The Cats...

We currently have two cats, Baby (a 20-pound monster who is about 5 years old) and Frappy (12-pounds of fluff, but an "old lady" at 11-12 years old!).  We had a Calico named Dot, who past away about a year and a half ago due to a rare Cancer, she is missed every day!


Dot, in one of her favorite places.



Dot & Baby cuddling in the clean laundry...



Dot giving Baby a bath, he is just learning to do this on his own, 1.5 years after her death.




 





Frappy came to live with us this past summer (2010), because she was being picked on by my Mother's two cats and Baby was acting very lonely since Dot's been gone.  Almost a year into living here, they still don't get along as well as Dot & Baby did, but we had Dot when Baby was a baby!  Frappy is a gorgeous dark brown color with a few white markings.

I believe that both Frappy and Baby are Ragamuffin mixes, they fit the description nearly perfectly (Frappy doesn't have the typical coloring, but Baby does).  I generally just call both of them DLH (Domestic Long Hair), because both came to me as strays as tiny kittens!  Frappy I got from a coworker who found her out in a field on a walk, and Baby came to us through Bend Spay & Neuter Project, where I volunteered until we moved to Washington in 2007.  He was a kitten I fostered and ended up adopting myself because we were so in live with him!  He had several medical hoops to jump through as a tiny baby, including a suspected extra loop in his intestines, a severe milk allergy (that left him even suffering from the KMR (kitten milk replacement)!), and things like dehydration from an unknown issue.  He was too small to run many "tests" on, since he weighed only 9 ounces at his sickest!  But, with 30cc saline injections every 4 hours, bottle feeding, and a slew of medications (pet equivalent of Ammoxacillin, Kaopectate (for a diarrhea issue), baby gas relief (OTC in kids section, this helped "deflate" the gas build up from his formula), dewormer, vitamin goop (I forget the name, but it comes in a big tube looking thing for horses, in smaller doses, it is great for other baby animals like kittens), and, of course, KMR mixed with a Science Diet prescription wet cat food (i/d) that has added nutrients and is normally given to cats with kidney issues.

He was a sick little baby!  Generally at 8 weeks old, kittens weigh in at the 2 pound mark and can be spayed/neutered...Baby didn't meet that mark until he was over 3 months old!  That made him about twice the size of the other kittens ready for adoption.  That made it so much easier to convince my other half we "had" to adopt him!  I am so glad we did, he is a joy every day!

Baby did not care for the Cat Grass, he prefers Catnip and fake mice much more!  On the left is Baby with a new mouse, he goes nuts over those little round ribbon tails!  Frappy promptly ate the eyes and ears off the mouse I gave her and then wanted nothing more to do with it. :)  The grass for Baby was "that thing sitting in my new water dish", lol.

Sometimes it's the simple things that make great toys...the egg crates that come with our eggs (we buy 5 dozen at a time) are awesome toys as far as Baby's concerned!

Christmas 2009 I put up our Christmas tree!  We generally aren't home at Christmas, but we attempted to hold the festivities that year.  My sister and her family couldn't make it, so it ended up being just my Mother, an Uncle, and us at the house.  We went for dinner at the "other" parent's house and did gift exchanging with them a day or two after the holiday.  Baby thought I put the tree up just for him though!  He spent hours and hours sleeping on the tree skirt and twirling the large snowflake ornaments!  All of the ornaments there are either plastic or metal, yeah for shatterproof decorations!  We also put bells on the tree (lots of them) to help let us know when one of the cats is trying to "investigate" higher in the tree, lol.  At 7.5' tall, that tree could really hurt someone if it fell!  The cats generally leave it alone after a day or so though.