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The kitties we acquired some months back are maturing nicely.  Sleek and luxurious of coat, they’ve developed the slight paunches of well-fed, castrati lover boys who spend the majority of their time snacking and purring with only brief periods where enough exertion is required to avoid the unregulated attentions of grabby-handed toddlers.

In short, they are very happy with us, and the feeling is more than returned by their human staff members.

They might be the nicest cats who have ever owned me.  Never before have I had feline companions who come to bed with me at night, curl on my head while I fall asleep, then magically reappear the moment I awake in the morning.  ‘Tis true.  They must hear the slight change in breathing when I return from Nod; before I even remove what’s affectionately know around here as my “funny hat” I’m joined in bed by my shiny purring companions.  They don’t even seem particularly interested in campaigning for food.  They’re genuinely glad to see me.

They do have one bad habit.  It seems that after they grow bored of watching over my slumber, they move on to harassing my eldest child.  A number of times she’s dragged her weary self into my room first thing in the morning, complaining that the kitties woke her in the dark of night.

The first time this happened I asked for an explanation.  “They come in, Mommy, and they want to play.  They get in bed with me and bite my hair.  They won’t leave me alone!  They were in my room at 3:15 and then at 4:30!”

I had trouble holding back a guffaw.  “You’ll have to put them out, honey.  And then shut your door.”

She’s now adept at this, but it doesn’t prevent dark circles and a certain degree of lethargy from affecting her the next morning.  She needs her sleep almost as much as do I, and even a brief interruption to herd cats upsets her delicate internal resting mechanism.

I shouldn’t find it amusing, but I do.  I think of all the times that she woke me in the middle of the night as an infant and even long after infancy had passed.  Since she was the first child, I hadn’t the willpower (or the bullshitometer) that developed with subsequent children.  When at eight months, eleven months, or even fifteen months she woke at 2 am, wide-eyed and wanting to cuddle, I indulged her, which gave me the dark circles and lethargy I now see in her.

It’s payback, brought down upon her head by cats.  I love it.

Looking at those circles I wonder how she’ll be with her own first child, or if she’ll even have children.  Will I get to pop by her house some morning twenty years in the future, perky and brisk after a full night’s sleep, hot shower and calm breakfast?  Will I see dark circles under her eyes, unwashed hair, jammies still unchanged from the day before?  Will the sweet smell of breast milk float up from her chest as she wearily passes a black-haired squalling infant to me so that she can shower and nap?

As amusing as feline-inspired dark circles are now, I so hope I get to see the ones caused some twenty years down the road by her offspring.  I promise not to laugh.

Much.