Sleeping Beauty

In the post Kitten's Cat Naps, I shared a few of Kitten's favourite napping places with you. As you may have noticed (especially in #10), no matter where Kitten is sleeping, he is generally in some bizarre contorted position. Ever since Kitten was a little kitten, he has loved to sleep in what appear to be some of the most uncomfortable positions imaginable.

Starting from Kittenhood and progressing to Kitten at present, here are a few of the more memorable:

Above, we have a very crusty Kitten sleeping in the crevice of the couch.

To the right, a weird stretch-leg pillow thing seems to be happening.


To the right, we have another classic shot of Kitten in the prime of his adolescence. As you can see, he hasn't quite grown into his tail yet. Now this position seems to be some combination of retracted arms and a twisted lower torso with pointed toes.

Below, Kitten is starting to assume his current favourtite position, though as you will see, this one is more board like. He also seems to favour retracted arms and legs, but his tail is now straight.

You will notice from these picture that in his earlier days, Kitten preferred to sleep on soft things. This too has changed.

On the left, we have a slightly different variation: the jamming the body into a place it doesn't fit. And on the right, the beginning of the modern Kitten pose.








These two below are the most recent. They show kitten in his current favoured position. It seems to combine elements from numerous pervious positions. He has maintained the belly up position, as well as the retracted arms. However, he has moved away from the briefly favoured retracted legs and is once again favouring the spread leg position. He also seems to have moved away from the extreme rigidness of some of the previous positions and has resumed the slightly twisted torso, except he is now twisting his upper half.

  

  

Potty Training

Here's a story from the archives:

Before we picked Kitten up, Boyfriend and I  decided that we were going to potty train him. By "potty train" I mean toilet train. We didn't like the idea of cleaning litter all of the time and also thought it would be a pretty cool party trick to have a cat that could use the toilet.

We had researched it a fair bit online and came across this site. I highly suggest you take a look; not only will it help you picture a few things I am about to explain, but it also has an awesome video you can watch. The basic concept is that you slowly aclimate the kitten or cat to toilet use. You start with the litter-box beside the toilet and day by day raise it up to toilet level. Then you have litter resting in the toilet, and finally you only put litter in rings along the inside (this will really make much more sense if you just go to the link).

Anyway, Boyfriend and I didn't want to spend our money on stupid plastic rings when we could clearly construct something equivalent ourselves. We set out to become master cat trainers. 

From day one we had the little-box in the bathroom.

This is Kitten, who had fallen asleep trying to climb out of his litter box. As you will recall from an earlier post, Kitten apparently had some narcolepsy issues in his kittenhood. 

Clearly, we could not have the box any higher than floor level at this point. But as you can see, the litter box is right beside the toilet. 

As Kitten grew, Boyfriend and I put textbooks under the box to raise it to toilet level.

The photo below isn't related to Kitten's toilet training saga in any meaningful way, but it is pretty awesome:

Once we had the box at toilet level I constructed a DYI version of the plastic rings. I started out with a shallow tray resting across the opening of the toilet. After about a week of that, I created a small hole in the centre. Each week, I would make the hole a bit bigger. It seemed to be working fairly well; Kitten would sit on the edge of the toilet like we hoped, however, he was really fixated on aiming for the litter. He was not okay with his business falling into the toilet. He also would paw in the air around the toilet like he was trying to bury it. Our toilet seat got quite scratched up during this experiment.

Like I said, things were going pretty well. It was frustrating having to move the litter-ring every time we wanted to use the bathroom, and it definitely made our house guests feel uncomfortable, but we felt it was worth it for the end result.

The ring got thinner and thinner and as it became thinner, it also became less sturdy. Kitten, who had not yet mastered balancing on the toilet seat, would put his entire weight on it and would end up falling into the toilet along with the ring.

What we thought would be a fun experiment was starting to become quite a burden. The rings were becoming more difficult for me to make and Kitten was falling in on a regular basis. Every time he fell in, the litter would fall in too and we would have to deal with that as well (we had flushable litter, but it was still a pain).

