It's like Campbell's---Mmm, mmm, good

So, yesterday was a typical lazy Sunday. Everyone slept in, ate breakfast late, kinda lazed around all day. It was unusually quiet until I heard a blood curdling scream by my son, followed by "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god". Now anyone who has kids can attest to the fact that probably 95% of the time, it's never an actual emergency when they say it is, so I took my time getting to the kitchen where the noise was coming from. As I'm walking there, I hear my son say the word "mouse" followed by the words "it doesn't have a face" while he's gagging...and I start to panic. The dining room lights were off and the curtain in the kitchen was closed, so the only light getting to that area was coming from the living room. In the semi-darkness I see what appears to be a mutilated, not "mouse" but rather a RAT. But not just any rat....the biggest, freakin' rat I've ever seen, sans head and bloodied, with whatever is in the neck showing. Remember how I said it wasn't an actual emergency? Well now it is. Because I don't do dead animals.....especially not headless dead animals. I leave the lights off 'cause I don't care to see what it really looks like in its full glory and I immediately start to wonder what to do. In the span of a few seconds, I wonder how it got in, decide it must have been brought in by the cat that had come in through an open window not too long before that, figure that it is that time of year and we do live near a huge open field so it's not too surprising that mice and rats could be out there, wonder why the hell the cat had to bring it in here, and start to run through a list of people that I could call to come pick it up for me because there's no way in hell I'm about to do it. Yes, I'm a chicken. I grab a plastic bag to cover it because I don't want to look at it and I shoo the cat away who is still trying to get to it. As I'm covering it, while I'm still trying to figure out what to do (I was really trying to psych myself into picking it up) my eyes wander to it again and I think "damn, that is really the biggest rat I've ever seen". So I cover it and I start to gauge which one of my children is most likely to be bribed at that moment and I start running through things in my head that I can bribe them with to pick it up. Eventually I ask my son if he'll pick it up and take it out for $5. He says yes----SCORE! Personally if I were him, I wouldn't have done it for less than $10, but I'm not complaining. He picks it up, takes it outside, thus ends the excitement for the day............or so I think.

Later on in the evening, things are quiet, clothes are being washed and dried because Sunday is laundry day, everyone's fed and happy, life is good. I start to walk out to the kitchen and almost trip over the cat. Remember the cat I wrote about a few weeks ago? The one who put her kittens in my couch? Yeah, that one. Cat looks up at me and licks her lips and I realize she's eating something. I move her out of the way thinking maybe she pulled something out of the trash, but to my horror I realize it's nothing from the trash and what's worse is that it's not a mouse or a rat, because at this point a mouse or a rat would be a welcome sight. There, right in front of me, is a dead white kitten with a hole in its neck. The cat was eating her own kitten. I try to shoo her away and she starts to growl at me but eventually I just pick her up and throw her outside and ponder how I'm going to get this thing out because that's even worse than the rat and if I wouldn't pick up the rat, I sure as hell am not picking up a dead kitten. I ask my son again because I'm that big of a chicken (and probably at this point a bad mom...lol) and he takes care of it. Thank god. Then my mind wanders back to earlier in the day and the phrase "that is the biggest rat I've ever seen" enters my mind........and I realize that probably wasn't a rat. I check on where she's been keeping her kittens and my fears were confirmed......it was another one of her kittens . She only had one left at this point and I will just confirm that, yes, that one is a goner too. I found her munching on it earlier this afternoon after she looked up at me, licked her lips and gave me this look, as if to say "what's your problem?" when I started yelling at her about how gross she is. Well, that's the end of the cats she originally brought in a few weeks back, so I guess I don't have to worry about taking them to pound. I suppose I should thank her for making my job easier but I would have preferred a less disgusting way.

That was her first litter and I've only seen that happen one other time years ago, with another cat who had her first litter. The vet told me that sometimes there is something wrong with the babies, the mom knows it and kills them. Sometimes the babies die on their own and the moms eat them because in the wild they get nutrition back that they lost during childbirth. And sometimes their instinct to chase small, furry things doesn't shut off, so they treat them like they're mice and kill them. Either way, it's disgusting and that cat is NEVER coming in my house again. She can stay outside to kill and mutilate whatever the hell she wants....but outside, so I can stop losing $5 to my son.