It’s been two months since we adopted Chai and Boo. I’m not sure why we bother buying them stuff. Their favourite toys are a tinfoil ball and a ribbon. We tried getting them a bed to sleep on, but they still prefer my laptop case or the laptop itself.

The one exception is a cat tower we bought from Peace off Mind Contracting in Langley. They loved it immediately and spend most of their day on it. Chai loves sitting perched on the top, and Boo loves sleeping in the dark house on the bottom. If you’re in the market for a cat post, I highly recommend this company – our cat tower is huge, well constructed, and was a very good price. It was a bit of an adventure picking it up from Langley, using a combination of Modo and Skytrain. In retrospect, I should have just paid the $50 to have it shipped to our house.

My only complaint about the cats is how persistent they are when they want to be fed. They’ve learned that if they meow loud enough in the morning I’ll get up and feed them, no matter how early it is. I’m doing a few things to break them of that habit. First, I’m squirting them with water whenever they meow before 7 am. That seems to be helping.

We’re also experimenting with their feeding schedule. Last weekend we let them self-feed – putting out a a lot of dry food and letting them eat at their own pace. It was a small disaster, with Boo refusing to stop eating even though it looked like he’d be sick. They both eventually learned to eat when they were hungry and leave some behind, but they also gained a few pounds. They’re now back on a regimented diet, but we might try again in the future.

In the meantime, we’ve shifted their feeding so they get their biggest meal late at night, in the hopes that they’ll last until the morning without waking us up. I think that it’s helping. I’ve had two consecutive days of sleeping in until 8 am without a kitty alarm.