Note: The post below was written on 8/30/10. I just found it and am now publishing it. There have been many changes since this was written.
Why do we have 3 kittens when we agreed to adopt 2? When one of the adoptive families fell through, we were asked would we possibly be able to take 3. We have had 3 cats at times in the past and The Bearded One had finished a glass of Cabernet…..and he LOVES cats.
Rufus got his name from the lead character in the movie “ffolkes”. Stubble and his friends decided that the two female cats were “little cat ninjas” because of their stalking and pouncing (on each other and on their brother and on us). We googled “female ninja names” and came up with Katsu and Kimiko.
How quickly one forgets what kittens are like. Well, it maybe isn’t so unexpected when you consider that we have been cat free for nearly 2 years and that our cats are complete house cats and so tend to live long healthy lives. We have many years of living with adult cats who are more, um, sedate than rough and tumble kittens. The night before last, in the middle of the night, at least two of them pounced on my toes and began chewing…little monsters. I wound up putting on my thick Thorlos socks and they went away. No doubt because it isn’t as much fun to chew on me when I’m not screaming in pain.
They arrived on Saturday and proceeded to attempt to eat the carpet and attack the furniture until The Bearded One had the happy thought of moving their climbing tower into the living room. It doesn’t provide any additional ambience, but it has so far saved the furniture. The mini-blinds and verticals are permanently closed so that the kittens can’t get to the screens; they managed to badly damage one of the screens in the dining room before we figured out what they were up to. Stubble’s shower curtain is also a victim of climbing kitties. His shower curtain is a loose weave, though, so I should be able to “massage” the fabric back into shape. His bathroom door is staying closed, however.
Sunday night, the climbing tower got a little too close to the living room slider and before you could say, “wait, stop, don’t do that”, Rufus was on the top rail of the verticals “walking the parapet”. Stubble couldn’t reach him to get him down and when we finally got something for him to stand on, the kitten would just happily walk to the other end of the rail and laugh at us. He finally decided to get down on his own and jumped right onto the climbing tower – which is now in the middle of the room rather than by the window.
There have been the inevitable accidents when kittens didn’t find the litter box in time. They are in a new house that is bigger than the house that they came from and to be fair, they really don’t know their way around yet. So when we aren’t around to catch accidents immediately, into the laundry room they will go. At least for the next little while.
Their first vet visit is tonight. I will be taking Stubble as back up to help keep all three of them in play and out of trouble (if that is in fact possible). Because we were so late in getting possession of them, spaying and neutering isn’t far off. Maybe only a week or two. I’m not looking forward to the expense of two spays and a neuter, but the alternative is unthinkable, so we’ll just have to make do. It will be at least another 20 years before I can handle any more kittens!
Follow up: We quickly discovered that the only way to get sleep at night was to keep the kitties in the laundry room. They didn't seem to mind at all. Just last week we were able to release the kittens from their laundry room when we are not in the house. Of course, now they won't go into the laundry room at night any more and are sleeping with us, but being a little older, they are now perfectly fine bedmates.
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