When Char and I first got Sigmund, I ran around like a giddy parent telling everyone about our new little guy. One of my coworkers at MIT also has a cat or two, and so of course
we gabbed about utterly inane cute things cats do. She mentioned that she had an old cat bed that her current cats don’t use, and she said I could have it. I accepted, and we added it to the pile of things we hoped Sigmund would use. You can see it in this old entry. Sigmund did lie in it if you plopped him there, but he didn’t really go there on his own. We tended to put it in places he was going anyway to increase the chance that he’d learn to like the bed.
Char discovered that if you lift the bed up by the sides, Sigmund doesn’t move at all, and you can carry him whereever you want. Because of his weight, the sides fold up, and it looks like you have made a giant Sigmund taco. So char dubbed the bed The Taco.
As the months went by, Sigmund basically stopped using the bed. Like the hub, he just stopped using it after a while. But that’s how cats (and I assume children) are — you get them stuff and hope
they like it. Sometimes you hit (fishing poles!) and sometimes you miss (hub). I had chalked up the cat bed to one of those misses, perhaps because he didn’t like going for rides,
although I still left it around for the heck of it.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I caught Sigmund daintly testing out the cat bed last week. He put a paw or two inside, and then moved the rest of his (now fat) butt into the bed. He was still standing up in it, which looked pretty silly. After a minute or two of standing, checking for whatever cats check for, he gave it his approval. He plopped down, and napped.
Now he can be found in the bed from time to time, looking around or sleeping. This is of course terminally cute, and requiring of a photograph.
