Monday, February 14, 2011

Happy Gotcha Day, Cupid

Eleven years ago today, we adopted Cupid from a local shelter. But, Cupid wasn't the cat we were supposed to adopt.

We had put in an adoption application for a different cat, but for reason's I can't remember that cat had a 3 day hold on it. So, we made sure we went to visit our soon to be cat everyday until we could bring her home. The first day we visited our potential kitty, the cat did nothing but hiss at us. This was odd because the day before the cat was perfectly nice to us. We chalked it up as a fluke and told her we would come back to visit the next day, which just happened to be Valentine's Day.

We returned the next day as promised and again the "almost ours" kitty had no love for us. She hissed and wanted nothing to do with us. We were starting to take it personally now and having doubts about adopting a kitty that clearly did not like us.

Dejected, we took a quick trip around the cat room and that is when we saw a cat rubbing up against the door of her crate. We stopped to say hello and a shelter volunteer quickly came over and asked if we wanted to hold the cat. We said yes, and Vanilla, which was the cat's pound given name, was quickly in our arms. She wasted no time flipping herself on her back and showing us her white belly.

For about 20 minutes the cat laid flat on her back, purring and kneading and drooling. Yes, drooling. Needless to say we were smitten.

The volunteer explained to us that Vanilla came to the shelter earlier that morning. A young couple brought her and her much older sister to the shelter because they just had a baby and Vanilla would not stay out of the baby's crib. The older cat that Vanilla came in with was not doing so well adjusting to her new surroundings, so the shelter staff called the young family and they returned to pick her up and bring her back home. After all, the older cat was not causing trouble with their baby. They wanted to be able to bring Vanilla back home, but they had to put their baby first.

We explained to the shelter staff, that we had an adoption application pending on a different cat that had done nothing but hiss at us since we signed our intent to adopt papers. The volunteer asked which cat and took a quick look at her files. She explained that the cat we had an adoption application on also had two backup adoption applications. So, if we chose not to adopt her, two other families were waiting in the wings.

We looked at each other, and within minutes we were filling out an adoption application for Vanilla.

As lovable as she is and given the fact that we adopted her on Valentine's Day we thought it was only proper to rename Vanilla to Cupid. After all, she used her charms to get herself sprung from the pound in less than 10 hours.