It started 6 weeks ago but I had made the agreement some time in late January. And I did it on a whim. A friend of mine needed to find homes for his kittens and I thought I'd inquire about one. At this point in time, I already had 6 cats of my own, all in their golden ages. I practically run an old folks home for cats =) I haven't had a kitten in years and can hardly remember the days when my own cats were so innocently small and had only concern for frolicking around. My brother, who is a POWWAH ranger in training and not the slightest bit discreet about it, has been driving me up the wall with all that sugar in his system. Fortunately, he takes after me on one thing. The love of animals. He constantly tells me that he hates to see dying or dead animals. But as little boys do, he has a tendency to smother one of my senior cats, Angie. While Angie wouldn't claw his face off out of respect for family (sometimes much to my dismay) she clearly gets agitated and uncomfortable from all his hugging, kissing and squeezing the love out of her. He hasn't quite learnt yet just how gentle you need to be when handling animals. He's unaware of his own strength which would do well for him as a rubber-monster-fighting hero but not as an affectionate friend of a feline. He doesn't mean to cause her silent brain infarcts but he does and I see it in Angie's eyes how she wishes she could just horse-kick him in the nuts. I often times have to rescue her and will be shouting for him to release her which in turns causes me to swell with the urge to cause damage to his self-esteem like good older sisters do. To avoid from having him to pay for therapy in the future from his eventful childhood (also to decrease the chances of me to have to get refills for Crazy Pills), I decided he needed a distraction. Besides I could sense that Angie was about to make a pack with the others to take naked pictures of him while he's asleep and post it around his school. So I decided perhaps its time he got himself a different cat to become his new bff. And what better option than to get him an active kitten.
It should have been a pretty simple thing to do. Find a kitten and give it to him. But the truth is, I would have been the one fully responsible for it and my brother would just be the helper. Instead of taking in a kitten, I ended up agreeing to foster the entire brood. My friend had a female cat who had given birth to 3 unexpected kittens. But being a responsible human being and an animal lover, it wasn't an option for him to throw them away. Unfortunately, he was leaving for school in a couple of months and no one would be around to care for his bunch of kitties. Since he wanted to send them back to the SPCA, I took 10 minutes to blurt out in a text that I would take them all in. After that I just needed to convince my parents. My mom would be ok with it but it was my father that had me fretting somewhat. I was sure he'd rather see me move out. I plucked up the courage to ask him anyway and although he said no, I said I already gave my word and unlike beauty salon slimming plan promotions, I was going to keep my word.
So the day finally came for them to be surrendered over into my care and all went well. When I say "went well", I meant that my father didn't disown me and didn't even say a word about it. I like to think of it as a silent agreement with conditions. The condition being --they better not be here forever or I'm marrying you off to one of my middle aged friends with a flatulence problem. NOTED.
Now I have 10 cats running wild in the house =)
