Could we be... a catnip family?

There's something about the Bean family that seems to draw cats. Mind you, we don't have any ourselves. After growing up allergic to a full menagerie of animals, I've vowed to avoid pets until ButterBean is old enough to truly insist. So, we don't have any pets. In fact, other than people we have nothing living in our house. I'm hopeless with plants and won't do animals. So, our attractiveness to cats in all the more unusual. For those of you who may not know, catnip is like chocolate for cats. They love the stuff and cat lovers will fill toys and the like with it to please their cats. So how, you may be asking, is our family like catnip?

In Baton Rouge, we lived in house with a nice big yard. We had comfortable outdoor furniture that we rarely used (El 3atal is not a big fan of the heat). We also had a herd of cats. Or is it a gaggle? No, no that's geese. A pride? Nope lions. A litter? Nope related kittens. Okay, a herd it is then. These cats would come and dig in to our lawn furniture and make themselves at home. And, I really do mean at home. There were about 10 of them, from what I could tell, that frequented our house. And, before you ask, we did not feed them. Ever. Period. And yet they came. I felt like we lived in the field of dreams house (whispery voice "if you have it, they will come"). It was truly bizarre. The worst were the late night cat fights that would wake me from sleep and have me rushing for the kids rooms to respond to the wailing. But it was the cats...

Next we move to Amman. Now, Amman isn't a city with lots of pets right? I mean, there are many more than there were 10 years ago, but still, it isn't like the US where everyone's got a pet. And yet, we have our own little herd of cats here too. This one is actually a litter of cats. A mommy cat that hangs out about the street decided to have her litter of kittens in the boiler room under our building. The boiler room has a small window that opens onto our garage, so we find growing kittens wandering about our car, dangling over our trashcan, generally carving out a life about our house. So, I begin to wonder, are we a catnip family?

Happy meow-ing!