Puddy Tat

See? She's got a little heart shaped patch of grey right on her chest. That's because she's a widdle biddy bundle of cuddles and wuvs. Oh yes she is!

Every breeder is required to assign a name to their kittens to put on the official birth certificate.  The future owner is in no way obliged to use this name.  It's purely a records thing.  Puss, for example, was offically dubbed Lucius Maximus Aurelian.  His breeder, it seems, favored such absurdly inflated Latin names for all of his kittens.  Puss, of course, was just Puss to us, but we did sometimes refer to him affectionately as Pussifus Lucifus when we wanted to pump up his ego after catching a mouse or the occasional butterfly.

This new breeder we're dealing with has a similar sort of pretention.  Apparently, she likes her gossip rags, because she names all of her kittens after celebrities of varying degrees of prestige and notoriety.  The two surviving sisters from her latest litter were summarily named Cindy Crowford and Cheena Easton (a very large [sic] in both instances).  I have no idea whether the misspelling is a deliberate part of the pretention.  Whether it's considered indelicate, or perhaps illegal to name a cat directly after a living, breathing b-lister.  Or whether she simply fucked it up (twice).  But those are the names they were given.

Cindy Crowford is the name of Little Miss Grey-Heart-On-Her-Chest.

I think Cindy is a perfectly daft name for a cat.  And I had every intension of coming up with a better, hipper, altogether more suitable sort of name once she came home to us.  Roxy, for example.  As in Roxy Hart. As in perfect for a cat with a grey heart on her chest.  No?

No.

The breeder has been forwarding pictures to us every week, and every damn picture has the name Cindy attacted to it.  At some point Elder Miss read this name, said it out loud, then asked Boy if he didn't think that Cindy was just the sweetest name ever for a cat with a grey heart on her chest.  Boy swooned, and instantly agreed that yes, actually he did in fact think Cindy was definitely the sweetest name ever for our new cat with the grey heart on her chest.

Fait accompli.

I still think Roxy would be much better but the children keep asking to see pictures of Cindy Lou Who.  And when is Cindy coming home?  And can Cindy sleep in my bed?  No, my bed!  No mine!  And so on and so forth, to the point where I think it's gone rather too far to try to unwind it all now.

Cindy it is, and ever shall be.

Cheena's new owners were smart and requested a name change right away.  Cheena was rechristened Stella, which is a pretty great name, if you ask me, and would have gone splendidly with Roxy.  But I didn't know about the grey heart on the chest until just last week.  How was I supposed to think Roxy Hart before I knew about the grey heart on her chest?

Alas.

I'm going to Rygge in June to pick up both kittens.  By happy coincidence, Stella's new owners live in Bergen too, and have graciously offered to baby-sit Cindy Lou Who Who'd Make a Much Better Roxy while we're in Salt Lake for the summer.

I can't wait to get my hands on her.  It's going to be hard not to be able to bring her home right away, but it really was very nice of these perfect strangers to offer to take care of her all summer.  It just seemed kind of cruel to uproot her from her mother and sister once, only to hand her back to her sister two weeks later, then drag her away once more two months after that.  So we worked it out this way so that she's moved as few times as possible.

That way too, I've got a whole summer to keep trying to slip Roxy in under the kid's radar.

Roxy Roxy Roxy Roxy Roxy