Then I had a child.

Now, I’m counting the days till my cats run away or drop dead.

Yeah, I know, I’m a horrible person. But I swear these cats are trying to push me over the edge.

I used to LOVE cats! Really, I did. What’s not to like? They keep to themselves, you don’t have to walk them, and if you train them right, they’ll give you neck rubs.

But, and I didn’t see this before I had a child, they are freaking disgusting. And annoying.

Here are some random bullet points on my cats (because I know you really want to read them)

• Their poop smells like the poop of the dead. I don’t know what companies put into the cat food I buy, but I wouldn’t rule out rotting corpses.
• The only time they seem to crap is when we are about to eat a meal.
• After said craps, they fling themselves across the house at the speed of light, banging into walls and knocking things over.
• Speaking of crap, how much feces do they track around the house on their paws? The OCD freak in me gasps at the thought of my son playing in feces.
• They are schizoid. Seriously, they can be all balled up on the couch lovin’ on one another one second, then engaged in a Last Cat Standing Death Match the next minute, scaring my son.
• They puke ALL THE TIME. It seems like every other morning, I wake up and step into a fresh new pile, which you can’t really see because it’s about the same color as our carpet. (note to self: never buy Cat Puke Brown Carpet again.)
• They’re VERY stupid cats. Captain Bologna Butt (so nicknamed for the way he smells sometimes when he doesn’t clean himself correctly) gets into fights with his shadow. And Sweetie (the nice, but neurotic cat) stares at nothing for HOURS on end.
• They sometimes, for no apparent reason other than to tick me off, like to poop on the floor.

This last thing is crossing the line. I do not want my son playing on the floor where cat feces was.

They are guests in my home. Rude guests, at that.

Polite house guests DO NOT POOP ON THE FLOOR!

This is about the time I should mention that my two year old son, E tends to pick things up off the floor all the time. He’s like a human vacuum cleaner, picking up Cheerios, raisins and God knows what else he finds scattered in various places.

I think you can see where this is going…

At any rate, I was sitting on the couch the other day when E walked up to me holding out his hand.

“Poop!” he said as he walked towards me. “Poop, meow.”

So for the record: E KNOWS the poop shouldn’t be on the floor, and it’s yucky. Yet, he doesn’t know that he shouldn’t pick up the poop?

“EEEEWWWW Gross!” I said as I snatched him up and rushed him across the house to wash his hands and dispose of the poop. As we passed one of the cats, E said, “poop, meow” and pointed at her.

Anybody want two cats?

I won’t bring them to the pound, because I know they nobody in their right mind would ever adopt them. And while I’d sometimes like to strangle them both with their tails, I don’t actually want them to die.

However, I am not going to help them live longer lives. Let’s just say we’re gonna leave it up to God’s will.

And no more of that pricey cat food that promises to prolong a cat’s life. Hell, if I can find a food that say’s it will shave a few years off, I’m buying it!

And if one of the cats happens to get sick and it costs more than $25 to fix them, it’s bye-bye time for that cat.

Believe me, I love animals. I spent close to $2,500 trying to save a guinea pig!

And if you want to comment or email me and tell me how awful I am and how it’s not the cats’ faults that I went and had a child, or I need to take my cats to a Cat Therapist etc… I’ll ask you to instead send your thoughts in a letter to my P.O. Box. Make sure you include your return address.

I have something I’d like to send you.

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My wife snapped this awesome picture of our son (who I will refer to as ‘E’ from now on to protect him from future embarrassment my posts may bring) after he finished dinner the other night. And while the pic looks similar to an image of Calvin dining on something gross his mother made, bad food was not the cause of this expression. Earlier in the day, while I was watching E, he’d been absentmindedly sticking his tongue out. It was the cutest thing. So I told my wife what she missed and she tried to get a repeat performance. This was his attempt. My wife laughed no less than ten minutes straight as she kept looking at the digital display on the camera over and over.

So, I decided to use Parenting magazine’s cover maker and turned her photo into this:

In case you are wondering about that bottom headline, that is where the gross story comes in.

The Grossest thing you will read today

We usually keep our son in the living room via a series of baby gates and fences. This protects him from the kitchen, laundry room and the other less baby-friendly areas of the house. Sometimes however, and by sometimes I mean always, my son whines because he hates to be separated from us. So sometimes we let him follow us beyond the gate while we do chores.

One day, my wife was cleaning something in the kitchen when she looked up and saw that E was about to take a chomp out of something in his hand. She couldn’t tell it was. At first she thought it might be cheerios which he frequently throws across the room (or hides in various spots) for later munching. However, she wanted to be sure he didn’t find a quarter or some other choking hazard. Suddenly, she realized how close he was to the litter box.

I should probably mention here that my wife is so germphobic that she has nightmares of our son getting a hold of cat poop and eating it. And as she points out, cat feces has deadly bacteria which can be deadly to a child if they eat it. However, and I know this from past experience, dogs can apparently fish cat poop from the litterbox and munch on it all damned day with no ill effects whatsoever.

Panic raced through my wife as she shot across the room, with all the adrenaline of a mother rushing to lift a car off her child, grabbing wildly for his hand as it arced upwards and… into his mouth.

I’m fairly certain that her scream is still racing through space into distant galaxies, where a civilization several thousands of light years away will someday hear it, trace it back to Earth, and call off all plans for contact, fearing that we are a barbarian lot.

Luckily, she got to his hand before he snacked on the crunchy treat. She smacked his hand, sending the poo skidding across the floor. She then gathered E up and rushed him to the sink, where she scrubbed his hands over and over and over and over and over with god knows how many different cleaning agents.

So, what’s the grossest thing your child has ever done, or almost done?