Double Trouble

Sometimes you make a knee jerk decision to run an extra errand and it has long lasting repercussions. Once I did this and got rear ended. More recently, we ended up with an extra cat out of the deal. Maybe I should stop running errands. I'm pretty sure that's the moral of this story.

Okay, now that you're wondering what I'm rambling about... We adopted a kitten! We'd actually been considering it for months and had been looking through pictures of available kittens. None had quite seemed right though. Then, two weeks before Christmas, I decided to run by the pet store to pick up some extra supplies. It was a shelter adoption day but I wasn't worried because we had gone to tons of those and never found an animal we wanted to take home. (I mean, they're always adorable, but none seemed just right.) I bypassed the adoption event and picked up what I needed. Feeling very on top of my schedule for the day, I decided to swing by for a quick look. And there she was, laying on her back in a cage, frantically trying to bat at the Christmas decorations on the table below the kennels. It was probably all over for me in a heartbeat.

It couldn't have been worse timing with me leaving two days later for a conference and a Christmas trip to FL only days after I returned from the work trip but we decided to take the plunge anyway. A few hours (and no more errands) later, we were home with a new kitten and a very, very pissed off MT (our four year old cat). And thus started a trial run for parenthood that we didn't know we had signed up for.

There are the sleepless nights as the two cats chase each other onto the bed, off the bed, and back onto the bed again. There are the early mornings when Kaylee decides to find her loudest toy and start chasing it around the house. There are the sibling fights (we've given up on breaking most of them up). There are the late night trips to the emergency vet. There are the temper tantrums (because, in cat-speak, throwing up on your bed is the equivalent to a full out toddler melt down).

The phrases No! Don't eat that! and What's in your mouth? Spit it out right now! have become as common in our house as they are in my sister's, which is home to three toddlers. It certainly hasn't been anything like we expected and I'm not sure we'd sign up to do it again but the sweet moments are pretty endearing and the cats are slowly (glacially) warming up to each other. We even got them to hold still for one whole photo...