Now That's Self-Control

I would like for all of you to meet our fiesty cat, Maddie....

Now before I reveal to you the other pictures on this post, I would like to give you a little bit of her history. In September of 2007, the kids and I made a weekend trip to Grangeville to visit my family...no big deal, we do that often. One of those days, we needed to tend to my Grandmother's cows. Since I was 7 months pregnant and had the two young kids with me, we mostly just tagged along and watched everyone else round them up. At my Grandmother's barn, there are quite literally hundreds of barn cats. She feeds and waters them but for the most part, they are all completely wild. She had told us that in August one of the cats had kittens and we decided to show them to the kids. We completely expected them all to run away, which, they all did except for one (you see where I'm going with this)?? Well anyway, Grandma told us that little "Maddie" (she wasn't named yet) was abandoned by her Mom, thus resulting in us leaving from Grangeville with a tiny kitten. On her first visit to the vet, they determined she was around 4 weeks old and she weighed a-not-so-astonishingly 9 oz!!! We fed her well and now, as you can see from above, she's HUGE...without ever having to lift a paw!!

So to get me to the point of this story. The other day I tried to sneak some pictures of Jeylin kicking around the football in the back yard but when I went to the window, I could see him crouched down talking to Maddie. After careful observation, I realized he was giving her directions for getting this....

That's right, we had a mouse in our back yard and our crazy cat, didn't have the slightest idea what in the world to do with it. Somehow, it was either injured or sick because it just wasn't acting normally and walked around in circles a lot. At one point, Maddie got bored, walked away and laid down in the grass. After a little struggle (our grass was really long), the little mouse made it's way over to Maddie and oddly enough, started climbing on her. She jumped and ran away...it was the most hilarious thing EVER!!! My thinking is that the mouse was either blind or he really did have a death wish...of course then again, he might just know that Maddie was raised as an indoor cat. However, who would have thought that my chubby, crazy cat could have this much self control????

P.S. For anyone who cares, the mouse did die but not by the hands, or rather claws, of our Maddie. Good thing because I really think the thing was sick...hey, maybe he was on a "suicide mission"?!?!?!?!