I was going to wait to see how his per­son­al­ity devel­oped before set­tling on a name, and for a while I was call­ing him Serge (after Gainsbourg) cause he was almost overly affec­tion­ate, con­stantly paw­ing me and rub­bing my face with his. Eventually, I real­ized it’d be impos­si­ble for a cat to live up to such name­sakes, so I went with my first choice, which was Leonard. It has Leo in it, which is per­fect for any­thing from the fel­i­dae fam­ily. I could never call him Lenny though cause “Lenny Cohen” sounds so wrong to me.

 

I love cats with goofy faces, and I can tell Leonard has a bit of one already from the way his cheeks puff out. I also like my cats fat cause there’s more to hold when they decide to crawl into the cov­ers. As novel as it is to see how tiny Leonard is in com­par­i­son to Dolly, I’m look­ing for­ward to see him putting on some more weight.

Unfortunately, Dolly’s per­son­al­ity has changed. She’s a bit less affec­tion­ate, less vocal, and more sickly; I’ve been deal­ing with per­pet­ual res­pi­ra­tory infec­tions and eye abscesses ever since I brought Leonard home. I’m won­der­ing if she asso­ciates being mis­er­ably sick with the arrival of the new kit­ten. Her mater­nal instincts seem to kick in when he lies next to her, and she’ll try to lick and groom him, but he doesn’t seem to like it much and they end up fight­ing. Hopefully, he’ll grow into the habit.