Respiratory Therapy Cave

This topic came up in the comments section of my blog and Amy's blog, and my most recent response became so long I decided just to turn it into a post.

Here's the deal. There is this "really cute cat" down the street from us, and it is "free."

My wife is trying to convince me that Singulair should prevent an asthma flair. Plus, she read somewhere that most people aren't allergic to cats per se, but to their saliva. Cats lick themselves to clean themselves, and that causes the allergic response. So, as per her source, if you wash the cat daily, you shouldn't have a problem with allergies.

Now, the gamble is, once you have a pet in your house, it walks the whole house, and if you do find out you are allergic to it, there's no way you will ever get all of the allergen out of your house. It will be there forever.

That's the argument I hang to when the subject "CAT" comes up. Now she has my 5 YO winking her cute little eyes at me saying, "Please, dadda, please..." It's not easy saying no to that.

(Ironically, I wrote about cats on my other blog just yesterday. Go figure.)

On a side note, we haven't done so well with pets in the past. When we first got married we simply "had to" get a dog. Mind you, I love dogs, but when you live in town, a barking dog can cause a lot of stress for an owner, especially when the neighbors keep calling the police.

But that wasn't the half of it. We had a fenced in yard, and we thought that would suffice. But the dog learned that it could dig a whole under the fence, and roam the town, causing havoc with other dogs. After the police gave me a ticket for this, I had no choice but to find a new loving home for this dog, even though I really liked it other than these two things. I even taught it to walk on two legs.

We "had to" get a hamster once too. But it somehow kept getting out of its cage. About the fourth time this happened I realized that my boy, then four, was opening up the cage every time he went to the bathroom alone.

Well, one day the hamster didn't look so good. We figured it got into the rat poison in the basement. No more hamsters.

We had fish too, but for the life of me (no pun intended), I could not keep fish alive either.

Thank God we are better at raising humans than raising pets.

So, now "we just have to" have a cat.

I'm not allergic to dogs or hamsters, and even though cats don't bother me, the test did show a positive result for cats. So, I'm sticking to that argument.

However, my wife and both my kids ask me at least 20 times a day. All it takes is one weak moment, so their strategy might pay off.

Besides, how can a dad say no to the little girl in the pic.

"Daddy, please..."