Over the next couple weeks, the kitties settled in to our house. They got more comfortable, they started to relax, they started taking naps in the living room and on us. They became full-fledged members of our household. Each person developed their own idiosyncratic relationship with the cats. Owen, in particular, liked to play with them by building forts, dangling a lure for them, and sometimes pretending to be a cat himself. It was good to see Owen get to play with other young beings. In remote learning he didn’t get to play with other kids, so playing with these kittens enabled him to engage in fast-moving creative, construction, and large-motor play that was less available to him due to the pandemic. It was very good to see it. He was basically crawling and tumbling around on the floor with the kittens, building things with them, and interacting with them at close range. All way better than sitting at a computer screen trying to make a connection with a disembodied head the side of a playing card. The cats, meanwhile, made themselves at home. They became a part of our family, and in some ways the family started to revolve around them. We enjoyed letting them out of the laundry room in the morning, and we all knew where they were during the day. They were a frequent topic of conversation: what they were doing, what they liked, what they disliked, where they were. They visited the kids in remote learning; romped, dashed and played around the house; and snoozed in the living room. They were a warm, funny, endearing addition to our home. I managed a number of behavioral issues during this time. One was scratching. The kitties, as part of their play, tried to bat at us with their paws, sometimes with claws extended. I combated this by instructing everyone not to play with the cats using their fingers, which encouraged them to bat at us. I also instructed everyone to put the cat down and stop interacting with it if they got scratched. I also got some little pet scissors and carefully (and with great difficulty), cut their claws. These solutions worked: the scissors removed the sharp points right away, and the behavior mod stopped the larger scratching behavior within about a week. Another issue was scratching the furniture. I dealt with this by covering the corners of the couches with double-sided anti-scratch tape, spreading scratching cardboard panels around the house, and using a small squirt bottle when they did scratch the furniture. These solutions worked quite well to make scratching the furniture unpleasant, and redirect it to scratching acceptable things like the cat trees and the cardboard panels. We had gotten them some cat trees, in order to have cat-centered furniture that they could climb, scratch, and snooze in. These worked beautifully. The cat trees were very attractive to the cats, and they primarily climbed and slept on those instead of the furniture. There was just something more appealing about the trees than the couch. They also had rope wrapped around them which was very attractive for scratching, so that they had an outlet for that behavior that wasn’t the furniture. We needed to teach them the places they couldn’t go, too, particularly the kitchen counters and dining room table. I was adamant about that. I kept squirt bottles scattered around, so there would be a bottle at hand whenever we needed one, in little wooden holders so that the squirt bottles would look neat and tidy. I watched them very closely those first days so I could squirt the very first occurrence of jumping on the counter or table. They tried, they got squirted, and they jumped down right away. This strategy worked quite well and kept them off the forbidden surfaces almost 100% of the time. Over the following months they did probe sometimes, and jump up, especially if there was something extremely attractive up there like a recently emptied can of cat food, but aside from those occasions (amounting to perhaps 1 occurrence every other month) they stayed off the counters and dining room table. Another broader arrangement that helped keep them well behaved and prevent the emergence of unwanted behaviors was that we put them in the laundry room at night and whenever we were out of the house. The laundry room was ‘their’ room, with their food, water, and litterbox, and lots of boxes and soft fleece to sleep in. This meant that they only had access to the house when they could be supervised, so that we could always catch the unwanted behaviors. There was no long period of time when they could get away with something every night, which would represent a lot of positive reinforcement every day. Originally the laundry room at night thing was supposed to last just while they were kittens, but it worked so well to contain them and keep them well behaved, and to keep them from visiting us at night and waking us up, that we kept it up. The kittens also discovered some nooks they shouldn’t get in to. In particular, they discovered a gap underneath the window seat in the home office, which allowed them INTO the back corner dead space within the seat itself. There was no way to get them out of that space. I had everyone back off, as lots of focused human attention can be quite intense and could keep the kitten hiding for much