A Cute Little Story, Unless You Hate Children and Puppies and Kittens

My almost-3-year-old niece has become obsessed with the fact that I have a kitty cat. I think part of it is she's coming to realize that she's never even seen where Aunt Carli lives, and she's a little curious.

My cat hates children. Or at least he hates the one child he's ever met: my other niece, who is now five. She met him a few times, and he hissed at her every time. The only other people he's ever hissed at are me, when I've accidentally stepped on a toe or something, and his water dish, which isn't so much a person as it is, well, a water dish. So J. Bear, as I affectionately call her, will have to settle for pictures and stories and perhaps, later this week, videos. (I ordered a Flip!)

Anyway, on Passover, my sister came downstairs and said, "Your niece is upstairs looking for Wendell." That's a little cute, because we were at my parents' house, which is not where I live and a place where Wendell is no longer welcome. (Your sister's allergic, he scratches the furniture, he climbs a tree and scrapes her knee, her dress has got a tear. How DO you solve a problem like Maria?)

This past weekend, confusion set in. J. Bear had just spend time with her cousins' two dogs. We were at my parents' house, getting ready to go to another cousin's birthday party (popular kid). She picked up the picture of Wendell my parents keep in the family room, pointed at him, and said, "This your doggie?"

It was so cute I wanted to bottle it and sell it at Toys R Us. It was way cuter than what she said ten minutes later, which was to just look at me and say, "bleeding." And she wasn't bleeding. It was a little creepy, like that "Redrum" scene in The Shining. But then she pointed to a Jasmine (From Aladdin) Band-Aid, adding some much needed context.

Anyway, I tried to set the kid straight. "No, J. Bear. That's a kitty cat. Kitty cats and doggies look alike, but they're different animals."

Now, my cousins have 4 cats. Three of them are kittens, about a year old, and one of them is 18 and has one eye sewn shut so she looks like a pirate and, well, God bless her, she may be at the end of her days. But this isn't a post about Oscar and her failing kidneys.

So what does J. Bear do at this party when she isn't stuffing her face with M&Ms or begging for another ride on the swings or snagging a spot right next to the birthday boy and his cake? She's walking around looking for, and playing with, the cats. . . Only now, she's started using the words "doggie" and "kitty" interchangeably. Half the time she wants to know where the kitties are; half the time she's looking for the doggies. And she was eating a hot dog and ran off to play, stopping to tell my mother, "Don't let the kitty eat my hot dog." Or maybe she said it the other way around, but "hot kitty" sounds like something dirty.

I guess I should mention that when I was younger (okay, like, 15 to 27), I got a kick out of calling just about every animal in the world a puppy. I think my niece is a lot cuter when she does it.