One of the big tasks of the fall and winter of 2020 to 2021, after we’d finished with the chaos of moving and unpacking, was… getting a pet. This may not sound like a big deal, but it was totally a big deal for our family. Having animals in my life, and interacting with them, training them, and watching them has always been very important to me. Way back in the 90’s and early 2000’s I’d had pet rats. I loved my rats and spent a lot of time with them, interacting with them, and learning and writing about them. But once we had kids, the vast majority of my pet-directed energy was re-directed onto the human baby. The rats were there in the background (in fact, Lela’s first word was “rats”), but they got little direct attention any more. We decided not to replace the rats once they died of old age. We’d get pets again once our youngest child went to preschool. Well, the last rat died when Lela was about a year old. We had another kid and moved from Menlo Park to Los Altos, into a house that actually did not allow pets. This was not a big problem though as we wanted another kid so it would be several years before pets were even on the horizon. So we had a third kid and a couple years later he went to preschool… but we were still in a rental house that did not allow pets. But this wasn’t a huge deal, as managing three kids ages 8, 6 and 3 took an enormous amount of energy, so pets weren’t a big priority. But over the years that followed, not being able to have pets stared to become a problem. It wasn’t a big deal, especially at first, but it became an ongoing source of background stress. Kind of like a splinter, that was working its way deeper and deeper into a finger, or like a pair of shoes that didn’t quite fit and caused constant low-level discomfort and blisters. The problem grew larger as the kids grew older and easier to manage. After a couple years, not only did I have enough energy for a pet, but the kids themselves were old enough that we wanted them to have the experience of having a pet, too, with all the joys, lessons, worries, responsibility, empathy, grief, and patience that came with that experience. Getting a pet became one of the many pressures that led us to start looking for our own home. Now we were in our own house and we’d finished with the chaos of moving. We didn’t want to introduce a pet to the household when everything was so unsettled, but once everything was unpacked, we could finally devote some serious attention to choosing and finding a pet. Now would also be a particularly good time to get a pet, as we were all home during the pandemic and couldn’t travel. It was a perfect time to introduce a pet to our household and get it settled in. The first question was… what kind of pet? This was a complex question. There’s a big dividing line between caged pets, like rodents, birds and reptiles, and uncaged pets like cats and dogs. Then there are pets like house rabbits, aquarium fish, and so forth. After much discussion, we decided on a cat or a dog. We wanted something bigger, something that would be an omnipresent part of our lives, that would be a part of our family for a long time. So I started looking into cats and dogs. Deciding between a cat and a dog was a complicated question, as each would be a very different experience. A dog would become a member of our ‘pack,’ and would require a great deal of training early on (housebreaking, behavior training, socialization etc.), and would require a great deal of attention over the course of its life: walks, ongoing training, management. Much of this training and attention would fall on us adults. A dog really would become a companion – that is one of the great pleasures of having a dog. A cat is different. A cat would become a member of the household but would require much less training and attention than a dog. Cats are more self-sufficient than dogs, and overall cats would impose smaller changes on the family and our behavior. A cat is more like a housemate. Psychologically, it felt like a cat might fit better into our family than a dog at this stage of our lives. It would be a part of our family without requiring the constant training and awareness of a dog. Plus, while I had never had a cat as a kid as my Dad is allergic to them, Mike had grown up with a cat, liked cats, and was less familiar with or enthusiastic about dogs. However, physical environment tilted the other way: the house was already set up beautifully for a dog. It had a kennel side yard, and dog doors leading from the house to the garage and from the garage to the side yard, so that, once housebroken, a dog could just go outside on its own to go to the bathroom. The house was not particularly well set up for a cat: the big patio door would almost require a cat to be an indoor-outdoor pet, unless we wanted to commit to having the house closed up all the time. But I had issues with letting a cat outdoors: the outside world is full of dangers, from cars and humans to diseases, parasites and accidents. My inclination was to keep a cat indoors, but that would mean reducing one of the big pleasures of the house’s design: the big open patio door. So that took a lot of thinking. While we figured this out, I researched cats and dogs equally. And I immediately discovered that there was ENORMOUS demand for pets right now. INSANE demand. Everyone was home during the pandemic and everyone want to adopt a cat or a dog RIGHT NOW. I read article after article of humane societies shipping dogs from rural areas to urban areas to meet the demand. Humane society staff had never seen demand like this. It was through the roof. Urban areas ran out of adoptable animals so cats and dogs were being shipped from rural areas into cities. Dogs and cats were being shipped up from the South to the mid-Atlantic states, and within California they were being driven from Gilroy and the Central Valley of California to the Bay Area. People were waiting at the arrival spots to get their new pet directly from the truck. I researched dog breeds and joined dog breed message boards, and tracked down reputable breeders in California, only to find that breeders had waitlists of one to two years for a puppy. Humane societies in our area had dogs, but the ones that were still available tended to have serious problems: behavior problems or ongoing medical issues, and a large number of them were pit bulls or pit bull crosses. A local golden retriever rescue organization only had a couple dogs available, and these were older dogs with health problems. It seemed that young, healthy animals were snapped up instantly. I researched humane societies and their adoption policies for cats. Our local humane society had a “kitten match” program which would match you with a new kitten, sight unseen, only to find that the list filled up within minutes of it opening – which it did only every Monday morning. A related adoption program in which you got to “meet” three kittens virtually (since there were no in-person meetings) also filled up within minutes. The adult cats they had available at the shelters were frequently missing an eye, a leg, a tail, or had feline HIV or leukemia. So cat and dog AVAILABILITY rapidly rose to become a major factor in our decision making process. After much discussion, we decided in December to get a cat. We decided it was more important to have a good behavioral fit, and we felt that a cat would fit better into our lives right now than a dog. We actually decided on a PAIR of cats, so they could play with each other and keep each other company too. We decided to act after we got back from winter bread, so we could give them our undivided attention. Then the “kitten season” ended, and the weekly sign-up sheets for being matched with a kitten, or for meeting kittens virtually were taken down. I’d had no idea there was a ‘season’ for kittens, but apparently, it’s spring and summer. So, once we got back, I started looking at every rescue I could to find some adoptable kittens. This was a challenge. Most places had no healthy young kittens. Then I stumbled on another rescue called Nike Animal Rescue Foundation (NARF). They placed kittens in foster homes so they could be socialized, and one foster parent had two kittens for adoption, a brother and a sister, born in September 2020. Their blurb described them as friendly, with the male outgoing and social, and the female playful and friendly but more reserved. These two kittens sounded great. We emailed the foster parent and set up a phone call. She interviewed us over the phone, and she agreed to let us adopt the kittens! I felt extremely fortunate to have found a pair of healthy, young, friendly kittens to join our family. The kittens were due to have their spay and neuter surgeries in a week or two, so we decided to let them stay with her until their surgeries were over so they didn’t have to handle the stress of a move combined with the stress of surgery. We would adopt them a few days after their surgery, on January 15th: their foster mom would bring them to our house. We told the kids what we had planned, and showed them the pictures of the kittens, and they were over the moon! The foster parent sent us photos and little videos, and we shared these with the kids, and we were all so excited! Soon, two kittens would join our family!