Pest Pets

I'm half joking on the title there. Really, it's not that I don't like animals. As previously mentioned, I've had some pets in the past, and I really loved them. I never minded caring for Uno, The Most Perfect Cat Who Has Ever Lived. I didn't even totally hate cleaning up cat poop, as nasty as poop is.

We were still in the "road trip" phase of life when Uno came along, and we'd regularly toss him in the car, which he positively loved. Okay, he didn't love it. He didn't like it either. Unless he was just doing that cat thing where they pretend to not like something but they actually don't mind it one bit. He'd yowl and freak for a bit, then finally settle down between Doc's neck and the headrest on his seat. Doc secretly loved this. Uno felt secure. We'd traveled the long road to Doc's parents house on a regular basis in such fashion.

But as previously mentioned, I discovered after I was in love with the stinkin' cutehead that I had a cat allergy. So when he died, a little something in me died too. My willingness to put myself in that position again seemed to disappear. Perhaps that was just a normal part of grieving...something I haven't really ever had to do yet. Perhaps with time, I would have gotten to the point where I was willing to take on another furry friend. Uno died about six weeks before we moved from Chicago to Vermont. Perhaps that's the only small blessing...that he didn't have to make a long road trip with his little brother and sister (Bunch N' Gator) in the back seat. That would have been trickier.

No sooner had we gotten settled in Vermont, than this crazy harebrained mom up and became a flight attendant. Suddenly, I had to leave town for work. Making provisions for the kids was enough of a stress on me. The thought of adding a pet to the mix never even crossed my mind as a possibility. Not only would I leave town for work a few days every month, but now that I was a flight attendant, when I wasn't working, I made good use of the fact that Bunch N' Gator were tiny tots still. Since there wasn't any school schedule in our lives yet, we'd up and go whenever the notion hit us. And it hit us all the time. Ahh, the good old days of stand-by flying on JetBlue It was a young company still, so we almost always had empty seats. And I could fly on off days so we never got stuck. There wasn't any stress about stand-by travel back then.

One morning when we were eating breakfast, Bunch said to me, "Mommy, can we go play at JFK today?"

I thought I'd heard her just ask if we could go play at JFK. We lived in Burlington. JFK was in New York City. As in, the airport in New York City.

"Honey, what do you mean?"

"I want us to go play at the airport play area."

She had asked if we could just "go play" in NYC for the day. My five year old. Wants to just jet down to JFK and spend a few hours in the play area in the terminal.

"Honey, we can't just fly down to play at JFK. That's in New York City", I told her, wondering if it was even ethical to use company resources like that. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

"Well it doesn't cost anything, and we could eat snacks on the plane and then fly home this afternoon", she replied.

She's always been a savvy little Bunchkin. Now I realized how our jetsetting life had impacted my kids. They thought nothing of hopping on a plane and going wherever their whims took them. Their attitude about going on planes mirrored how a city kid feels about getting on a bus. In fact, my kids were WAY more excited about going on a bus, which was a novelty, than they were about getting on a big jet.

We didn't go that day, because I had some plans. But we did do it a while later, because, I'm a fun mom, and realized it would be a fun memory. And because I could pick up some papers while we were there. We went despite the fact that the JFK play area was nowhere near as cool as many of the local play areas and parks available to us in our home town. It wasn't anything special. But it was in an airport, and perhaps that fact alone made it exciting. I can't say I don't agree with her.

It was spontaneous moments like these that made me not really interested in having another pet. Eventually I caved in and we got a couple fish, which we named Clementine and Mango. Goldfish are pretty low-maintenance pets. I didn't feel too bad asking friends (who also had fish) to sprinkle in a pinch of food for us when we were out of town on longer trips. It was a little bit of a hassle to get the 2-gallon tank to them, but once it was set up, it wasn't much of an inconvenience.

But I never got to the point where I had it in me to have a dog or cat. Till now. With Doc, Bunch N' Gator all in school every day, and with living in SLC where it's harder to fly stand-by than it is to find someone whose never been in an MLM, we just don't get away that often. I've been on sabbatical for the past 11 months, and so I haven't been going anywhere either. And now the kids are old enough to be the ones responsible for care and feeding.

Nea did the skedaddle right after she got here two nights ago. Though we found lots of kitty prints in the snow and her food was gone in the morning, we hadn't seen her. But last night Doc found her curled up in her little heated box that Mountain Man made for her, so we rewarded her with a nice can of tuna fish, which she dove into with zealous kitty abandon. Doc commented that it sure would be interesting to see where she went. "It'd be cool to strap a little camera on her back. We could set up a website called "Cat Cam" and follow her around."

That would be funny. My kids wish they were allowed to go exploring the way Nea gets to. Between the warm reception she gets from the kids and Doc (and I smile at her and try to let her know it's not personal!), and especially that can of tuna fish, I think it's safe to say she'll return again. And again.