Today was the kind of day you drive along thinking today is as beautiful as you might hope a midwinter's day to get: the sky all blue and clear and the trees with a bit of yellow stuck in the tops, and you're really cruising along and then you look down and realize that you're Ooops over the speed limit.  This may depend on your personality type.  

   I had too much coffee today but we have output.  Check out the video on the blog two down and you'll see an extra starlet.  Our cat Cooper.

A Cameo DSH Feline, 1 year old who was tagged as a “staff favorite” at the SPCA, and has now become like a second child in our family.

                Cooper is quite an extraordinary cat, alert and feisty and quite kittenish… also very social, and quite talkative.

              He escaped from confinement after only a few days and came running out to meet me from a house at the other end of the block.   Two weeks later he was so adapted and so good about everything, we let him out to explore and he didn’t come back. 

            I thought we’d lost him, so after two days I made flyers, and put a website notice and rang the missing cat team…

            We had a number of phone calls.  Cooper had been playing with children three mornings in a row a few houses to the north, he’d been sighted in a tree up the hill, he’d been given a drink of milk across the road to the west and down a bit, and he’d been seen chased off by another cat further along….

            I delivered more flyers and called out to a man in a driveway quite randomly…  We’re looking for our lost cat..  “Oh he’s here” Cooper had gone in through another cat’s door, woken up the lady of the house in her bedroom, and then gone to the fridge making his requirements quite clear.

            I’ve been worried about my two-year-old’s behaviour it’s a steep learning curve because the cat is so exciting! and understanding of inflicting pain and so on still new…  (We suffer ourselves too).  …  That’s enough we say…  be Gentle! That Hurts him, Don’t even think about it, and we intervene and give time out for one minute if the behaviour is bad attention-seeking or dangerous.    Cooper however, follows him, huddles and jumps at his leg spanning two metres low to the ground…  he wrestles and play bites and play kicks without using his teeth or claws..   It’s hilarious.  Now we have to give them both time out to be fair.

            He’s a bigger cat now, and robust, and although he won’t hurt us it’s a shock to be headed off at the doorway by a flying square foot of kitten playing anything you can do…  Sometimes he jumps up and kicks off again from your chest in one swift manuovre.  When he’s outside he climbs trees in a nano-second. 

            To show us that he’s an initiated member of the clan, he’s started bring us his hunting trophies.  Birds would be a disaster, mice - we'd be not so upset, but having played chase the string games with him, (it’s one way to distance him from the baby, at least by a metre), it should be no surprise that he brings us slightly mauled earthworms,  large ones, and deposits them in the hallway where they make silvery paths across the wood in a slow bid for escape.

            Cooper snores like a trooper, competes with our son for comfy positions in front of the fire, waits by the letterbox when he expects us home, and is firm friends with my mother who lavishes attention on him when she visits.  In fact she ignores us and directs her attention to the ‘kids’.  Cooper sits himself in the middle of whatever is going on, (the keyboard, the paper or book, the kitchen bench), he’s simply curious.  At night he wonders why he’s not welcome to lie across my neck, and tries anyway, signaling his arrival with an affectionate bite on my nose. 

            It’s stressful, but the same applies with human babies, and we love him dearly.