanished as cats often do a few years ago, but Iris is the Queen Bee of the household now.In the fall of 2005 we were down to three cats and we saw an ad in the paper about abandoned cats that needed a home. We went to rescue Isabelle and Lucas. A few months later we were all saddened when Lucas died of feline leukemia. Isabelle still misses him, but Kit has helped fill that void.
That following spring our dear friend SH died. She had two kittens that were about five months old. They had been inside a enclosed porch and had really just had each other. Her grieving husband didn't know what to do with the cats. He was afraid to let them go outside because of wild animals and he already had an inside cat. We knew what SH would want. She had loved those kittens to pieces. We brought a part of our dear friend home the spring of 2006 when Lily and Sweet William became part of our cat family.Did we ever realize another kitten would need to be rescued? Are we just the kitten magnet house or what? Kit showed up in a tree last fall and needed a home. He was not in good health, but had a personality even in sickness that won our hearts. Now we have quite a cat family. Four of the cats are mostly outdoor cats and three others come and go inside and out. They have all been fixed so we don't repopulate the neighborhood. They have all been a blessing and I have began training as a cat whisperer myself. (The last picture with all three dogs before we said good-bye to Lucy.)

Added to this critter family are two dogs. After the death of my dog Lucy we had two older dogs at home- Bluey and Emily. We were at WalMart on day and saw a woman holding a blue heeler puppy. We stopped to ask her about the dog and found out their were more in the litter. All the rest were red heelers. What I learned that day is that JEJ had always wanted an Australian Cattle Dog. The rest is history. We visited the farm and fell in love with Shelby. She is now three years old. We lost Emily in December of 2004. I didn't really think I was ready for another puppy, but when I was reading ads in January 2005 one caught my eye: springer spaniel puppies for sale. After much discussion I made the call to Garfield, Washington and that week-end we took a trip through blowing snow to find our dear Annie. From the first trip home with Shelby they have been loyal friends. Shortly after that Bluey also died so we enjoy the companionship of two dogs. Bluey taught Annie and Shelby "the ropes" before she left us. What a mentor she was!


You can read other Sunday Scribblings about family here. You can see other Camera Critters here.