We were finally able to tell who was who consistently by the end of our second week with the kittens. Towards the start, it was mainly behavior based. Kasia was much more interested in people, while Zosia didn’t want to be petted as much and would go off on her own a lot more. Either way, they seem to get along very well with each other:
About halfway through the week, Zosia started looking more obviously different, bigger and more mature. She is about half a pound heavier than her sister. She was from the start, but it has become more obvious as her face has changed:
Kasia still looks more kitten-like:
They quite like eating cardboard, so we have had to take most boxes away that are too easy to eat, but they love these ‘non-woven bins’, as Amazon calls them. They haven’t seemed as able to eat or otherwise destroy them as cardboard. They make for great toys because they can hide in them, collapse them and see through the little hole in them. They were part of some truly hideous nightstands we got when we first moved to the US that have since been replaced with proper ones.
We were able to use the actual nightstand part as well to deal with another issue. They both still had a lot of interest in sleeping in the mechanical sofa whenever we were out of the room for long. We did two things to fix this. Chris created something that had as similar feeling to the inside of a sofa from the old night stands and some cheap fleeces and put it on the other side of the room. We also tried to make the actual sofa as unfriendly as possible. Chris filled any major holes with foam. The thing that most seemed to work though was putting a large sheet of vinyl carpet runner from Lowes underneath it.This is the only thing the internet said cats hate that ours genuinely don’t seem that keen on. What you do is turn it upside down so the spiky part is facing up:
It is not a harsh enough material to actually hurt them, but uncomfortable enough that you wouldn’t want to sit or walk on it, so they have been motivated to avoid it. Lowes conveniently sold it in a size exactly the width of our sofa, so only a single cut was required to fit it. The bigger challenge was propping up a 300 lb sofa to put it underneath.
Here’s the video:
As a small preview of week 11, when I was writing this, Zosia jumped on the keyboard and composed her first blog:
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