#if you send something off of anon or mention a name you want credited they'll go up with the item

[greatbigbellies]

New Seasonal Standalone McPreggo Item!

The Festive Feast (Concept By @caitthebellyartist)

A unique seasonal item, sold annually during the month of december! A platter of roasted ham, sides of green beans, mashed potatoes, stuffing (with cranberry sauce), a warm roll, and a tall glass of sparkling apple cider (available in a limited time McPreggo branded reusable holiday cup)! Upon completion, initiates a singleton pregnancy which, for the next 12 days, every 24 hours, adds another baby to the consumer’s womb, resulting in full sized DUODECAPLETS by the end. If carrying twelve babies at once wasn’t enough, beginning with the first baby and repeating with each addition, the pregnancy will also incur one of 12 effects. The order of these effects is completely random, meaning only extraordinary lucky patrons will experience the same Festive Feast pregnancy twice.

The possible effects include: +15% extra baby weight, +20% stronger baby activity, +35% brighter stretchmark visibility, +12.5% additional belly length, +12.5% additional belly width, +75% craving and appetite strength, noticeable polyhydramnios, +25% vein visibility, +25% belly skin sensitivity, +12.5% hip width, Popped bellybutton, and 35% darker linea nigra. Effects cannot repeat during a single Festive Feast pregnancy. Will fully stack effects with other McPreggo products, but will continue to progress even after other items wear off. Whole Festive Feasts cannot stack. Festive Feasts are also sold frozen upon request, allowing them to be taken and enjoyed at home! It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

[This item will be added to the menu post proper in the next McPreggo menu update, whenever that may be]

[reinemichele]

Okay, I was going to make this post the day it happened, but I was already really distraught & felt like typing it all out would just like push me over the edge, and I still had to survive NYE fireworks. I decided to at least wait until after the 1st, but then Life Things kept happening, so I didn't get around to it until now.

My righteous anger has mostly simmered down, so but I think it'll probably still get long, so this'll be another read more post. TW for mentions of animal death, emotional abuse, and declawing

To be 100% super duper crystal clear: I am entirely against declawing; it's unethical and cruel and inhumane. This will become abundantly clear as the post goes on, but I just have seen too many pointless disc hoarse posts filled with people who gleefully, willfully misinterpret posts for any reason to harass people. I'm not going to leave myself open to people who'd send me death threats without even reading the full post. As it is, I'm turning reblogs off bc I don't want my post about my cat dying to be reblogged, but if I need to I can turn anon/asks in general off.

So. At 11PM on the 29th of Dec my cat gets hurt, we get to the vet by 12:30, and by 3AM he died. We got home by 4:30AM and none of us could sleep. We were all still awake at 10AM, and dreading the fact that it was a 3-day weekend and we'd have to face all of it trapped with our thoughts without having our normal day-to-day routines to buffer the first 3 days.

We know a lot of energy vampire type people. Liars, manipulators, people who'd come over to our house just to steal something for funsies, abusers. One of my mom's sisters was an accessory to murder. The same one stole my mom's SSN to open credit cards with. I have more examples, but my family tree bullshit could be its own post. A lot of them are in our family and there's some my mom basically has to keep in contact with due to her job.

So, it's 10AM, and my mom is dreading the 2-5 energy-draining people who consistently text her all day long, no matter what's going on or how busy she is. She can be with a patient who's actively in the process of dying, and they'll just text her "?" repeatedly when she doesn't respond.

She decides to tell these people about our cat dying the night before, in hopes that they'll give her space. Unfortunately, abusers like these people love to violate unsaid boundaries like this, so nothing less than blocking numbers/turning off her phone would work. But it's a step towards being able to say "no" that I've been trying to help her with, so we're going to be proud of her for it.

I don't want to use this person's name because as shitty as they are, they deserve privacy, so I'm going to use her initial.

V . responds . "Oh. My sister is trying to rehome her cat, maybe you can take it?"

So let's go over the timeline again. 11PM on the 29th -> 10AM on the 30th. In less than 12 hours since our cat died, V is trying to shove her sister's cat at us. Please don't try to give her the benefit of the doubt or say she was trying to help us feel better. There's not a single thing this person does that comes without ulterior motives; I've known her since 2015. She goes to strangers' funerals so she can brag about it later. She doesn't feed her own cat wet food, not because she can't afford it, but because she'd rather buy cheap dry food at the dollar store and spend the entire rest of her money on herself, like going on cruises/vacations while I petsit her cat. (And use our own wet food for her cat because it's cruel and fucked up and genuinely a detriment to a cat's health to only feed them dry food). This suggestion was nothing short of an impulsive launch at an opportunity to make her life more convenient, by finding a new home for her sister's cat, so her sister would stop complaining or asking her to take the cat.

My family has always had pets, and I'm the youngest in our house, so by the time I was born, a lot of our pets were already getting old and sick (12-15 for dogs, 20-25 for cats). The first pet that died in my lifetime was our dog Killer, when I was 4. My dad had already died, so I didn't need any lies about going to live on a farm or something. And of course it's always sad, but we've always felt like the best thing you can do to ease that pain is take in a new pet and provide them with a home. You get mutual love and happiness from each other, and day by day it gets easier. But, like, you take in that new pet after maybe a month or so. Not a fucking day.

Before continuing, for some extra context, 2 of our cats already had been from V.

The first one, Joey, she only had for a few months before becoming convinced he was peeing all over the house (hint: it was her 20 yr old cat who had chronic kidney/urinary tract problems from being fed nothing but DRY FOOD FOR 20 YRS @%^#&*^*&@#) and offering him to my mom's sister, who ended up dying a few months after that. (We don't know why or how; coroner declined performing an autopsy.)

