For years – decades probably – we’ve seen pictures of cute little kitties playing with cute little balls of string and yarn. The cute little kitties are happy. The viewer of these pictures could probably hear them purring and mewing in their mind’s ear. But the reality is that yarn and string are BAD for kitties. My sister paid somewhere around $500 to have an undigested ball of yarn surgically removed from her cute little kitty’s tummy. Schmoo recovered – but the bank account was limping a little for a while. And still, these images purrrsist. (oh, that was a bad one)

So, I have two new cute little kitties. Cheddar is orange and white and Smudge is black and white with a black smudge on her nose. Clever names, right?? They are typical cute kitties… running around after each other, tumbling off the furniture. General cuteness abounds at our house. We also have a cute new puppy, Monkey. He’s a typical cute puppy… playing with balls, running around in circles with his ears flapping behind him (he’s half and half Basset and Beagle). He also chews on EVERYTHING. When I say everything, I don’t mean everything small and on the floor. I do mean those things, but I also mean furniture, boxes full of stuff on the sunporch (the boxes, not the stuff), wads of grass on the curb, my son…

But a chewing crisis occurred last week when Monkey chewed the hell out of a $3.50 pair of neon green flipflops from Old Navy. We thought it was no big deal. No one wanted to wear them anymore (I mean, they’re NEON green) and they were last year’s model. And for crissake – they’re $3.50 a pair! So, they became a dog toy. That’s when we found out that A) kittens like to chew things too; and B) flipflops and kittens don’t mix.

Like the yarn story of my sister, this one also cost in the neighborhood of $500 to tell. You wouldn’t think a kitten could SWALLOW a piece of flipflop like this, but he did. Twice. Two little pieces of neon green rubber were found in his intestines that are each roughly the size of a nickel. It’s a wonder Cheddar didn’t suffocate trying to eat them.

So, our house is getting a good cleaning and the kids have been instructed to pick up any little piece of anything off the floor that could become surgically removable material. If only I could figure out how to make it the flipflop manufacturer’s fault and get some compensation… Too bad he wasn’t burned by hot coffee, I guess.