More Feline Follies

So I’ve got this fan­cy new LJ client, and I fig­ure I should post something.

Shel­ley is back to being unable to keep any­thing down. I guess it’s braised chick­en liv­er time again. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, (this is gross, okay?) the kit­tens are all too inter­est­ed in the results when she horks. And while FIV is sup­pos­ed­ly only trans­mit­table through blood and sex­u­al activ­i­ty, we aren’t absolute­ly sure that it can’t be passed through sali­va. Of course, we always try to clean up after any such inci­dent imme­di­ate­ly, but now we’re also hav­ing to con­stant­ly shoo Moon­stone and Mica away when it hap­pens. And when I got up this morn­ing, there was a big mess in the kitchen, and I don’t know if they noticed it before I got it cleaned up. Which is worrisome.

Hap­pi­ly, Shel­ley did come and cud­dle with us a bit last night. Until Moon­stone decid­ed to join her in my lap. She did­n’t like that, so she scoot­ed off. But at least she is leav­ing the kitchen.

Zoë is used to the kit­tens now. She does­n’t seem to want to hurt them, but she’s con­stant­ly fol­low­ing them and watch­ing them and get­ting between them and the food or the lit­ter­box. We have to watch her to make sure she isn’t harass­ing them. She’s need­ed some spe­cial alpha social­iza­tion time with sam­bear in the past to make it clear that small­er crit­ters (like tod­dlers) can still out­rank her in pack hier­ar­chy, and it seems we’re going to have to work on that more.

When the boys have tried to eat Shel­ley’s food while she’s at the bowl, she has of course warned them away. And this morn­ing, for the first time, I saw Mica warn­ing Moon­stone away from the Kit­ten Chow when he tried join­ing his broth­er for break­fast. They ate togeth­er before peace­ably. Interesting.

Mica has also learned to be every bit as insis­tent as Shel­ley is when he wants to be pet­ted. He’s a lit­tle cud­dle slut, which is great. He can’t man­age to meow quite as loud­ly, yet—he just meeps. But he’s work­ing on it.

Katie is cur­rent­ly scan­ning, crop­ping, and oth­er­wise manip­u­lat­ing graph­ics to cre­ate a cus­tom back­ground for the kit­tens’ web­site. Yes, it’s all homeschooling.