Our First Year With the Cats

A Friday Hodgepodge

About a year ago, we acquired our first family pet, a Balinese kitten. Three months later, her half-brother joined us. Here's how Lucinda and Seymour are doing.

Lucinda, after a hard day of supervising some wallpapering. (Image by the author.)

1. One can own cats for a lifetime and never tire of discovering how different each individual is. Lucinda and Seymour are both Balinese, but there is no confusing them. This goes for their personalities, of course, but also for their appearance. Their builds, faces, and fuzziness are quite different.

We went with Baliese because the kids wanted fuzzy cats, but Seymour is merely long-haired. Lucinda takes up the slack in that department, though.

Seymour is also ... small. He's healthy and active, but we often call him the "half-cat," or the "halfling cat."

2. Lucinda remains the introvert of the two and "raccoon mode" is still a thing with her, and probably always will be. Cats of this breed sometimes will have a "favorite person," whom they will often follow around the house.

Lucinda, aka "Dad's cat," likes to follow me around, especially during my evening routine, and will come to me and do a distinctive meow when she wants to be picked up and petted. I always ask Hug? just to be sure. If she cocks her head back looks at me like I'm from Mars, I know better than to pick her up.

But just because she's Dad's cat doesn't mean Lucinda won't stalk anyone else. She often watches us when we do things she deems interesting, and she's big on routines. She shows up at our side door around the times people come home during the week and is waiting to greet us.

I've seen her do this ahead of when others get home, and I have looked inside while fishing for my keys and spotted her sitting and looking at the door.

Seymour, not ready to get out of bed just yet. (Image by the author.)

3. Seymour may be half a cat, but he is always up for a petting session. Mrs. Van Horn is "his person," but anyone who sits on a couch for any length of time is likely to have him show up and fling himself next to their leg and angle for pets.

Oddly enough, he is not a lap-cat. He'll take pets anytime and anywhere else, and he'll sleep next to anyone in all sorts of weird positions.

Just not the lap.

4. So we have a big cat and a little cat. Guess which one is the chow hound?

Seymour, of course.

In the morning, if he deems me slow to serve the wet food, Seymour will show up and meow at me. He follows me and watches everything I do while I'm getting their food and water for the day.

When I bring "the good stuff" (the wet food), Seymour will stand on his hind legs like a meerkat when I close in on the feeding station until I have his bowls in place.

Lucinda does not partake in wet food at all. I originally misread this as her letting Seymour eat first, like she adopted him, but I got that wrong.

I eventually realized that Lucinda wasn't eating wet food at all, and thought that perhaps this was because Seymour was hogging it all.

So it was that one day, when I knew Seymour was napping, I offered Lucinda her own bowl of the good stuff.

Her reaction? She picked up some debris from nearby and placed it into the bowl, and then covered that with a scrap of paper!

-- CAV