I am thankful for #charlieandcharcoal! In case you’re wondering what or who that is, you clearly don’t follow me on Instagram as I may have an obsession of posting adorable pictures of our cats. Who would have ever thought I’d become a cat person? Certainly not me (and I do still want a puppy – I may ask the cats a couple days a week if they want a puppy brother…)

About 19 months ago, Tom called and told me our friend took in a pregnant cat that had been hanging around his house. Tom wanted to take I the pregnant cat and then adopt out the mom cat and whichever kittens we didn’t want to keep. Before we even had a chance to discuss, and I was not on board at all, the litter was born in our friend’s garage. When they were a week old, we went to meet them – there was an orange tabby (male), two black tabbys (female) and two part Maine coons (male and female), [also, fun fact, a female cat can get pregnant by more than one cat at a time, hence three tabbys and two Maine coons].

So after about an hour with the kittens, I knew the orange one was special and I decided we could adopt him and we would name him Charlie. We left Charlie with his siblings and mom and visited him about once a week. We decided about a month later that maybe we wanted a second one so Charlie wouldn’t be lonely when we were at work. We knew it would be one of the Maine coons (the black tabbys were scaredy-cats and lame!). We finally settled on the female Maine coon since she was always playing with Charlie (the male Maine coon was also a bit of a bully and I may have nicknamed him ‘Fat B@st@rd’) and we eventually named her Charcoal.

When they finally came home, it was a bit of a shock to me – I had never had a pet until last summer. They love to cuddle and help keep my spirits high. When I’m sad and down, they know, I’m not sure how, but they do. They have some sixth sense and know that I just need to cuddle or pet them. They are cute, adorable and soft (especially Coal). They let me pet them constantly and don’t destroy the house (as in have not broken anything, ever), but they sure do like to run around the house, all around the hardwood floors in the middle of the night so we can hear the putter-patter of eight paws at 2:30AM. But it’s OK because they also act as alarm clocks, as in they wait for the actual alarm to go off and then they make it a point to make sure I know I need to get up to feed them, but that’s OK since at least now I have an ‘alarm clock’ that doesn’t come with snooze!