The straw that broke the camels back: One day, little gifts started showing up in our sink and bathtub. 

This was upsetting for Boyfriend and me on so many levels. 

I guess Kitten had also met his breaking point with the toilet rings. We didn't know that Kitten had coordination problems at this time, but in retrospect he probably physically cannot balance on a toilet seat. Regardless of his reasoning, Kitten was done with the toilet. He does deserve some credit though, as he mainly kept his gifts to things that appeared porcelain. 

Boyfriend and I gave up and in case you are wondering, Kitten is now very well trained to use a conventional litter-box. 

Kitten: Destroyer of Life

Boyfriend and I are pretty bad a keeping plants alive. One time, we even killed a cactus. However, right before we got Kitten, we decided that we were going to make a real effort to keep some plants around the apartment. We went out and bought quite a few plants of varying sizes and put them around the apartment. We made sure they had sunlight and watered them according to their instructions. We even bought those glass watering bulbs, As-Seen-On-TV. So basically, things were going pretty well.

Then we got Kitten. As soon as he was large enough to jump, Kitten began to systematically destroy our plants.

He has three main methods of destruction:

     1. Eat the plant

     2. Scratch and rip off the leaves

     3. Smother the plant

[Note: The following pictures are from Kitten's youth. He was going through puberty and looked a bit weird.]

Here, we have an example of smothering the plant. At one point, this was a very nice decorative chilli plant; it had lots of little chilli peppers on it and was quite cute. Kitten essentially created a nest in the plant pot. By the time Kitten was done with this plant, it was just a bunch of brown twigs. 

On the floor beside the chilli plant is a plant that Kitten destroyed by eating the leaves. Unfortunately, I never got a picture of him eating it. Probably because Boyfriend and I were worried that the plant was poisonous and were focused on getting Kitten to stop eating it, not on taking a picture.

This here, is the chilli plant near the end of its life. As you can see, there is nothing sticking out from the top except some dead twigs.

In this picture, Kitten is about to move onto his next victim - Hibiscus.  

At one point we even had Hibiscus flowering. It had beautiful red flowers. But leaf by leaf, Kitten ate it until it didn't have enough energy left to repair itself.

You can also see from this picture that Kitten knows he isn't suposed to be in the plant pot, but of course it was a game to him. A game that he always won.

In these last pictures we have some type of tropical tree thing. Kitten liked to use this one as a scratching post. He would also scratch at the leaves and try to pull them off. Sometimes, he would even try to eat the leaves. We were always most worried about Kitten when he would attack this plant because the leaves had very sharp tips. Boyfriend and I were pretty convinced Kitten was going to poke his eye out. Luckily, he never did. Though he did succeed in destroying this plant as well.

These plants represent only a small portion of the plants that Kitten has destroyed. We stopped taking pictures because his once adorably destructive ways became just plain annoying. Boyfriend and I are down to two plants now: one we keep behind the TV so Kitten can't get to it, the other is an old bamboo plant that we keep in the kitchen. Kitten sometimes will show interest in the bambo, but generally he leaves it alone.[Until recently we actually had two bambo plants. The other one was on our windowsill, but Kitten learned to jump up there too and knocked it off the ledge breaking the holder and spilling rocks every where.]

  
    Basically, Kitten hates all things living.

The Awkward Stage of Kittenhood

You know that awkward stage of childhood where even the cutest kids get really ugly for a year or two? (No? Maybe that was just me.) Kitten however, definitely went through that same stage.

 I know, I know, you probably don't believe me since Kitten is just so darn handsome at his ripe age of two, but I have evidence.

I hope you enjoy this look back at Kitten's uncomfortable stage.

I know people always think that kittens are just the cutest, but now you have empirical to prove them wrong. 

I think Kitten's ugliness as a kitten made us love him even more. He was such a little ragamuffin that it was impossible not to love him. He may have been an ugly duckling, but he has since grown into a slightly less ugly, straggly, angry swan.

 And once again, my favourite last.