Seating For One Human Ass Only

The kittens have recently decided that the bathroom is the coolest place in the house and their favorite place to play, especially when I’m getting ready for work in the morning. For a while, this didn’t really bother me at all. They were too little to jump very high, so they’d sit on my feet or wrestle in the bathtub while I was washing and brushing and doing hair and makeup and whatever.In the last couple of weeks, though, they’ve come a long way in learning how to jump, and Abby in particular is testing her limits pretty much every moment of every day. I’ve seen her eyeing the top of the refrigerator from the kitchen floor more than once this week, and this morning she tried to jump to the top of the medicine cabinet (a ledge about a quarter of an inch wide) from the bathroom counter. Needless to say, she biffed it.
So now that they can jump on to the bathroom counter, they like to sit in the bathroom sink and watch me get ready for work. This would be cute except that they continue to sit in the sink even when I turn the water on to wash my face and brush my teeth – they just scoot off to the side a little so they won’t get too terribly wet. And if they do get wet, they’re pretty much completely unconcerned about it.

This morning, Marco attacked the makeup brushes while Abby tried to eat my glasses, and then curled up in the sink and decided to take a nap while I was untangling Abby from the hand towel rack for the 47th time.

Since I live alone, I’m just going to go ahead and tell you that I very often don’t bother to close the door when I go to the bathroom. Generally, this is not an issue, since up until several weeks ago, I lived completely and utterly alone.

But now I have these two kittens who like to be where I am all the time, and who have reached a developmental stage where they are astonishingly like toddlers. I suppose I’m lucky that they sleep most of the day when I’m at work, because when I’m home in the evenings they are holy terrors and I almost never leave them unattended without battening down every hatch I have.

This whole wanting to be where I am thing means that if I leave the room, they’re right behind me, usually catching up with me and tripping me as they try to wind through my legs while I’m walking up the stairs. And it means that if I decide to take a shower, they’ll sit outside the door and meow like abandoned little strays and/or fling themselves against the door until I come out. It means that if I’m working on the laptop, they’re going to sit on the keyboard, and if I’m lying on the couch, they’re going to sit on my head, and if I’m loading the dishwasher, they’re going to sit in the dishwasher.

I guess that might make it look like I have no control over them, which is pretty much true, but think about it. I could take an hour to load the dishwasher in between yelling/swatting/spraying water at them and constantly removing them from the dishwasher door, or I can let them stay there, where they’re relatively still and more importantly in my line of sight, and I can load the dishwasher in five minutes. Besides, they totally don’t give a crap about the yelling/swatting/spraying business. I could dump an entire bucket of water on them and they wouldn’t care.

Anyway. It also means that if I’m going to use the toilet, they’re going to beat me to the seat.

Seriously, between pulling down my pants and actually sitting on the toilet, I generally have to remove a kitten from the toilet seat eleven times before my ass makes it to the seat kitten-free. This is bad, because sometimes I nearly sit on a cat, and then there’s the whole awkwardness of trying to grab a squirmy kitten and chuck it out of the bathroom with your pants around your knees and your bare ass hanging out. And I’ve become worried that one of these days, I’m going to have the kind of peemergency where once the pants are down, the pee is on its way, and if there are kittens blocking my path to the toilet, someone might get peed on.

In addition to all that, since they can’t actually share the toilet seat with me while I’m using it, they’ve decided the next best thing is to sit on my lap. That’s not any better. I have a series of ugly scratches down the side of my right thigh from trying to keep Abby from jumping into my lap while I’m going to the bathroom. Because, see, when she starts to slip, she puts her back claws out to grab on to whatever she’s trying to sit on – in this case, my pasty white thigh.

So now I close the door.