I did not get a picture of Her Regalness while we were there, but picture a very longhaired, poufy fluffy black cat with big round eyes. One is who is getting up in years and can no longer run as fast from the toddler as she once could.

They have his and hers cats and Sam has had Eve since she was a kitten. After the puppy arrived, the cats had an escape hatch through one of the bedroom doors.

You know those toys that challenge a baby to match a square block to a square hole, a round one to a round one, etc? Mathias at a year old just thwacked the one with the other, as tiny people do, but by last week the simpler shapes were a piece of cake and he even got them in most of the time.

But that cat door.

It’s a sideways oval. His head is round. He can see through it if he hunches down. So that should work, right? But his shoulders, and his head was bigger than that hole anyway. We about died laughing while he was trying to follow the cats into their room: feeling the edges of the space as it bounced his forehead back, confused why it just refused to comply.

His mommy got him the feather toy and helped him make it leap around where the cats were surely watching. Sure enough, a disembodied white paw belonging to the other one suddenly darted in and out at that feather. Mathias was in heaven: it was playing with him!

Normally they keep their distance from small people. He hasn’t quite got the method down of how to stroke their fur so that it feels good to them as well as him–and that black cat is the one you’d most want to touch. She runs at the sight of him, almost not fast enough anymore that one time I saw them at it before she made it through her door while I was dashing to the rescue.

A week later, the earthquake happened.

Nobody was home.

Eve freaked.

When my son-in-law made it home before the others, he found her: she was wedged under the couch, immobilized possibly by an aftershock, but however she got there it was a very small space and it couldn’t have been fun; he rescued her.

That night she did not go through that narrow little cat door.

Instead, at the baby’s bedtime, there she was, lying down under Mathias’s crib of all places.

Nothing could fall on her there, she could see out to the hallway, and even though she was safely underneath the crib, it left so much space above her that she could never be wedged in again. Not here.

She was with her people. She was safe now.