We call V and tell her what happened, because we don't know what to do with Joey. Her reaction is like, "Oh... hmm. Huh. That's really a shame. Let me know if you find someone who can take him."

As in, "NOT IT!"

They hang up and my mom stares blankly at her phone screen. I say we should just take him home instead of leaving him in the empty apartment and stressing about finding him a new owner.

Flash forward to December of 2020. V calls my mom crying, saying that her (now ex-)husband thinks their other cat, Smokey, peed on his expensive speakers and is threatening to divorce V unless they find a new home for Smokey. V says all the local shelters are full and when she looked into people who'll temporarily house cats for owners, they charge $200 per day. She says she needs to find Smokey a new home like, now. My mom says we'll help her find someone but V is like, her husband has Smokey locked in a cat carrier and says she won't be let out until they find her a new home, that kind of now. We're like, jesus fucking christ, silently. I mute my mom's phone and say "tell her we'll take her". I'm sure she would've said that anyway, but like, instinctual response to hearing the thing about the cat carrier.

(Btw, he divorced V the next year anyway. I wanted her to be away from him, because he's so abusive and mean. But it's so fucked up that he forced her to get rid of her cat with the threat/ultimatum of divorce, only to follow through with the threat anyway. He could've just divorced her and let her keep her cat!!! She had to deal with the heartbreak of a divorce without the comfort of a cat she spent 9 years with!!! He moved out of state, but every time I think about this, I wish I could go and break his kneecaps.)

The problem to that is that Smokey . is declawed . So she has to be separate from our other cats 24/7 for her own safety. None of our cats are very aggressive or get into "real" fights with each other, but they're still cats, with sharp teeth and claws, with predator instincts, who act on those instincts when they can tell another cat is weaker, whose instinct during a fight with another cat is to swipe at their stomach to disembowel them. That's not something you want to take a chance on. So Smokey is exclusively in my mom's bedroom. Over time, we've started to let her out for 20-30 minutes at a time with supervision, but that's the extent of what we can give her without putting her in danger, and it can't be done while doing chores like taking the trash out or doing the dishes. All because V declawed her fucking cats. (Not Joey, but only because he wasn't with her for very long.)

Okay, with that context established, let's go back to V texting us on Dec 30th.

Of course, we could rehome her to someone who didn't have other pets, but she spent 9 years with V, and has now spent 4 years with us. She's a 13 year old all-grey short-hair cat with a bald patch on her belly and on her front legs and below her ears, so it'd probably take a very long time to find someone who'd pick her over a cute kitten, and even longer stuck in a shelter if they had room. And if we had chosen not to be her permanent home, we would've been keeping her at arms' length the entire time, trying not to get attached.

How would that be fair to Smokey? She deserves a life where she spends as many days possible feeling wanted and loved and safe. That's what I set out to do, and I think I've achieved it as much as I possibly could, around her being declawed. I do love her and want her. And I do keep her safe, obviously. I spend as much time as I can with her; we cuddle, we play, we watch birds, I share food with her (when it's safe for cats, obv). With V she was always hiding under the bed and never meowed, just came out to eat. With us, she never hides, purrs non-stop, and is very very vocal. She gets wet food and treats, she sits in the middle of the bed like she owns the place. She gets to be a cat.

I leave my room to go check on my mom. She relays me the text. I say . "What the fuck is wrong with her? It hasn't even been a day."

I ask, "Is V's sister's cat declawed?"

We, like, talk about what a transparently selfish and inconsiderate person V is. I tell my mom I'm gonna try to sleep, but then I stop in the middle of the room.

It's a balancing act to watch out for 1 declawed cat with our other cats, so it would take more mental energy to strategize life around 2 declawed cats, especially with how often I'm asked to petsit. You have to factor in how much time you can spend out petsitting (I usually spend 5 hours there at a time), time you can spend with the Have Claws group of pets (including a dog), and time you can spend with the No Claws pet.

Despite the... misconceptions about cats being detached and aloof, they want (and need) to spend time with you. They want to cuddle, they want to hang out in the same room, they want to hear your voice, they want to play, they want to snooze in the presence of someone they feel safe around; they love you. Same as with dogs.

My mom says she'll find out.

I get some sleep, then I wake up. My mom tells me that no, V's sister's cat is not declawed; she can't find anyone in the state to do it. That's why she wants to rehome the cat.

",,,, How could anyone say that without being ashamed?"

My mom shrugs. "I don't know. I told her, 'wow, we're sitting here miserable because we wish we had our cat back, and your sister wants to get rid of hers because she can't mutilate it' I don't think she liked that because she stopped texting me back."

We laughed.

Silence is telling, you know? V's 20 year old cat died last year, and my mom and I spent months hoping to god that she wouldn't get a new cat, because we didn't want her to declaw it. She swore up and down she regretted doing it to her other cats and would never do it again, but she's also a liar. So after she did get a new cat, my mom and I have checked to see if she still has claws every time we go over. So far she does... but probably because V can't find anyone to do it either.

But then it stopped being so funny when I realized it was probably only a matter of time before one or both of them crossed state lines to look for a vet who'd do it. We can't exactly steal V's cat, but if we take in her sister's cat, we can save it from happening.

I don't really have a good way to finish this. We'd rather take in a cat off the street or from a shelter than have Three cats that came from the same asshole, but if V's sister does declaw her cat, we'll feel responsible for it happening, even if we know it's not our fault.

I just wanted to post about how fucking insane it is to try to pawn off your (sibling's) cat less than 24 hours after someone's cat died. She's almost 70 and has no mental illnesses; she knows better. She's just an asshole.