T13 #3 - Baby Praline Memory Lane

I bet you are on Baby Praline overload this week. Mom has just been obsessed with transferring my baby pictures to digital format so she won't lose them (Now I just need to remind her to back up her hard drive!). For today's T13, we will share picture from my first month with Mom back in 1995. Tomorrow, we will complete the Baby Praline picture week with a then and now shot of Mom and me.



1. Playing with my two favorite toys as a kitten: a shoe string and a stick with feathers and string. I wonder where these went.

2. Helping Mom with the filing. She tends to be a Type A personality (how does she ever live with a cat?) and likes to keep things in order. Unfortunately, her filing is a lot larger now.

3. Snow! We live in South Carolina, so we rarely see snow. My first three years with Mom, we lived in Clemson, SC, which is in the western corner of SC and borders SC, NC, and GA. We actually had snow my first winter with Mom! She took me outside, but I quickly ran back inside because it was too cold and wet!

4. Eating! I tended to be a messy eater! Just look at all of that food on the floor. Mom says I am still a little messy. I like to call it picky. Every cat knows that each piece of food tastes a little different.

5. Talking to Mom. I am half Himmie and everyone knows that Himmies have some Meezer in them, so it is only natural that we like to talk. I developed a very special vocabulary for my Mom in my early years. She knows which meows mean, "MOM", "I'm hungry", "I'm scared", "Hello", etc.

6. Visiting my human grandparents. While Mom was in graduate school at Clemson, she rented out her house in Columbia, SC, so we had to stay with her parents when she would go home for the weekend. I traveled almost every weekend with my mom until I had surgery to get "fixed" at about 6 months of age and then I started staying home. About the only time I get in the car now is to go to the V.E.T. I don't really like to travel now.

7. Playing with balls! My human grandparents bought me this neat toy that was round and had a ball inside of it. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get that ball out! I think my Mom eventually stepped on it and broke it (is was an accident, of course!).

8. Visiting my human aunt and cousins. I enjoyed exploring my mom's sister's house when we went on our first trip. She had hard-wood floors all over the place. It was so much fun to take off running and then try to stop and slide completely across the room.

9. Kissing my Mom! This is one of the reasons my Mom fell in love with me. I actually kissed her in the pet store. My favorite place to kiss her in on her chin. Even though I am a little heavier now, she still picks me up the same way and I welcome her home every day with a kiss on her chin! (Hey Mom, that sure is a weird hairstyle!)

10. Big eyes! My human nephews called me Gizmo (from Gremlins), my human grandmother calls me the Owl Cat, and my Mom calls me Baby Girl. One of the problems Persians have is with their tear ducts, so we tend to have these dark splotches under my eyes. Mom is doing a lot better with keeping me clean now, but this is one of those "bad days" of eye stains.

11. First Christmas present. This was my first stuffed animal that was actually given to me. My mom's grandmother picked it out for me and it was my favorite gift for a long time. Ma Ma Gregg went to the Human Bridge two weeks before Christmas, so this toy was very special to both Mom and me.

12. Me and My String. I could never get enough of that silly shoe string! I think I took it wherever I went. Hey Mom, don't you think you should clean up a little bit?

13. Living the College Life. Even though mom was 40 years old when she went to graduate school, her apartment began looking like a typical college student's dorm! Of course, all of my toys didn't help too much. My favorite game was to take a flying leap towards a pile of papers that mom put on the floor (either to grade or to read for research) and see just how far I could spread them out! Now, I just lie down on the papers to keep her from work on them. She spent an awful lot of time at the computer, so I used to jump up and walk all over the keyboard, her papers, swish the pencils off the table, and just meow to distract her. I still do this as she is helping me with the blogs.

Thanks for being patient with us as we traveled down memory lane. All of these pictures are from my first three months with Mom. We lived in this 3-room apartment for three years in Clemson until Mom received her PhD in Mathematics Education. Our first move was to Spartanburg, SC, where Mom got her first job at Converse College as a professor. We then moved to Aiken, SC, where mom was a professor at the University of South Carolina - Aiken and then Mom finally moved back into her house in Columbia, where we have lived for the past five years!