confessions of a cat parent.

I'm a cat parent, not a cat owner or a cat master. Call me the crazy cat lady if you want, but the two grey tabby cats that run around my house with bells around their necks are more my daughters than my animals. They love to play with grocery bags, bottle caps, moths that are flying by on my balcony, and any other fragment of trash that may be lying around. As much as they love these things, I constantly feel like a dead-beat Mom whenever my friends visit and notice my cats playing with garbage. So I've been trying to spruce up their toy collection. I bought some fuzzy balls with catnip in it - they stared at them at first and sauntered away with the look of disappointment painted from whisker to whisker. They turned their pink noses up at the multicolored assortment of jingle bells I toss for them to chase after. Now, let me remind you, these items are MADE for cats. But my girls won't have a thing to do with it. Inspired by their love for the crinkly noise that grocery bags make when they play with them, I recently added a new toy to their collection - one I was just sure they would love immediately. It's called a crinkle bag. For all you non-feline folks out there, this is a cloth bag (in my case, cheetah printed) that has an open end for cats to crawl into. The best part - the material inside the cloth makes a crinkly noise whenever it's touched AND it's infused with catnip, so it's supposed to attract them in. It was around $20, which is more than I care to spend on a fuzzy bag but I just knew that when I got it home they would both chase each other to it and fight over who got to lay inside of it first. Cecelia just thought it was wierd. The hair on her back stood up when she heard the crinkling noise. Needless to say, she wasn't standing in line to use it. I somewhat conned Phoebe in at first, but I think my overexcitement and high expectations for her to fall in love with it freaked her out. Well, it probably didn't help that after several minutes I was literally PUSHING her into it. So, long story short, the crinkle bag was an investment that now sits in the box of the other neglected toys. And the cats are still waiting for me to go grocery shopping so they have some fresh bags to play with. Lucky for them, I got new textbooks from Amazon.com just the other day... they've been fighting over the box ever since.