Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Strange Animal tales

My cat's name is Vladimir. He's named after Vlad Tepes the man who inspired Bram Stokers character of Dracula. I named him after Dracula because he's black and as a kitten he was bloodthirsty (he used to tear my hands up and he made this hilariously cute little angry face). He's known as Vladi for short but mostly I call him bunny because I enjoy the juxtaposition.

When I got pregnant I was a little worried about how all our pets would react to the new baby. I assumed Gambit would ignore her since that's how he treats everyone, and that's just how he's behaved. Sammy I figured would love her and try to be the second mommy and again I was correct. Vladi I thought would take a page from Gambit's book and ignore her since cat's aren't usually big fans of small children but here I was wrong.

Vladi has been curling up with her on our laps since we brought her home. At first I thought he was just demanding attention but now I'm not so sure. She used to cry like she was being tortured every time we had her on the changing table and Vladi would run over stand up on his back paws put the front ones as close to her as he could get and meaow in anguish with her. We've just started sleep training with her and last night when she woke back up and started crying we were waiting a few minutes to see if she was able to put herself back to sleep but Vladi was having none of that. He ran to her room and started voicing his sympathy and then when we didn't come fast enough he started coming down the hall toward the living room to get my attention. It was as if he was saying, "The baby's crying! Can't you hear the baby? She's crying, the baby that is! Come and help the baby!". As soon as he knew I saw him he darted back in her direction and then turned around to make sure I was following. I picked her up and rocked with her as the cat stood in the doorway and supervised until he was sure I wasn't going to abandon his sister again then he returned to the living room to sit on Dave.

Who'd have thought that little bloodsucker would turn out to be such a softy?

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