Sunday, July 12, 2009

A new foster cat





Here's a picture of me at our campsite, a picture of a mug that I had made for Beth, and our new foster cat, Mrs. Park. Let me start with camping on Friday. I wasn't really thrilled about going, but we were all geared up to go so I went along. Once we got there, my mood lifted and the boys had a good time running around and finding sticks for us to burn. My hubby and I are not good firestarters so we did have to borrow some lighter fluid from the neighboring campers. It helped so we had a big enough fire for hot dogs and s'mores. It was a really neat camp area at Stone State Park here in Sioux City. The sites are small, so at least there were several vacant so we could change the one we reserved. The nice ones who lent us the fluid ended up being a little foul mouthed. I don't think the boys really noticed the language, and I know I'm not the perfect example, but I certainly do not talk like that in front of my kids (or in general). They did have a child there so it was completely inappropriate in my opinion.
After we all had enough of firefly catching and s'more eating, we decided to get to bed. My wonderful hubby cleaned up our site and helped the boys brush their teeth and herded us to the bathrooms (the more modern and less smelly ones) a little walk away. It was a very pretty evening but we wish it wouldn't have been cloudy so we could have watched the stars. At about 11pm, I heard a cat rowling a ways away. I thought I was at home! It stopped but just a bit later, I heard the cat right next to our tent. I got her attention, snuck out of the tent, found our last hot dog, and fed it to her. She was hungry. And very friendly. Darn. I had a few thoughts running through my head....I could take her home, but I didn't know if she would make a huge mess or if I could even get out of the park. I knew it closed at 10:30 so didn't know if the gates closed. Then I could just let her stay out and hopefully find her in the morning. BUT I thought she would follow me and keep us up anyway with her meowing or me thinking about her. What to do, what to do.....
I took her home at 11:15 that night and returned at midnight. No gate issues and she was hungry. I set her up in our basement where she had plenty of soft places to sleep and plenty of food and water to have. Tyler named her Mrs. Park for obvious reasons. She is shy but when I call her, she comes and just can't get enough petting. She also gorged herself with food. She seems to be doing fine and I will take her to the vet this week to get her leukemia tested and find out if we can get her spayed right away.
I thought Beth was going to kill me when I told her, especially since she had just said that they can't take in more cats...the hotel is closed. She called yesterday to share the absolutely wonderful news of getting a nice grant to fund our first spay/neuter clinic. This will change the lives of the animals in Siouxland and hopefully make a huge impact on the number of cats euthanized. I hope anyway. After she told me the news of the grant, I told her of our "find" at the park while we were camping. Of course it was ok since we both know that we can't say "no" when a cute furry face is meowing in ours.
We have a lot of work ahead of us, so we will forge ahead and get started this week. What a wonderful way to spend time.....making a difference.
Stay tuned as I have some more things to post about Animal Control.....

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