I just had my hand up a cat's butt. It isn't a real cat, but it is a very lifelike imitation of one, once you cram your fingers into its appendages and wiggle them. My kids love that puppet, and today is the first time that one of them noticed that my hand is the magic behind the movement. Before today, they thought it only liked me enough to wake up, I suppose.

They were petting and snuggling the "kitty" while I expertly (or not) threw my voice in a perfect imitation of a cat's meow. Molly decided that her kitty would love daddy's kitty. Daddy's kitty is his ever-spreading mop of chest hair. Molly named it "kitty" when she first started speaking, and it's been kitty ever since.

"Make this kitty hug Daddy's kitty," Molly ordered in her special "I'm 3 and I'm the boss" way. So, I helped kitty walk over to Howard's hairy, bare chest. Let me take a moment to sympathize with the other wives who are subject to their half naked husband's hairiness on a daily basis. *moment of silence* So anyway, the kitties had a brief love affair, and I think my husband might have liked it a little more than he should have (which is creepy in a weird stuffed animal kind of way). All of a sudden, Molly squealed at a pitch that would have shattered every window in a greenhouse.

"WHYYYY is your hand in the kitty's BUTT?"

Oops. It's like ruining the magic of Disney by letting people see the well-hidden parking lots in the middle of the Magic Kingdom. Afraid she would never recover, I scrambled for an answer.

"Because.... well, because.... he had something stuck in there, and I had to get it out."

Huh? What on God's green earth made my mouth say those words? Oh, that's right. It was my brain, malfunctioning.

The answer satisfied the girls. It also spawned a new game for the kids - I like to call it, "stuff the butt." By the end of the night, that poor little kitty gave birth to two plastic snakes, an Easter egg, a set of car keys (which I will probably never find again) and a spoon before I put it out of its misery.

There are two morals to this story. Puppets are bad, and men who have kitties on their chests may also have them on their back. Eww.