Weddingbee Blog

I love pets of pretty much any shape and size.

I’ve grown up with all kinds of house pets starting with a smart-as-a-whip German Shepherd mix named Micah when I was itty bitty growing up in a tiny town in Northern Minnesota to matching Siamese cats all through high school. I babysat the class guinea pig over spring break in the first grade, dutifully picking grass for him to eat from the nearby meadow. I helped my dad clean out a fish tank as long as basketball player is tall in the fifth grade. I was pulled around on a sled by a husky-terrier mix in middle school (let me tell you, he was a goofy looking dog with those little legs). I cleaned cat boxes every week in high school for our three cats: Meeka, Mocha and Mooka (please say those names aloud along with the previously mentioned dog). I clipped the claws of a friend’s cat in college.

OK, so this was not actually a pet, but I did horseback ride at Girl Guide camp. Does that count?

Clearly, I wasn’t about to be pet-free once I was a real life adult living in the big, bad world. Enter the roadblock: The Baconator is “not a cat person” and our apartment didn’t allow dogs, nor are we at a place in our lives where we can commit to training a dog.

Slowly, I started sending pictures of adorable, adoptable kittens to him and that roadblock began to crumble. Finally, over Father’s Day weekend 2009, we found ourselves at PAWS, a Chicago no-kill shelter, filling out paperwork to adopt our very first Bacon Bit, Lincoln, a brown tuxedo tabby kitten.

Lincoln!

Are we great patriots that loooooooooove Abe Lincoln? Nope. We are people that are terrible at reading fine print and were towed from our parking place by a towing company named Lincoln. If we hadn’t gotten towed, we would have made it to our initial destination on the far side of town, a public Chicago shelter that has so many pets, it can’t afford to be no-kill. But, we got our little red car towed to the far side of town while eating burgers, so we headed over to PAWS instead, and that’s where we fell in love with our first furbaby!

His First Day Home

Lincoln was pretty lonely during his first year in our house, and he was getting a bit of a reputation as a biter since he had no fellow rambunctious companions. A year later, the weekend before Father’s Day 2010 (and the weekend after our engagement!!!), we were back at PAWS, adopting a little orange tuxedo kitten to grown our baconlicious family. This little guy was clearly a trouble maker, jumping on unsuspecting sleeping kittens, batting at my ponytail and spilling kibble all over the floor, so being the LOST fans we are, there was only one name that made sense: Sawyer.

Sawyer!

It took us a good couple of weeks for them to get along, but now they are lost without each other. If Lincoln is in another room and Sawyer can’t get in, Sawyer cries. If one is sound asleep next to the radiator, you better bet the other is snuggled up next to him. But it’s not all Kodak moments of cuteness, they do plenty of chasing each other around our little apartment and there is the occasional hiss if a swipe is landed just right, but mostly, they are definitely cat of the day calendar worthy.

C’mon, they even sleep the same!

Now that you’ve made it to the end, how is this wedding related? Well, we can’t figure out how to include them into the big day. A cat ring bearer is a pretty radical idea, but I have a feeling those rings will wander off as they please.

Does anyone else have furry family members that don’t fit the typical wedding party bill? How are you including them in the big day?