Happy Birthday, Ivy

Ivy is nine years old today, more or less. We picked Valentine's Day because it was a memorable date around our estimate of her age, and duh, because she's full of love. For a few months the Spring of our wedding, we would see this little cat sleeping around/on/under the cars in one area of the apartments where we lived. We assumed she belonged to someone with a lax curfew policy. One day in September of the same year, she followed d home from the garbage bins. We offered her food, but she ignored it in favor of being petted and scratched. We were hesitant to become a two cat household—I grew up believing that cats were individualists, preferring to keep their humans and their litter boxes to themselves. Ivy kept walking up the stairs every day, several times a day. I would go out in the morning to give her breakfast, and she wouldn't touch it until being thoroughly loved up. We searched for the perfect home for her. Ok, we actually just looked for any home. Finally, we left it up to Simon, and obviously he said yes, a sister would be fine. We learned she had a chunk of tongue missing, likely from being cut on a can in the trash where she had been dining, and also that she had the most horrendous and continual farts of any living being ever. The gas only lasted a couple of weeks; the tongue gives me intense guilt that I was too distracted by our wedding plans that I didn't clue into our little homeless baby sooner. Yet here she is, the princess of the house. She no longer forgoes food for attention, but she gets pissed off if Simon gets more of either. The best way to get her to come is to call his name instead. She likes sleeping in her basket, purring with her mouth slightly open, snoring in the middle of the night, eating whenever she can now that the eating is good, and cleaning her face. She yells at her brother when he looks at her. For her birthday, I am giving her a diet. I am seriously going to take the food away at night. I promise.