Day Four
While the older cats haven't exactly taken over the job of kitten sitting, they are interacting more and watching them more. They take turns between being out in the living room, keeping an eye on them, and hiding somewhere in the back, where they hope they will remain unnoticed.
The kittens have been sleeping pretty well during the night, and so have I until last night when I awoke in the middle of the night and stirred enough to get Tai's attention. Chi was already keeping her Mommy company, so Tai decided to come back to my room to make sure that I was being properly supervised and sufficiently cuddled. Her conclusion must have been negative because she came back there and not only gave me a cat scan, she also thoroughly examined my neck, as well as my nostrils. Apparently there has been some upheaval in the world of human nostrils, since mine have been carefully observed multiple times (mostly from an interior position) and well tended. Tai also must have thought my neck was too cool again because she made the supreme sacrifice of using her tiny body to warm it up. Apparently the blanket was too heavy to drag across my inert body so a kitten cuddle pack was promptly applied. I'm not quite sure when I've been "treated" to such careful feline ministration.
I've deduced that Tai is a kinesthetic genius, while Chi has an astounding intellect, like the brainy kid in the cartoon, and they very much learn from each other, which is both a marvel and a worry. These girls are achieving heights it took much longer for Li'l, Pixie, and Yeti to accomplish. For instance, the top tier of the tallest kitty tree has been a sort of rite of passage for each of the kittens who have come into this house. Li'l reached it after being here for a couple of weeks. He was smaller than either of these two and still sick when he came to live here. Yeti was a little bigger, but still it must have taken about a week to reach that level. Pixie was about the same size as Yeti only she was older and a little more developed. She also mastered it in about a week. She was pretty small but definitely a week or two older than these kittens. But these two figured it out the first day.
Tai is somewhat of a Spidergirl cartoon character. She flings herself at the couch and simply sticks there like a string of al dente spaghetti. Then she climbs the rest of the way up to the top. The first couple of days, she jumped up there like that and her tail flipped back and forth nonstop. She resembled that retro black cat wall clock, whose tail acts as a pendulum. Chi's extreme intelligence shows when she sits there looking at an object or a situation and figures things out for herself. She'll put two unrelated objects together and create a new toy and a new game. A plastic frozen yogurt spoon, for instance, moved in the direction of an empty bandage box creates a cool noise. I'm not sure what exactly it is to them, other than a fun noise, but it was intriguing enough to entertain them for at least thirty minutes. Once one of them figures anything out, the other one figures it out too, usually right away, or at least the same day.
This shared intelligence is pretty interesting but it's also accelerating the rate at which they learn how to do things, which as I'm sure you can imagine, can be a good thing or a not so good thing. With all the other kittens, I knew I had a week or two of grace time when I could use the top tier of the cat tree as a kind of tower prison. It looked fun to be up there, but once you were up there, getting down was not so easy. Not with these two. They conquered it the very first day they were here, and I haven't yet figured out a good replacement spot. The bathtub is my last bastion of hope for a few minutes of peace. It didn't take Li'l long to figure that one out, but Pixie and Yeti were slower with this obstacle.
We survived the fourth day and night. Beebee is still vocalizing her displeasure, and Li'l is still hiding pretty much all the time. He comes out to eat and that's it. He's moved his protest headquarters to the top of my closet, which will require both time to grow and a keen intellect to allow the kittens access to his fortress up there. I give him about two weeks respite up there, but I sure hope he will rejoin the family long before that. Given how social he is, I have to think that this has more to do with the skin allergy than the new kittens. One or the other is enough to deal with, but both together is too much. I see his point and am being appropriately sympathetic.
No comments:
Post a Comment