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.

Adopted another kit­ten from the Humane Society (and I wasn’t able to wait until the new year). When I went to go see him at the shel­ter, he jumped into my arms, started purring, and wouldn’t stop nuz­zling my face. Even if he was any less cute, there’s no way I could have left him there.

He’s exactly what I was look­ing for: four months old, neutered, male, with a stubby tail. Cats with stub tails from shel­ters usu­ally have their tails cut short because they’ve been run over by a bike, or caught frost­bite, but on him there’s no sign of scar­ring so he was prob­a­bly born with it.

I’ve yet to name him cause I want to see what kind of per­son­al­ity he devel­ops first.

At this point, his res­pi­ra­tory infec­tion led to sores and he was bleed­ing from him nose. That’s why he looks sort of sad and groggy.

When I got him, he had an upper res­pi­ra­tory infec­tion and was infested with fleas. I kept him sep­a­rated from Dolly for more than a week, but she still man­aged to catch both. Now she’s really grumpy and sick, and he’s com­pletely over it. She also feels huge, because the lit­tle guy is so small right now.

He likes to sleep by rest­ing his chin on my cheek, or lying right across my neck. I’m cur­rently try­ing to change his sleep­ing pat­terns because he’s still a noc­tur­nal cat and gets up in the mid­dle of the night to lick my face. And because he’s a kit­ten who doesn’t know any bet­ter, he thinks Dolly is play­ing with him when she gives him a swipe in annoy­ance. There haven’t been any real scraps between them yet. More of a play­ful fight­ing, where Dolly gives as good as she gets.

He tries to sleep with her all the time, and Dolly is usu­ally just too lazy to move away. I’m pretty sure this has helped her get used to hav­ing him around.

His tail isn’t buried under Dolly’s fat — that’s how long it is.

I won­der if I can be as good as Tiana and only write about him once a month the way she does with her son. But cats grow up so fast; they reach adult­hood in one year instead of 18, so I’m more tempted to record him as much as pos­si­ble when he’s so small and cute. I just don’t want to be a mommy blogger.