Chapter 2: Cairo's Birthday Surprise
"The ceremony was divine! Simply to die for, I loved every minute of it!" Catherine Leigel, who couldn't stop obsessing over her younger sister's wedding, gushed.
"Thanks, Cath, but it wouldn't have been half as great if you hadn't attended," Charlene, Catherine's younger sister and new bride to Wyatt, said with a flip of her pale blonde hair. In the room full of cat anthros, she was definitely the most physically attractive.
"Oh, Charls, I wouldn't have missed it for the world!" Catherine exclaimed as she got up to clear the table of all the leftover birthday celebration things.
It isn't every day your baby sister gets married to her baby's father, you realize?" Catherine continued as she washed the chocolate raisin cake-covered plates in the kitchen sink.
"Nor is it every day your big sister gets pregnant!" Charlene laughed as she stroked Catherine's large belly affectionately.
"I'm almost six months along!" Catherine exclaimed as if she couldn't believe it.
"YES!" Catherine's husband, Markus', voice rang out from the living room.
Catherine rolled her eyes. "Men and their Monday night football!"
Charlene laughed. She peeked out at her new husband Wyatt watching the human football game with Catherine's husband, Markus. Charlene and Wyatt's daughter, Cairo , was perched on her father's knee, pretending to enjoying the football game; when really she was just enjoying being bounced on Wyatt's knee as she alternated between sloppily slobbering on an oatmeal chocolate chunk cookie and sipping on her grape juice.
Cairo must've realized that she was being watched, as she turned and caught her mother's brown eyes in her big navy ones. A smile lit up her chubby face and she shimmied down her father's leg and toddled head-long to her mom.
"Mom!" she squeaked.
"What is it, Cai?" Charlene asked, patting the top of her head.
"I'm hungry!" Cairo answered.
"How can that be, Cai? You just got done eating!" Charlene admonished.
"Oh, hush, Char! Cai's the birthday girl, she gets whatever she wants!" Catherine said silkily, bending over with some difficulty to Cairo's height.
"Oh, alright," Charlene sighed, "What do you want to eat, Chubbie?"
Cairo opened her mouth to answer, but Catherine shushed her.
"Don't say it, Cairo… Picture it!" Catherine said quietly, a strange sparkle in her tan-colored eyes.
"'Kay!" Cairo said as she took the Polaroid camera Catherine handed her.
Squeezing her eyes shut and squishing up her face to imitate what would later in life be dubbed as her "toddler face"; Cairo concentrated.
Half a minute of deep 5-year-old concentration later, a picture came out of the camera. After it cleared up, it was a picture of an oatmeal chocolate chunk cookie.