A grandmother’s thoughtful gift to her grandkids has served an unexpected function.
A new indoor slide, meant to bring joy to her grandkids, found an unlikely, and much furrier, fan. In a viral Instagram reel, the grandmother captured a hilarious moment of her cat secretly using the slide in the middle of the night—a twist on what was intended to be a family toy. Since the reel was posted, it has received over 903,000 likes.
“When you get a slide for your grandkids, but this is happening at midnight,” the woman, @grandma_gin_, captioned the video, which shows a gray slide set up indoors. But instead of a giggling child, what comes down the slide is a cat, backwards, sliding helplessly towards the bottom. The cat’s clumsy adventure quickly charmed viewers who recognized the mischievous nature of felines.
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The commenters were just as surprised as the video’s creator. One user, who was expecting a very different kind of late-night hijinks, commented, “I was expecting a drunken adult to be falling down the slide not…[a cat].”
“The look on the cat’s face is great! They do not like you to see their mischief—unless they want something,” one commenter wrote. Another person had a more innocent theory about the cat’s predicament: “You could tell he accidentally got on the slide the way he fell…he must’ve been curious and then slid all the way down.”
One viewer even imagined the cat’s inner thoughts: “She looked embarrassed like, ‘Why do you laugh? God forbid a cat wants to have fun.'”
Cats and Their Love for Slides
As many pet owners know, cats are naturally curious creatures who are drawn to new and unusual objects in their environment.
It seems that slides, in particular, hold a special fascination for them. A commenter noted this tendency, writing, “Cats looove slides. The strays in our old apartments used to play on the playground and the slide was a particular favorite!”
“Did y’all see that [the cat] intentionally walked up there to slide back down?” another pointed out. “That’s his slide, not your grandkids.”
A final, comical detail drove the absurdity home—the slide ended abruptly against a wall, leaving little room for little ones, or cats, to get off.
“I love that it dead ends into the wall,” one person wrote. “Building that next generation a little stronger than the last. Well done.”
Newsweek reached out to @grandma_gin_ for comment via Instagram.