Solo

Meet Solo.




It was not my intention to get another cat after we lost Pie.  Our pet losses have been high this past year: Hope adopted abruptly just before we left Texas, Emma left behind, Elliott and Lili succumbing to a hereditary heart defect, and then Pie giving in to his age.  I kind of thought we'd give Chin a go at being a single kitty, keep our hearts open and if the universe decided that we needed another cat, we'd take it in.

Enter the three year old.

Not long (at all) after Pie passed away, Bug floored me.  We were playing with a very affectionate Chin when Bug told me "Miso needs a friend who isn't dead".

...ouch.

I put in a call about a cat I'd seen on craigslist that spoke to me, and the kids and I took off to meet him.  Solo.  So named because he was all alone in the world when the family we adopted him from found him.  Though lots of people prefer to think it's a Star Wars reference. ;)

He was a pathetic little baby kitten when he was discovered.  The family he'd been living with already had a cat and a dog and had no intention of keeping him, but took Solo in, fed him, cleaned him up, got him to the vet, etc.  He was ten months old when we met him (and there goes my "no more kittens!" rule, right out the window) and the three boys in the family had gotten quite attached.

The woman we adopted him from felt that we were a good match for Solo (Bug took to him instantly and was very gentle - yay!), but I wanted to talk to Richard about it, and I hated the idea of taking the cat while her oldest son was at school.  Not getting to say goodbye is hard.  I wasn't going to do that to someone else's kid.  We went home, I talked to Richard, she talked to her son, and we went back that evening.

Solo has been a real sweetie, and fit into our house very quickly.  I expected it to take a few weeks before Chin and Solo were okay with each other, but they'd stopped hissing at one another by the end of the second day, and were tentative buddies the day after that.  Now they're inseparable.

Solo is still very much a kitten - very active and playful - but also quite mature and thoughtful.  He'll attack anything that moves (so he's not a good bedroom kitty at night), but if he knows that there's a person beneath the movement, he will NOT put out his claws.  Bug can use him as a pillow, and Solo's okay with it.


(That's an early morning sleepy-face, not sad.)

I'm glad he's here.

Worst. Blogger. Ever.

Yep...that'd be me.

I've certainly *thought* about updating the blog quite a lot, but we've had quite a lot going on, too. Obviously, since it's been about a year since I've really written anything. Sheesh.

A few big things, though.

1 - We've moved. We're in a HOUSE again - yay! C has a super duper awesome playroom and, to be honest, we live in this. Seriously. We wake up in the morning, come in here, and we're pretty much in here until we go to bed at night.

2 - We got a dog. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had forgotten my big major dog rule though: NO MORE PUPPIES. So, like a fool, we adopted an 8 month old lab mix. Mostly because C absolutely loved her and she was awesome with him and that was a pretty big deal because he was well on the way to developing a fear of all dogs, especially the larger ones. At the time, he only liked chihuahuas and that was largely because he thought they were cats.

So, Hope entered the picture, thanks to Second Chance Pets. We love her. She's awesome. She gets along well with the cats and she'll let C do anything to her. I've seen him pull food out of her mouth while she's eating and she didn't react at all. She's also a really big, really rambunctious puppy. And she eats anything that doesn't run away from her. Like the sofa. Gah.



3 - I'm pregnant. Didn't see that one coming but we're quite pleased about it.



There have been some good projects going of late and our camera just made it's way back to us after I managed to leave it in Arizona, so I'll be taking some pictures and getting stuff posted asap.

Links:

Second Chance Pets - www.secondchancepets.org/index.html