You’d think with all the couch time, I’d pick up my handy-dandy laptop and check-in here once in awhile. If I’m not even loyal, how do I expect you to be? I mean, I have more “spare time” now that formal schooltime is out, dinner is baked potatoes and overpriced salad-in-a-bag, and Mr. Rogers entertains the kids instead of me.

If you want clean clothes, you have to find them in the pile in the hallway.

So, you’d think I’d have enough sense not to accept a kitten-sitting-that-might-turn-into-permanet-keeping-kitten position. I hate cats. They’re snobs, and I didn’t like cheerleaders in high school. But I’ve grown. And maybe I’m just trying to prove my maturity. Or maybe I’m just insane. Or maybe I’m trying to pacify the kids with a lower maintenance animal that doesn’t require daily walks, obedience school, and a sitter when you go out of town.

I’ve always got an angle, and I’m too honest to deny that I choose anything without weighing what’s in it for me. Or if you want to say it another way, Jonathan Edwards claimed that we always choose to do that thing that we most want to do. I wouldn’t have accepted the cat if I didn’t want to. Even if I wanted to.

But I wanted to and I did. So, why did I do it? Because now the kids have another thing to chase instead of each other. Because I felt bad about killing Speedy, the Beta fish, that my son bought with his own money. Because hamsters stink and when I was a kid, my hamster ate all her babies and got loose in the walls. Because watching my son put the cat in a Tupperware bowl attached to the back of his remote-control car makes the time here on the couch go by a lot faster.

And the kids really like her. I even saw my husband petting her on his lap the other day. But he left town right after that, so I don’t know what that means.

I’ll fork out the bucks for cat food if it makes the nausea time any more bearable. But when I get better, she better have learned to fetch my shoes by then. Either that, or she needs to enjoy the racecar ride a little longer before jumping out.