The Second Visitor

Last week on Saturday I had my mom visit the kittens. Apricot, of course, disappeared. This week yesterday I had my dad visit.

Apricot again disappeared and didn't come out for hours afterwards, but I'm beginning to think this is just the way he's going to be. Once he comes out, he doesn't act traumatized or the least bit affected by his experience.

And this week I planned better. I managed to get my mom punctured by an unintentional Thimble, and since Daddy's on blood thinners, I needed to make sure that wasn't going to happen to him! So he came later, after their nap time, because it is during the sleepy time that I clip kitten claws.

Well, you really think clipping kitten claws when they're all riled up and playful is a good idea? And it's a good thing I had him visit after the claw clipping, because Colby had somehow managed to get all of his except two razor sharp. They're really good with their claws when they're interacting in a lap time petting time fashion, which is why I hadn't noticed.

They're really quite good kittens. They know the rules of human skin-kitten claw interaction. They just forget when they get all excited over a toy.

My daddy and my kittens.
Colby's the one you can easily see.
Thimble is in the picture. He's just behind the tree supports.

I also had a longer wand toy for Daddy to play with the kittens with. I actually had it last week too, and just forgot I had it. You have to put those sorts of toys out of sight and out of reach so the cats don't try to play with it on their own (the toy is not designed for unsupervised play) but with me, out of sight is out of mind, and I forgot about it!

Daddy had lots of fun, judging by the chuckles the kittens elicited. I noticed my play style with the kittens mirrors his, and I think this is very odd, considering that, with his work schedule, I would have seen Mom interacting with cats way more than Daddy.

He stirs up trouble more than I do, but then again, I see the two of them pounce on each other plenty; I don't have to initiate it! Whereas this is the first time he's gotten to interact with them. So he was trying to get one kitten to pounce on the toy and accidentally pounce on the other kitten. It might have worked with less focused cats, or less polite cats, but they were both focused on the toy and they do actually take turns. 

Sometimes they play with the toy together, and sometimes one will rest while the other plays. This means the human at the other end of the toy gets no rest at all!

I told Daddy about one time a few days earlier when Thimble had flipped the braided rug cat bed over on himself, and I looked over to see the bed, and Colby just watching it. I didn't see Thimble anywhere, and I hadn't seen the initial bed flip, so I didn't actually know where he was. I lifted the edge of the bed just a smidgen to see, and I didn't have to look--a fast paw came out and tagged me and then withdrew. He didn't use his claws, because it was me and not Colby, and so I just thought it was funny, that quick soft paw touch and retreat.

So Daddy promptly starts trying to get them to flip the cat bed. He actually had to trap a kitten himself as they flipped the bed going after the strategically placed toy, but not on top of either one. Since the game wasn't cat-under-the-braided-rug-bed but kittens-after-wand-toy, Colby emerged quite quickly out from under the cat bed, leading to a laughing comment from Daddy of, "he escaped!" 

The bed has a cat tail now...

He was having so much fun with them I wished he could stay longer, but his asthma was starting to bother him, both from working outdoors earlier in the day and because, well, my poor father loves cats but is allergic to them, and while he can be around them for short times, all the time is too much.

(He wasn't supposed to let Pippin in his bedroom when I lived with my parents, but he'd fall asleep on the couch in the living room with Pippin next to him. He says long-haired cats don't bother him as much as short-haired ones do. Good thing I have three long-haired cats then!)

I think perhaps this weekend I will take the weekend off from having visitors, though. It's exhausting for me to have anybody else in my house. Really, I'm such an introvert ... having cats in my house is about as much company as I want.