freckles_and_doubt | thank heaven for little girls

Vignette from yesterday's party: distressed four-year-old comes dashing through the house to find me, because something in my bedroom (where three of them have been perpetrating unspecified small-girl evil) is ringing. I wander through and switch off my bedside alarm clock, which has mysteriously set itself.

"Someone must have switched it on," I say thoughtfully. "I certainly didn't. Who was playing with it?"
A ring of innocent faces gazes at me raptly. They exchange conspiratorial looks.
"The cat did it!" volunteers someone.

This morning I was rudely awakened at 7am by the ringing of my alarm clock, at the extremely loud and intrusive end of its graduated scale, which is audible even three rooms away behind a closed door. Staggering, dazed and semi-nude, through the house, I eventually tracked the bloody thing down tucked in a corner of the bookshelf in the guestroom, beeping its little head off.

I knew we'd be in trouble when the cats developed opposable thumbs. I struck a blow for an unsubjugated humanity by wantonly not feeding them breakfast before I staggered back to bed.