During the remote-schooling years, everyone in the house attended something. The humans had their meetings. The cats were enrolled in kindergarten prep, delivered by tablet, and the curriculum was birds.
Classes ran daily. The tablet went into its wooden stand beside the cat tree, somebody pressed play on several hours of birds hopping around a mossy stump, and the students took their seats. Howl was the faithful one — front row, whiskers forward, perfect attendance, minimal note-taking.
The kindergarten question
The hope — stated out loud more than once, and not entirely as a joke — was that all this preparation would finally get the two of them into kindergarten. The screening was rigorous. The coursework was reviewed nightly. The future looked, briefly, academic.
It did not work out. Paradox never took the entry exam — she was reminded of the date several times and attended a nap instead. And Howl, who by every measure would have gotten in, refused to go to kindergarten without her. That was the end of the household's academic ambitions, and as far as anyone can tell, neither of them ever regretted it.