Meet Caroline

We’ve added a new fur baby to our family.  Meet Caroline. She’s about 16 weeks old, weighed in at just over four pounds at today’s checkup, and is full of energy.  She’s also incredibly sweet and playful.

You may remember that I said we weren’t looking to foster or adopt for a while after losing so many pets in a relatively short time.  We didn’t have a set time frame in mind, and we weren’t actively looking.  Sometimes fate (or in this case, my sister’s elderly neighbor) just decides to drop a kitten in your life (or on your sister’s porch a few hours before you’re supposed to arrive).

We went to spend the weekend with my sister, Gabrielle, three weeks ago.  The visit had been planned for months, for my parents to come, and for Nick and I to come.  Gabrielle calls me a lot, so I didn’t think much of it when she called me right before I left work.  Until she started in on a tirade about someone dropping off a kitten on her porch.  She’s a total cat person, but she works nights, and had just gotten up.  She also has six cats, five of whom arrived on her porch as kittens in her old neighborhood, in various states of ill heath.  Her current neighborhood doesn’t seem to have such a high population of homeless cats, so she thought her days of rescuing kittens on her way out the door were over.

I suggested that she ask her next door neighbor, a very nice elderly lady who seems to know all of the goings on of the neighborhood, if she knew anything about the kitten’s arrival.  And I started thinking about how fun it might be to have a kitten again.

It turned out that the kitten had been wandering the neighborhood for a couple of days.  Gabrielle’s next door neighbor, and a neighbor across the street had seen her and decided that she needed to be taken somewhere safe.  Neither of them are cat people, so they weren’t sure of the logistics of rescuing a kitten, but felt certain that Gabrielle would know.  They put the kitten on her porch, with the intention of calling her later in the day, after the time she usually gets up.  She just happened to get up earlier that day since we were all coming to stay that evening.

We had already made plans to go with Gabrielle to take two of her cats to the vet while we were there, so she just called and added an appointment for the kitten.  We knew at that point that one of us would be keeping the kitten.

After we arrived and met the kitten we decided that we would keep her.  Nick came up with the name Caroline, which I loved.  I had originally suggested Olivia, which Nick liked as well.  We ended up drawing for her name, since we both liked both names.  Our next girl will be Olivia.  Fortunately, we tend to agree on girl’s names.  Boy’s names are an entirely different story.  It took us two days to name Frankie, and I’m pretty sure it’s the only boy’s name we will ever agree on.

Caroline is settling in well.  It has been a while since we’ve had a kitten; Frankie was our last kitten (other than some short term fosters), and he’s nine.  We had forgotten how playful and energetic they are!  Caroline is interested in everything, and constantly wants to play and explore.  She’s very affectionate, and loves to cuddle when she’s not busy exploring.  We haven’t allowed Caroline to interact with the dogs yet, just because she’s so tiny.  Duke and Chuzoo are both great with cats, having spent their lives with cats, but Duke is over 90 pounds.  We just want Caroline to be a little bigger before she starts playing with the dogs.  The older cats are adjusting to having a kitten in the house.  It’s kind of fun to watch them act all offended when she does things that they did as kittens.

So even though we weren’t actively looking to add another kitty to the family, it only took us a few months.  It feels right, though.  Caroline seems happy with us, and she definitely makes us happy.