longer. I figured that eventually the kitten would get bored and come out (it couldn’t be THAT interesting a hiding space), which is what happened. Once the kitty was out, I blocked the hole with cardboard and tape. The cats’ personalities were quite different. The male was more easygoing and sociable, while the female was more reserved. So I zeroed in on her during those first few weeks, and got her to ride around in my arms. She would approach me every morning, meowing, and bit by bit I got her to jump into my arms, at which point I carried around. Every morning I would carry her around, walking back and forth, while she purred in my arms. I hoped that she would eventually generalize this behavior – the ability to relax on others’ laps or in their arms -- to other members of the household, and eventually she did. It was also very pleasant for me to slow down and stroll around the house with a purring cat! We reached a point where I just had to squat down and, after carefully considering the situation, she’d jump up onto my shoulder with her front paws and I would wrap an arm around her to support her hindquarters, which was quite an act of trust on her part. I’d then straighten up and start to walk around with her. The little male kitten was interested in this as well – he approached my feet while I was carrying his sister around, and followed me around while meowing -- so I began to carry him too, which also enabled me to work on teaching him not to claw at people. He would relax in my arms like a bag of rice, totally trusting and purring and limp. The little female did not relax as fully – she tended to keep her paws under her, which was a position of greater readiness to react if she needed to. But even she, too, eventually relaxed enough to lay on her back in my arms, on occasion, or to let her legs dangle over the side. It was delightful to watch them play together, too: they chased each other, stalked each other, jumped on each other, and tore through the house after each other. Some of the play was more intense, with hissing and kicking and tails poofed out like baseball bats. But they kept their claws sheathed. Most of the time, the male would chase his sister around, with her hissing at him. But occasionally, maybe one out of ten times, she would go after HIM. On very rare occasions, I would separate them, and put one in the laundry room for a while, if the play looked like it was getting negative. This wasn’t a punishment, but more of a ‘time out’ so that they could settle down and start to focus on something else. When friends came over, we made sure to have the ‘stranger’ give the kitties a special treat, to start to teach them not to be afraid of strangers. We wanted them to approach our friends and be friendly quickly, and not run and hide. This worked quite well. They were curious and open with strangers, though more reserved than they were with us of course. Over the weeks we got cat towers for the girls’ bedrooms and for the home office, to give the kitties nice places to hang out in each room. So they would make the rounds, sitting or snoozing in the different rooms while the kids were in remote school and Mike was at remote work. They enjoyed having the kitties in there with them. Lela had a bird feeder right outside her bedroom window, and the kitties loved to sit by her window and watch the birds – it was like looking through the window of a restaurant. Food, just out of reach! Now we just needed names for them. This turned out to be a challenging process, because we didn’t want just one person to name them, and we wanted everyone to agree. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas and wrote them down on a piece of paper, then we added to the paper as we thought of more. We’d sit down and discuss the names and remove some from the list and add others, but we didn’t come to a unanimous decision. So we tabled it for another week. This cycle went on for two or three months, a rather ridiculously long time to name two cats, but we wanted everyone’s support. We went through herb names, spice names, insect names, color names, and paired names. But nothing seemed to quite fit the two of them. For paired names one tended to fit well while the other name didn’t fit as well, like Snicker and Doodle. Cute pair, and Doodle was kinda cute on its own, but we didn’t like Snicker very much. We eventually settled on one name first: Cricket. We gave this name to the female because she was small, petite, quick, and delicate like a Cricket. The male was harder. Names in the running included Cosmos, Finn, Hazel, Widget, and Gizmo. Finally, we settled on Gizmo for the male. It was not a paired name with Cricket, but it was cute and everyone liked it. Gizmo meant a little gadget, and it also referred to a piece of a flute. And so we had two new members of our family! They added a great deal to our lives. And I was so, so glad to finally have pets. I’d always wanted to raise my kids with pets. And for myself, I wanted to live with pets too, and on a deeper level it felt really good to be able to use my animal behavior understanding on actual animals. It helped a great deal in managing the cats, keeping them well behaved, solving behavior problems, and understanding what they were doing.