Furry Friends

Mommy was cleaning in the kitchen tonight when Daddy called for her to come quick in the living room. She was able to snap this picture before the cats moved. This is so rare for them to both get up on the chair, especially near one of the kids. But Wesley loves them - he gets all smiley when they are around and he will crawl across the floor to try and get near them and pet them.

That's Joe on the left (dark) and Mary on the right (light).

Our furry friends have been part of our lives since before the boys joined our house. We got Mary just two weeks after we moved to Fort Myers in June 2001. We had to put down Daryl's cat Bubba a few months before leaving Kentucky and we wanted another pet. Mary (already named) was a year old when we got her from the humane society during one of their pet drives at PetSmart. She's a Lynx Point Siamese and a definite lady. While Miss Mary loves to be petted, she hates being held and she hardly ever meows. She especially enjoys rubbing on people's feet and loves to curl up next to you and give you a bath. But her favorite talent is playing the piano in the middle of the night and scaring us all to death - if we forget and leave the cover off the keyboard, she will walk up and down the keys!

It didn't take us long to figure out that Mary needed some company. Whenever we would go away, she would refuse to eat. We found Joseph in November of 2002 at a craft fair in Sarasota. We had gone to see Grandmommy and Aunt Diane's ceramics on display and a little girl was wandering around trying to give away a litter of kittens. Mommy fell for the runt of the litter, who fit inside the palm of her hand. What do you name a little boy kitten when you're a preacher and have a cat named Mary? Of course, you name him Joseph (we usually call him Joe or Joe Bear). He was deceptively quiet at the craft fair, but after we loaded him in the car for home, he meowed at the top of his lungs the whole hour drive. He is still our vocal boy, wandering around at all hours meowing at the top of his lungs, and he craves the attention of being petted and held. However Joseph is also a big chicken. He's very scared of visitors to our house (hides under the bed) and he's been terrified of Parker since he started to crawl and move around. Joe spends much of the day trying hard to stay away from the munchkins. But Joe performed an act of heroism a couple of weeks ago by catching a wasp in the house and now Parker talks about him like he's some kind of super-hero - "and then he jumped up way high in the air against the sliding glass door and BOOM he caught the big bug that was trying to get us!"

So that's our furry friends, the other cast members in our crazy life!