Sam

Looking back through some of my previous posts, I noticed a post about the stray cat we adopted in November of 2010.  I chuckled at the post because I titled it Ballerina, the name given to the cat before we found out she was actually a he.  His male name was Sam. Sadly, sometime in July, we couldn't find Sam anywhere and finally decided he must have met up with a coyote while wandering the fields across from our house.  Besides fish, he was our first family pet and really made a place in our hearts.  Haylie was especially heartbroken, but we all shed a few tears over our sweet pet.  For months the kids prayed that Sam would come back in our family prayer.
I decided to write a post dedicated to Sam first because he was a part of our history as a family, but also because when I think of him and our new cat Chester, and about how we got both of them,  It serves as a good reminder to me of how much we matter to our Heavenly Father.  When Sam came along, we were living in the apartment and Haylie had been hounding us about getting pet.  We kept telling her that we couldn't have a pet in the apartment, and I kept feeling like my children's whole childhood was slipping away in a tiny apartment.  I felt like they were missing so many experiences and it really had me depressed.  I know, it sounds a little dramatic, but what can I say...apartment living gets to a person!  Anyway, we came home one day and Sam can running over to the kids, then a scrawny little cat so skinny his purring seemed to rattle his bones.  We decided to keep him as a outside cat, and amazingly my outlook, and Haylie's, changed.  She spent hours outside that first winter playing with him.  He was such an unexpected answer to our prayers.  It probably sounds corny, but I think about this a lot and know that Heavenly Father was watching out for us, even for something so small.  Here is a picture of Sam that Dave took while the kids and I were out of town and he was working in the garage with Sam as his companion.  We are pretty sure this is the last time we saw him.

Just when we were giving up hope of Sam coming back, some friends from our ward brought over a stray cat that had been hanging around their apartment.  They knew we had recently lost our cat.  We named him Chester, and he sure helped all of us get over the loss of Sam.  Again, an answer to our prayers, not what we had planned, but a mindful Heavenly Father at work.  Small examples, but good reminders.