State of the Cats – March Edition

I realized this morning that it has been quite a bit since I made a “state of the cats” post. Since I didn’t have a ton of pressing things that I wanted to talk about this morning now seemed as good as any time to do one. Josie continues to get more and more comfortable in our house, and I am pretty sure she is made out of some form of gelatin. Cats notoriously can sleep happily in some pretty contorted spaces but she more than any other seems to be completely happy in pretty much any shape. She likes to sleep between my wife and I and if for some reason one of us moves she is more than happy to stay in whatever random contortion she winds up in. Her current favorite spot is nestled into the pillow back of the old love seat we have in our loft… where she is effectively upside down which isn’t really something you can tell from the above picture.

Kenzie and Josie are getting along swimmingly, and while rare they do occasionally actually snuggle together. Generally speaking it involves laying on my legs while I am sitting on the sofa messing around on my laptop but I have encountered a few other random occurrences where they were nestled together. This is the relationship I was most concerned about because Kenzie has not really taken to liking another cat in our household ever. They however appear to be buddies and are constantly playing together and I’ve even caught Kenzie grooming Josie. We’ve even been teaching Josie how to play catch, and she does a much better job at actually returning the object than Kenzie ever has. Shockingly Kenzie is also seemingly fine with Josie playing with her hair bands.

While I don’t have a readily available picture of Mollie, the things on her front are not going super well. Mollie does not get along well with either Kenzie or Josie, and I am not sure if it is a jealousy thing or something else. Mollie and Kenzie have NEVER gotten along, and since Josie tends to be pretty passive it seems like Mollie is taking that to her advantage and venting her frustrations on Josie. This however leads to a cycle of events which means we hear once or twice a night a squabble that is largely vocal only. Mollie will attack and corner Josie, and to this Kenzie will come to the rescue and go after Mollie until she gets chased off. Weirdly they can all be in the same vicinity when one of us is involved. There have been several occasions when I have all three snuggled in with me on the sectional.

I don’t really know if it is a situation of Mollie is actually trying to play, but not really understanding what play is? She had a weird upbringing of spending the first months of her life in a dog shelter without access to other cats and I keep blaming that on the fact that she doesn’t quite work like other cats seem to. For the time being however I am just going to be thankful that two of the three cats get along swimmingly. Josie is either following me around or following Kenzie around pretty much all of the time. Kenzie seems to be perfectly fine with this and for that I am counting my blessings because I could have wound up with a three way conflict on my hands. I am still working on Mollie and giving her lots of attention any time I can catch her off by herself, thinking that maybe just maybe eventually we will have a real breakthrough there.