When we first got the kittens, I did weekly updates for the first month. Due to the business of the holiday season and in order to not overdo it, I’ve decided to go for monthly updates in the future.
They have more than doubled in weight since we got them on October 25th. They seem very happy and healthy. They have been allowed to go into the other rooms supervised and have thoroughly enjoyed this:
Offices are fun!
They also very much enjoy climbing. They love climbing up the screen to the balcony. It is stronger than it looks and exactly the right build for their claws:
They also very much enjoy this:
It is something a friend of mine recommended when I told her that Zosia seemed to try to literally climb the walls. It is basically a carpet leading up to a shelf. Chris affixed the carpet to the wall and they can run up it and get to the shelf. They love it and it gives an extra dimension to their play. It also gives them a place to get up and away from everything. They sleep on that shelf sometimes.
It is extremely good they have somewhere to climb because something I had read is that cats love climbing Christmas trees. Most of my cat owning friends have given up on having a tree for this very reason. We really wanted one though, both because we love Christmas and our huge tree is only a year old. We were determined to find a way to make it work.
We started off by doing things like the carpet to give them other outlets. After that, we tried putting the tree up with no ornaments or lights. Kasia did indeed climb it. We invested in some ssscat canisters. If you’ve gone to the Amazon link, you will have seen it only got 3.5 stars. I think this is due to people not buying enough. This product absolutely works, but you need full coverage, which can get expensive depending on what you want to keep the cat from. In order to fully deter the cats from the tree, we needed 7. Basically, they are smart enough to get around them if the coverage is less than 100%, but this appears to be the only thing that will deter them with us out of the room as it is heat activated and therefore worked just as well overnight when we were sleeping in another room or if we were out.
By covering the circumference of the tree from all angles facing in, we had 100% success. The cats avoided the tree in its entirety once all 7 were in place. We had a Christmas with a normal tree covered with lights and ornaments with no climbing, knocking or destruction of any kind. We will definitely do this next year and the canisters have plans in the near future for when the kittens grow big enough to reach the kitchen counter tops.
As a result, everyone had a merry Christmas:
Here’s the video: