Kitten Diary - The Little Monsters - Weeks 8-17

Weeks 8-17

While they’re very tiny, they can't cause too much damage – apart from the maze of scratches on our arms and legs. However as they get a little bit bigger, they start to wreak a bit more havoc...

The destruction

The following is a list of what they destroyed;

• The carpet - even though they have a scratching post, they still claw the living room carpet. They have their favourite patches all over the room – which are getting noticeably threadbare.

• 

  We did this!

  Any paperwork we leave out gets automatically shredded and spread around the room.
• The tumble drier – one night when locked in the kitchen/utility room area, they get behind the tumble drier and rip a hole in the outflow air pipe that goes through the wall. Goodness knows why these things are so flimsy. We don’t repair it for another 6 months as we know they’ll just do it again, so no tumble drying through the winter – brilliant.
• The broke the lamp. We had a long Chinese lantern style lamp in the living room. One of them (my money’s on the ginger one) launched himself at it, knocked it over and started ripping chunks out of the lamp shade.
• They bite the walls. I'm not joking. Both of them bite and tear wallpaper and plaster off the wall in various edges and corners of the living room. My husband does a temporary repair job with flour and water.
• They take pictures off the wall now. Not content with overturning the pictures on surfaces, they jump up to the smaller pictures on the walls they can reach and rip them off.
• Decapitated wooden camel. We have a wooden camel ornament that stands on the floor – it’s about knee high and because they kept knocking it over, it has been laid flat on the floor for months. When I decide I can stand it up again, they knock it over while I’m at work and the head is severed mid-neck.

I cannot over state just how demanding they were. As soon as I was in the room with them, they wanted attention, as soon as we put a new object into the room, they were all over it until they were either bored of it, had eaten it or broken it. I longed for the day that they could go outside, but our plan was to have them spayed/neutered at 5 months, let them recover and then let them start going out. The last month before they went out was the hardest, as they were getting big, and still had the same amount of energy as when they were tiny. When two almost full grown cats are tearing round the place, bouncing off the walls –it’s even harder to try to watch casualty of an evening.

Curiosity couldn't possibly get me into any trouble!

At night, the bumps and bangs coming from the kitchen were growing louder. It wasn’t uncommon for us to hear a massive crash and have to go down and investigate in the middle of the night. One night we came down to find they had knocked a speaker off the top of the kitchen cupboards. It had bounced off the kitchen surfaces and left a dent in the unit! Our neighbours reported hearing these crashes and bangs too. Thankfully they were good humoured about it! When shutting them in the kitchen at night, sometimes I would literally have to hurl both cats into the room at once and quickly shut the door or I'd never get them both in at once.



I would let the cats go upstairs quite frequently in the evenings to let them stretch their legs and have a run round and burn some energy off. They would tear through the house from top to bottom, making a terrible amount of noise but I was just glad to get them out of my face.

As a young male, Jason started to get quite aggressive. Bigger than Milly, he would come off better in any wrestling, though that didn't stop her from baiting him on occasion. They would wind each other up by chasing and biting the other’s provocatively waving tail, which led to fighting and as they got older, loud yowls instead of squeaks.

Jason was very strong and muscular; when he pounced and sprang, you could see all the muscles rippling under his coat. He was a great example of a young male cat in perfection physical condition - and very handsome. Milly, about 60% of his size was like a little toy cat. Dainty – with tortoiseshell markings and white paws, she was every inch a lady (except that is when she was licking her bits in front of an audience)
 

We're always up for an adventure!



When their fighting got out of hand I would step in and separate them as I worried she would get hurt. I looked forward to the day Jason had the snip – so his aggression would decrease. Also he could get rid of any leftover aggression outside, on the other cats of the neighbourhood and any unfortunate small animal that came his way. However, through it all he was always the more affectionate, insisting on sitting on our laps and purring loudly and rubbing us with his face.

I probably took things a bit too seriously as an owner, imagining they were going to be the worst behaved cats ever (when in reality they were just being kittens) Also if I had been out all day at work, I felt like I should be spending time with them in the evening, so I would let them upstairs when I was doing things like using the computer. I would be trying to type with one cat in my lap pawing at the keyboard, and the other on the window sill in front of me trying to take the wallpaper of the corner of the wall with her teeth! Not to mention the time I didn't exclude them from the bathroom when taking a bath, and Jason got up on the side and fell in! Not very relaxing really either for him or me...