Well, we bit the bullet and got our two-year-old cat Kyra a friend this weekend. After extensively considering Kyra’s current situation where she’s alone most of the time, and when she’s not alone she’s shadowing me as if I’m her only friend in the world (scary notion), we concluded that another kitty friend would help.

We read up about introducing established cats to new pets and found that resident cats will take better to kittens than to older cats. So on Saturday we hit Petsmart and adopted a four-month-old male kitten we named Grayson. He’s gray with white paws and a white chest and blaze. He purrs non-stop and is constantly kneading everything his front paws touch, even the linoleum. If you know Kyra, this kitten is nothing like her in personality. It probably helps that he’s been in a shelter and has been handled before, whereas Kyra was a bit of a wild one when we got her and not even weaned from her mom.

Next to Kyra, Grayson is so tiny. I forgot how small Kyra used to be. We introduced him right away to a “safe room” (the downstairs bathroom) where we set up a little towel bed, food, and kitty litter box. That was to help him get adjusted to his new environment. The book we’ve been using as a guide said to give him a couple of toys and once you hear him playing with the toys, it’s a sign that he’s getting settled. Well, about fifteen minutes after we put him in the safe room the bells in his toy ball were tinkling. We’ve let him out a few times (when Kyra’s not around) to roam and get used to his new surroundings. He scampers everywhere and sometimes his rear end gets ahead of his front end, like he hasn’t quite mastered running yet, and it’s pretty cute to watch. He sort of reminds me of Ducky from The Land Before Time the way he scrambles around.

Kyra doesn’t like him yet, but that’s normal. We’re following the book’s advice to introduce him gradually to her and let her get used to him. Hopefully before long she’ll be looking after him like one of her own. Or at least stop hissing at him long enough for us to feel safe putting them in the same room together unattended.

Here’s a picture of him. We took about fifty pictures of him, not because we’re obsessive like that but because he was such a bundle of motion that nearly every shot was blurry. This picture is one of about two that turned out in near-focus.