Kitten Update: Mine, All Mine!: February 10, 2009

In which I cave in to the inevitable.

Categorized

Animals

We’re keeping both kittens.

Raise your paw if you saw it coming. OF COURSE YOU DID, because you know I am a sucker for a cute, whiskered face. If these had been human babies, I would have fed them to a woodchipper weeks ago; kittens, though, are another story. Even as I type this, the littlest one is curled up in my lap, holding onto my arm with one soft little paw as she sleeps, and oh my god the CUTENESS. It’s the kind of cuteness that makes me want to run out into the streeet screaming EVERYONE NEEDS TO RECYCLE MORE, because if we do not recycle the earth will rot away and everything on it will die and then where will we find cute kittens? I believe the cuteness is our future, people.

We are calling them Oliver and Cosette, for now. I say “for now” because I keep changing their name every two weeks or so, with the result that I keep forgetting what names to yell when they’re being naughty and they never respond to me anyway. If I’d known I was going to keep both of them, I would have called them Sebastian and Viola, because they are orphaned, marooned siblings and I initially thought the girl-cat was a boy. I did try those names for about two weeks, but it didn’t go over too well; turns out the nickname “Lolita” will never be viable in polite company again, even for a cat, THANKS A LOT NABOKOV. Anyway, the girl-cat looked much more like a Cosette than a Viola, and the boy-cat responds better to Oliver than to Sebastian. So I am ditching the Shakespearean-orphan theme for a generalized 19th-century-literary-orphan theme instead. Still highly snobbish, but a bit more palatable to the plebes.

Remember how shy they were when I found them? Well, now they are anything but. They spend most of their time either racing through the house at top speed, knocking over knick-knacks and bowling Piper over, or curled up together on my lap, chewing on my fingers while they sleep. Cosette, in particular, loves to be petted, and will literally fall over in sybaritic ecstacy at the touch of a human hand. Oliver is more finicky about when he wants to be cuddled, but when he wants to be cuddled, he will climb me like a tree and stick his hand down my shirt to get my full attention. (Maybe I should have called him “Humbert Humbert”. NABOKOV YOU HAVE POLLUTED ME.) I spend each night buried in a welter of fur and tiny limbs, with paws in my hair and tongues in my ear, perpetually petrified lest I roll over on a tiny, fragile beast. And then Oliver bites my nose and simultaneously Dutch ovens me, and I stop being afraid and start wishing that Christopher Moltisanti would stagger in and sit on him for me. And then I remember that the dog he sat on was actually named Cosette, which is a freaky coincidence, and then I think of all the space in my head that is taken up with Sopranos episodes. I could be using that space to think of a cure for cancer or come up with a better orange peeler, but no, I am thinking of passive-aggressive ways to kill my cat. And I wasn’t even the one who put all six seasons on my Netflix queue.

Fictional drug addicts and their pet-crushing ways aside, the guys have made themselves quite at home here. Piper Maru the ~~Penguin~~ Cat is, of course, not at all pleased with the idea of having to share her home forever with two creatures almost as cute as she is. There have been fisticuffs and face slaps and body checks and hissing, oh my God the hissing, there were two weeks there when the kittens were first out that I thought Piper’s face had permanently frozen into an open-mouthed grimace with an unbroken “ssssssss!” coming from it. But she is gradually, gradually, coming around, and yesterday even went so far as to play with Ollie. Playing consisted of trapping him in a cardboard box and boxing his ears like an angry British nanny, but at least nobody bled and she seemed to be having fun.

Eventually everything will settle down, the kittens will no longer be news, and I will stop posting these entirely kitten-centric updates. Eventually. For now, I’m following my vet’s advice: take lots of pictures, give lots of treats, and spend lots of time cuddling everyone. And, whatever happens, don’t flop down on the couch when you’re high. That way lies madness. And ground-in cat.