Our Splat Cat

My husband asked me this morning if I had posted any photos of our cat, Splat, on the blog. I realised that I had not; except for one of her and my cat Brutus in a story about our flea problems we had. Now, my husband is not a blogger at all. He doesn't get it; he doesn't understand why people want to put their personal life out on the Internet for everyone to see; he thought I was a little goofy when I started this a few months ago. But I think it is starting to grow on him, and from time to time, he likes to look at what I have posted on my blogs, and even some cool "non-personal" stuff from other's blogs. Especially about animals, and farms, and things like that. So I have been posting some photos of our horses on my horse blog, "All the Pretty Little Horses," and we were looking at horse blogs last night; when our cat-child, Splat, was doing something utterly cute and I scrambled to take a photo. Then this morning, he gave me the idea to introduce you all to a very huge, important part of our life, our cat-children; most especially, Splat.
We have had this cat for just about exactly one year. One evening, as we were watching a DVD, we heard a commotion outside the house on the highway. (We live right off the highway :( ) slamming doors, screeching tires; voices. A little while later, we heard a little cat voice in the yard. Odd, we thought. We even went out onto the front porch to try to see the cat making the noise, and couldn't. We went to bed. Later that night, there was a interruption in our electricity, cutting off the a/c and making everything utterly silent in the house, and waking me up. That's when I heard it again..... tiny meows. This time, I jumped up, grabbed a flashlight, and ran outside. That is when I first saw her - a little black and white kitten, terrified. She ran away from me and hid under our small log barn. I went in an got a small dish of food, setting it out for her, hoping she would decide to stay. (I adore cats, and love them too.)
Now, you must understand, I was taking a huge risk. Kevin is NOT a cat-lover, and I was lucky to have been able to move my two cats Brutus and Cosette with me when I moved in after we got married. He set rules: no cats in the bed, (my cats slept with me) no cats on his pillow, no cats inside at night; things like that.
So the kitten stayed under our barn, and it wouldn't come out to us. For 2 weeks, we fed it, and tried to get it to come to us. Finally, one day, I took a can of cat food and sat out by the barn and she came out to eat it and let me stroke her a little bit. I promised Kevin, if I got her, she would live outside, be a barn cat, and never bother him at all.
I needn't have worried. It was Kevin, in the end, who tamed the poor thing, and one day he came in the house with her. That was the end. He was in love with the cat. I was, too. Obviously, someone had dumped it on the highway and left it. We named it "Splat", as we thought surely it would end up that way on the highway. It was several months before we figured out it was a girl cat, though.
We put it outside at night, and it would find it's way under the house and come in through holes in the floor, as, at the time, the kitchen was gutted for remodeling. We stuck to the "no cats in the bed" rule, and every morning, there she would be, sleeping on the floor right outside our door, waiting for us. Finally, when cool weather set in, we started letting her in our room at night, and she weaseled her way into the bed. We have now created a little princess! This is the most spoiled, most pampered cat ever. Even more so than my own Brutus.
She sleeps in the bed, under the covers. (When it is cool out.) In addition to this, she has her own little pet bed under the window.
She has a small dish of water on Kevin's bedside table for drinks during the night.
She eats dinner with us every evening, and her favorites are: (I kid you not) Chicken breast; steak, cooked medium-well, never re-heated, in bite-size pieces; gravy; cheddar cheese; canned mushrooms; ice cream; pasta with Alfredo or other creamy sauce; and a few others. We actually fix her a small plate of food at dinner time, cooled, and in bite-size pieces.
She has her favorite "fuzzy" blanket on the sofa, and cuddles with it when the weather is cool.
Every morning, we open a window and pull up a small chair for her to come and go out of the window all day as she pleases.
She hardly ever spends nights outdoors. We always make her come in and sleep in the bedroom, whether she wants to or not.
She loves to play with chapsticks, and had about three tubes that she would roll all over the hardwood floors, chasing wildly. She had kind of outgrown that now, though, as she is a year old. If we are outside, she begs to come out, too. She takes walks with us to our pond, a mile and a half long. When she got spayed, she was very sick from the drugs given to her, and couldn't get upstairs to the bedroom, and cried if we tried to lift her; so we slept on the sofa bed with her until she recovered. She provides up with hours and hours of entertainment, and we literally refer to her as our cat-daughter. We have not gotten a third cat, as much as I would like, because we don't think she would like it, and we don't want her to run away or get mopey. As you can see from the photos, she loves to get inside things; baskets, boxes, things like that; and she likes climbing, and figured out how to climb Kevin's ladder when it is in the kitchen we're remodeling.
Kevin adores this cat; I have never seen a guy with a "thing" for a cat before; and he has it bad for this little bugger. I mean, she has him entwined around her paw.
Ok. I think I have babbled enough about our cat, Splat.