My New Family

Judging from the title, I'm sure many of you would expect this post to be about the Cooper Family, who I will be grateful to have as in-laws once Katelyn and I are married next October.  However, many of the members of Katelyn's family live far from Maine, and while I will see them on holidays and other important dates, there is a more readily-apparent addition to my family unit now that I have been living with Katelyn in Blue Hill for the past month and a half: her cats, Teagan and Gabriel.

Now, growing up, we never had cats in my house.  My father (Jim) and younger brother Nick are both very allergic to cats, and my mother (Joan) has just never really warmed up to cats (it has something to do with their "evil" claws).  Indeed, for many years we only had an aquarium of assorted fish or the odd hamster as Nick and I were afraid of dogs because of an incident we had at a pet store as children. 

This changed when we went to Arizona to visit an old co-worker of my father's, who just happened to have a Shih Tzu.  Nick and I very quickly had to adapt to having a dog around, and it went so well that my family got our first "real" pet, a Shih Tzu of our own aptly named Arizona.  A few years later, we got another Shih Tzu who we named Dakota.  In the past year, both of these dogs have passed away; Dakota in November 2008 and Arizona much more recently a few weeks ago.

In some sense, it was as though meeting Katelyn and falling in love with her was also providing me a means to cope with the loss of Dakota and the impending loss of Arizona.  As the only person in my family who is "cool with cats", I have known friends through the years who owned them and I have been fine with them, but I've never lived with cats.  After a month and a half living with Teagan and Gabriel, I've certainly warmed up to life with felines.

I'll take some time to address each cat separately, as they do have very distinct demeanors and character traits.  We'll start with the much bolder cat, Teagan.

Teagan was the only cat of the two who was really comfortable enough to spend any time out in the open when I visited Katelyn at her apartment for the first time in our dating.  He is very personable and isn't too skittish when new people come around.  However, he is also kind of an asshole.  He likes to yowl at 5AM because he thinks Katelyn and I should be up at that time, and he won't stop meowing and scratching at the chest on my side of the bed until Katelyn either feeds him wet food or gets up to deal with him otherwise.  He also likes to bite Gabriel in the ass and chase him around the apartment, and Gabe is usually so mellow that he has to run and hide to get away.  Teagan is cute, and he can be a very adorable and lovable cat, but he does have personality quirks that aren't very fun when you're trying to get just a little bit of extra sleep in the morning.

Once-bashful Gabe, now my new best friend in the world, as far as he's concerned.  The first time I visited the apartment, I thought Katelyn was lying when she said she had two cats until I saw Gabriel peek his head out from the bedroom and then run to hide under the bed when he saw that I could see him.  It took a while for him to warm up to the idea of me being around the apartment on a regular basis, but now we're on really good terms together.  He has the funniest meows (they almost always sound like he's asking questions of the world) and I now have him trained (or he has me trained) so that when I wake up in the morning and go to turn on my computer, he rushes to sit on the computer chair so I can rub his belly.  Earlier today he spent most of the morning with me meowing to get my attention and jumping up into my lap so that he could keep up with what I was doing on the computer.  Gabe has some annoying habits too (he likes to chew on Katelyn/her necklace and sometimes he likes to poo outside of the litter box for kicks), but I think we've bonded fairly well since our first encounter.

For better and for worse, I am now a "cat person" (though I'm still lobbying for a dog whenever Katelyn and I move on to a more permanent residence) and I'm lucky to have two cats that have been accepting of me and allowed me to share their Katelyn.