Our first pet

    I am an animal lover, but not a pet lover. I like cats and dogs and animals in general, but on a farm, where they can run freely and do things they were meant to do. The idea of keeping an animal in a house for the sole enjoyment of an adult (or worse, to teach a kid responsibility) just seems silly to me. Also, I am not a big fun of cleaning fur/hair/urine smell on a daily basis without any hope of a remedy (except of course the cruel hope of animal death). It is universally accepted in our household that we will not have house pets. If at any point we'll own a house with a garden, we might have a small dog/cat that will live outside (or in a shed in the winter days). But most probably not.

  That being said, this morning I realized Catalina has a pet. Few days back I took inside the house a small rose in a pot. The plant had beautiful flowers for a while, and then, little by little it lost all of its leaves. I suspected some sort of disease, or pesticides from the lawn, or some nasty mosquitoes. So I brought the plant inside with 3-4 remaining leaves. Last night, right before we went to sleep Catalina showed me a small, disgusting worm that was crawling on the plant. Catalina thought it's the cutest little worm, she named it Tiny and talked about it quite a bit. It was late, I was tired and I did not want to think about a creepy creature in my kitchen. So I did the best and most expected thing: I ignored the worm and went to sleep. This morning, Catalina jumped out of the bed and ran to the kitchen to see what the worm is doing. She was so excited to see Tiny! And what do you know, Tiny was still on my plant, but the last leaves were not. Darn little hungry caterpillar! Pretty angry at our newly acquired pet I took a paper towel and tried to "send it to a beautiful farm". This did not go well with Catalina who started to wail that she loves Tiny. What to do...right?
   So, I did what every girl does when she's in trouble. I called mommy. Meaning that we called bunica Milica, had a nice chat on skype so Catalina can show off her beautiful pet. We then talked about what Tiny will eat and we explained to Catalina that we need to give Tiny more leaves. Catalina wanted to bring more leaves from the tree in front of our house. But mommy had a better idea: how about we put Tiny on a leaf and then he can eat as many leaves as s/he wants. Catalina agreed happily. Mommy was happy too.

This ended the first pet episode in our household. Now, I'm hoping for some new leaves to grow on my once beautiful plant :)