I have Carter, Grant and...Baby Cat.
Who is Baby Cat you ask? Why, he is Grant's feline alter ego. And I consider him one of my children because I spend close to as much time with him as I do with actual Grant.
Now, let me just clear this up right now...when Grant slips into this role he's not simply being "a cat". Baby Cat is a specific cat. It would be like calling Mickey just some mouse. You wouldn't do that. It's Mickey f'ing Mouse. And it's Baby f'ing Cat.
We were first introduced to BC a few months prior to Grants 2nd birthday. He started mewing a lot and we thought "Hey! He knows what a cat says!"
But then he started trying to communicate with us by mewing and then we thought "Hey! There's something wrong with our kid!"
At first when we'd ask him what he was being he'd say "I'm a baby cat!" It was always a baby cat, not a regular cat or a kitten. Eventually he dropped the "a" and he just became Baby Cat, the persona.
We thought it was funny. We thought it was cute. We thought he would outgrow it...
Then suddenly he was three and guess who's still around? Baby mutha f'ing Cat.
Every morning we would wonder who Grant was going to wake up as that day. He's a sleeper-inner so I'd go in to wake his ass up and he'd just open his eyes, stare at me for a minute and then either yell at me for waking him up or...calmly mew at me. Turns out Baby Cat is a way better morning person.
So there we were acting like a completely normal family when secretly we had a cat son.
We managed to get through Grant's first year of preschool with no public displays of Baby Cat. But everything changed this past November during his school's annual pot luck dinner....
Every class had come up with an art project that the school was auctioning off as a fundraiser. One class made a cookie jar with their names written on it, and so on and so forth. Grant's class did a big frame with pictures of the kids holding signs with what they wanted to be when then grew up written on it.
So amid all the cute "princess" and "fireman" answers I found this:
Oh what the hell!
For almost two years we had managed to keep Baby Cat internal. Now here he was totally outing us. Oh wait...don't forget the best part: those project were auctioned off. So some other parent in his class now has this picture in their possession. I should have bid my life savings just to get my hands on the evidence that I'm raising a cat.
A few weeks later I walked into the school to pick him up and noticed his class had hung up some art work outside the room. The kids had squished white paint on a pice of paper and called it spilt milk. Then they had to say what their spilt milk looked like...
Giant. Baby. Cat. Of course. Why would it NOT look like that?
So we're now going on two full years of Baby Cat with no end in sight. I would understand this more if he had a lot of exposure to cats. We have dogs. And I'm not even sure he had yet to meet an actual cat when all this nonsense started.
Some day I'm going to be having a conversation with someone and it'll slip out...
"My son thinks he's a Baby Cat."
"Aw! That's adorable. How old is he?"
"Seventeen."
In recent months the cat obsession has moved from him simply BEING a cat to him being an advocate for all cats.
Grant was watching Muppet Christmas Carol with my brother in law and there's one scene where Rizzo the Rat slams a door and a cat runs into it...which presumably hurts the cat. My brother in law laughed. Grant immediately gave him a dirty look and very seriously said "That's not funny. I love cats." He then sat there for a few minutes, arms crossed, mumbling under his breath "That's not funny...cause I love cats. That's not funny..."
Mother of God!
At what point do I check him into cat lovers rehab?
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