Simple Joy

Oreo and Noodles

Any of you who have either followed me on this blog or on Facebook know two things about my life:

1. My husband suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm a year ago and the entire family is still trying to find their footing after that.

2. We got new kittens a couple weeks ago.

The cat my husband had when we were married died just this summer.  She was old and sick.  It was her time.  We loved her, but after all the vomiting on carpets and scratching up furniture and night time meowing, we decided No More Pets.

Um. Yeah. That lasted two months.
The house was clean. Finally.

But it felt empty.

And now we have these two crazy, crazy kittens tearing around the apartment, ruining the curtains and chewing through the cords on all our headphones.  These crazy, crazy kittens who attack the drawstring on my pajama pants and the shoestrings on my husband’s work shoes.  Crazy kittens who make my daughters laugh out loud and put away the iPad to dangle string in front of these furry guys. Kittens who, through being nothing but themselves, have managed to make us all feel like a family again.

Simple joy has been returned to this household.  We all have something to look forward to when we come back from being away.  We all have something to talk about at the dinner table.  We all have the same thing to complain about at 1 a.m. when our felines fancy an all-out-knockdown brawl.

Life’s not perfect. (Is it ever?)  And yeah, I’m not too thrilled about the curtains.  But I find myself smiling twice as often as I did before.  That alone makes it all worth it.  I like myself a lot more when I’m smiling.

My family likes me more, too.

The kittens? I think they’d be smiling if they could.  They purr, anyways.
And we love to hear it.