You know when you wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning and you’re starving? But you calculate how much time before your alarm is going to go off and just fall back asleep? Well, it’s SUMMER!!, so I thought, what the heck, I’m going to get up and make myself some toast! But I don’t have bread, the Eggo waffles are whole grain, and most conveniently, the homemade M&M cookies were literally right on the counter, so…like I said, it’s summer — I had two! But cookies don’t go back to bed (summer or not, one cannot bear crumbs in the bed), so I’m walking around in the kitchen in my PJs looking for something to read while I nosh on my treat. There was a National Geographic magazine, a Marley Spoon recipe I'd already made, and the new bag of cat food. National Geographic is a pretty big commitment for 3am, so I totally went for the cat food bag. Plus the cat food was in three languages, so what an added nighttime mystery!
I feel like the multiple languages is an important part of this story. It’s also how I got to cookie number three (and let’s be honest, four). Does anybody else do this with things in multiple languages? You read the language you don't know first, and try to make heads or tails of it, and then check yourself in your home language? I started with the French since I only have a semester worth of it from middle school. I checked myself with the Spanish next. I mean it's not really a check, right? I'm not reading these two languages; I've been purchasing this same cat food for at least four years. I KNOW what it says. Whilst going through this process though, I came up quite short in my understanding, and flipped the lid back to English. I was at the feeding table at this point, just glancing through the weight chart. This is also where I got the 4th cookie and some reading glasses.
You see, on the chart I saw that if your cat weighs 2.7 kg, they should get 45 grams of food. 2.7 sounds small! But then I see that 45 grams is roughly equal to 1/2 cup. This is when I started completely over, from the top, in English. Because I feed my cats 1/2 cup each a day. 2.7 kg is roughly equal to 6 lbs (yes, I totally Googled that). And while we're all about who you are, not what you are here, numerically I know that neither of these two furballs are only 6 pounds. Winnie is about 8 pounds, and Lanny must be 12. 😬
I've been congratulating myself for not having overweight indoor cats, but apparently that's not to be celebrated since I'm nearly starving them! Lanny eats way more than his fair share (they eat together), and that make sense, since he should be getting almost a whole cup of food a day. SMH. And Winnie wakes me up somewhere between 2am and 4am to eat. Sigh. I feel like this is would make an exceptionally good real life math problem: Lanny and Winnie eat the same food at the same time. Lanny weighs 11.5 lbs and Winnie weighs 3.7 kg. How much food should they eat, together, based on the above chart? But Winnie made it clear that this was a right now problem to fix, not a "let's see what the kids do with it in the fall" problem. 😹 So at 3am, there was extra food, and while they were both surprised, no one objected, no one overate, and everyone slept until my alarm went off.
I'm having two hopeful thoughts this afternoon. #1: Might I be allowed to sleep through the night if they are well fed? And dare to dream #2: Might Winnie's personality be positively changed with a few more carbohydrates in her life? 🤞🤞 I mean she is FB beautiful, but several of you have experienced her more...hm, passionate side, shall we say. Don't rush right over -- I'm collecting data and will keep you posted. 😉
