Oh, Lord, folks. It has been a doozy of a week.

Harlow’s spring break started a week ago Friday, so we went up to her grandma’s house for a long weekend. While we were there, I got a panicked text and call from my husband saying he couldn’t find the cat. Lily had somehow snuck out as he was coming in the door and took off (we think… we still aren’t sure how she got out!). We originally thought she MUST be hiding inside somewhere because we are super careful about not letting her outside, but she must be a ninja. Chris eventually saw her outside at 4am Tuesday morning. Loooooooong story short, we realized she was staying around our neighborhood for the time being, (she was coming in the garage in the night to eat and… yes… use the litter box. She stayed civilized.) so we bought a live trap and within 2 hours of setting it, caught her. Now she is queen of the house again like she hadn’t been gone almost a week driving us all crazy and making Harlow sob uncontrollably. No apology. No explanation of where she had been or why she had left. Just came in, drank Abbey’s water, hissed at her, and demanded lots of cuddles.

So that’s that part of the cat post. The next part is that during all these shenanigans, my little girl turned NINE! We ventured back into an altered normalcy and threw her a small cat-themed party. It went amazingly well. Here’s the photo dump of it all.

The kids all had such a wonderful time, and the parents did, too! It was just a little nudge toward normalcy while keeping safety in mind. For most of the kids, it was their first in-person party in over two years. I think it went very, very well.

Yesterday (Sunday) Harlow asked me if I could make the cat cake pops that I made for her party for her class on Monday to celebrate her birthday. So. That’s what I did most of yesterday. They were slightly modified in that I did NOT add the sprinkle whiskers, but I did get them done!

But of course when we asked Harlow last night what her favorite part of her birthday weekend was, she said having Lily home. You have no idea how relieved we all are to have that stupid cat back. For all her evading of actually coming back home on her own, Lily seems really happy to be back, too.

So, that’s the cat-filled week we had. Whew! I’m sure glad we can move on to bunnies now. Hop-hop, here comes Easter!