Way too much cute

My last two and a half days have been pretty much kitteh-centric. There’s a lot of work involved in introducing a half-pound scrap of fur to the household. We’ve had to make sure she’s shuttled to the litter boxes in the basement every few hours, to pry her off the curtains, and to rescue her after she’s made heroic leaps onto the slippery tops of my pyramid-shaped glass panel lamps. There’s been a considerable amount of following her around to see exactly what trouble she’s going to try to get into. When she’s not in the room, I feel as if I’m straining my ears in a constant attempt to figure out where she is and exactly what she’s playing with.

Both yesterday and Sunday evening I was wiped—I mean, lying on the sofa, knuckles scraping the floor, eyelids drooping at seven-thirty plumb tuckered out. But we’ve made a lot of progress. Fred knows where the litter box is, now, and how to get there on her own when she needs. She’s able to navigate on all three stories of the house and find people in it instead of mewing pitifully like she’s Little Orphan Kitty. And last night she had her first open-door bedtime in the grownup person’s bed, a test she passed with flying colors. So maybe I won’t feel quite so exhausted, the rest of this week.

This morning I was sitting on the john when Chloe trotted into the bathroom. She’s always been a bathroom cat; when someone is in there, she’s right beside them, begging for water from the faucet or attempting to open the cabinet doors and investigate their contents. As usual, Chloe walked into the little room with a welcoming cry and a squinch of her eyes. Almost immediately, like a deranged feline Jack-in-the-box, Fred popped her head from my pants, where she’d been making a hidey-hole in my underwear. Chloe recoiled in horror, hissed involuntarily, then sat back on her haunches when she realized it was only tiny little Fred. Glaring at me, she let out a disgusted, adolescent huff. It was as if I could almost hear her growling to me, “Jesus christ, that kid is everywhere!”

(And no, I don't intend to turn my journal into Kitty Picture Central, but my household has experienced a critical cuteness overload in the past couple of days.)