As a kid, I had to babysit my little sister and brother at different times. I was only a kid myself and didn’t embrace the responsibility that had been put upon me. As I had a difficult and at times traumatic childhood, I was afraid to have my own children, never wanted to. I felt like I missed that “Mothering” gene. So many of my friends couldn’t wait to have children and are now enjoying being grandmothers. The 30 plus years my husband and I were together we spoiled each other. We had agreed to no children when we first got together, thinking if we ever changed our minds we could adopt. We had cats, fur babies.
So accepting the responsibility of these three little kittens when they were only 8 weeks old was an eye opener for me. I don’t know how human mothers with twins do it, let along triplets. Here are three little beings wanting, needing, sometimes demanding food, clean litter, play and supervision. As I believe these girls are really smart, besides being really cute, I have been very serious and intent on teaching them good behavior from the beginning.
It only took four days to reach success on the “potty training”. The scratching on ONLY the right things took a little longer. The day they came to live on the Aina, “Auntie and Uncle” in the big house brought them down a kitty tower. She showed all of us how to use the scratching part. I had bought them a scratching pad in the shape of a heart as part of their nursery. 😉 Between the two acceptable scratching places, demonstrating to them how to do it, then grabbing them when they started to scratch somewhere that was a no-no and helping them feel the scratching pad under their paws, they slowly one by one got it. One learning from the other.
It was cute to watch and be a part of. Of course it was the one named after my Mom that was the most resistant to this too. I began to wonder if she was my karma kitty. I was a difficult child I’m sure and often thought if I had kids it would be payback time, so was glad I had chosen not to have any of my own. Because of the challenge she gave me, I poured the love on even more. Love is the answer and I am proving it to myself and this little red headed firecracker of a kitten, Traci. That’s her in the picture above, standing there looking innocent watching her sisters. 😉 If I could post the video you would see she is not so innocent.
I got to see how new mothers feel. All I wanted to do was be home and watch my babies. They are so cute and so funny. They were learning new things every day. Coming home from work, I would often bypass the grocery store or put off an errand as I needed to get home, now. It was silly of me probably, but I even curbed my outside time for awhile so I could be inside with them, instead of them wanting to climb the screen doors. They were quick to pick up on not climbing the screens. Spray bottle with water works magic at times. They were curious about outside but had never been outside so they didn’t know what they were missing.
They have a cat door but it wasn’t opened until after they were fixed. I work to keep them active during the day so they sleep at night. I don’t feed them when I first get up so they are not trained to wake me up to get food. I fill their crunchies bowls before I go to bed.
Being typical kids, they get fired up and chase each other around the house. Oh man, so much laughter as they would race and chase around my living room. I live in a one bedroom Ohana behind a main house. The living room is a comfortable size with an open space in the center where they chased each other under, over and around the fouton couch, around and around. Bouncing off and over the rebounder, up and over the loveseat to circle back again. Hilarious to watch, from my safe office chair at my desk. I had been needing more laughter in my life and boy howdy have these three girls provided it.