Can i breathe please

Tessa from Community Cat Rescue in Palo Alto, California

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Lovely tortoiseshell color Tessa is an outgoing, confident and VERY smart young girl.  Born homeless on the street, she quickly figured out how to make friends and influence people, particularly the people that could help her. That included a trapper who was trying to trap the cats to get them spayed...Tessa just walked into the trap before it was even set!

In her foster home Tessa still plays like a kitten, with a kitten's energy.  She is probably making up for her deprived kittenhood when she had to worry about survival and had no opportunity to just play. Her favorite game is pounce-jump-hunt the play mouse dangling on a pole, but she will hunt any toy that moves.  She also enjoys cuddling with her foster parents and sleeping with them at night.  That might not be important now, but when the weather gets cold again, she is bedwarmer that doesn't end up on your utility bill.

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

King Arthur and Queen Guinevere from Save A Kitty in Canyon Country, California

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Click here for a link to Save A Kitty's main website.

King Arthur is a magnificent Lavender Point Siamese! He is ultra, ultra sweet and affectionate.

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

BUT