Meet Pip

I know we said, before we knew how close to losing Captain we were, that when the fateful day came when Captain would cross that rainbow bridge, we'd take a break from pet ownership for a while. And that 'while' lasted not quite three weeks. Yes, it was lovely not to have a basement that smells like litterbox and far fewer dust bunnies floating around. But the house also felt very empty. I will also fully admit that had it not been for the holiday season, we may have delayed things a little longer. But I took a trip to the OSPCA that turned into about 4 or 5 trips all told, and soon the idea of having a kitty under the Christmas tree seemed pretty cool.

Of course, things don't always work out the way they do in the movies... we couldn't delay the adoption until Christmas because the OSPCA is simply overrun with cats right now and had no room to keep her that long. On the bright side, they had also dropped the adoption fee - a fire sale on kitties, if you will. I have long been partial to calicos and so we honed in on Pip - old enough to be past the spastic age of kittendom, but still very much a kitten at roughly 5 months old.

No, she didn't come home with the name Pip. She actually came home with the name Tink, which we did not let on to the kids; I wasn't keen on keeping it. Liam did find the adoption paperwork and saw it after the fact, but by then he was sold on Pip, too. Chad and I went back and forth on names and mutually agreed on this one. He will tell you it comes from Pippi Longstocking and I will tell you it comes from the orphaned protagonist of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations... what matters most is that we all like it. And I will admit that it does seem to suit her more than Gracie or Minka, which were a couple of my other favourites.

The kids simply adore her. She has proven over these past 48 hours to have a very sweet personality, fun and playful and very much a lap cat. We have had a couple of issues with her... number one, our pre-lit Christmas tree mysteriously 'went out' tonight, with her underneath it. Chad diagnosed the problem and it's lit once more, and he doesn't think she should be held responsible for it, but I do find it funny that the tree has worked for 5 years now and as soon as she's under it something goes wrong. Of course, she's not just under it; she also likes to get INTO it, as seen here. Which is why we keep her shut into the music room at night. The only problem with that was when we heard someone playing piano sometime after midnight on Saturday...

And we also had the issue of a very wet cat jumping up on the couch tonight, which after some detective work, seems to be the result of her having fallen into the toilet. We think. The kids' bathroom was utterly sprayed with water and had a telltale trail of paw prints leading out of it. Ughhh.

But Mallory was sick this weekend, and she curled right up with her on the couch, and within a couple hours of having her home on Friday Liam had already made her a stocking (pictured above), stuffed with cat treats and toys left over from Captain... which goes to show just how endearing she is. We're back in it for the long haul.