Alex Gladwin Blog

We'd been talking for a while about getting another cat. I'm cat-mad so no amount of cats is ever too many for me, but as a cat-lover, I do understand and respect that cats are naturally quite solitary animals and they don't enjoy having their territory threatened. 

In an ideal world and thinking with my heart, I would have loved to have rescued another adult cat from a rescue centre, but my head knew that that wasn't really going to be fair on our current cats or the new cat. Plus with having two small children, I worried that a rescue cat would become nervous around them when they became noisy (which is 95% of the time!). ;) 

I knew that thinking on a practical level, a kitten was the right option for our family at the stage we are in our lives right now. A kitten wouldn't threaten our current cats' territory as much as an adult cat would. And the kitten would also grow up around the boys and learn very quickly that whilst they can be loud and our house can be crazy and chaotic at times, that that is actually nothing to fear or be afraid of. I also liked the idea that the boys would have a kitten that would grow with them and that they would learn to care for from its young age. 

And so, when I ran into my neighbour last week and she asked if I might be looking to re-home a kitten (her friends cat had accidentally got pregnant just before she was due to be spayed and she was trying to re-home the kittens for her), I guessed that maybe now was the right time to go back to having four cats again. When I went round to have a look, I knew I had to choose a confident kitten who would be brave enough to stand his ground with 3 grown cats and 2 young children and we knew that we wanted a male as we already have two females. And then I spotted (or rather he threw himself in front of me by repeatedly trying to make an escape from his crate) a little male silver tabby with a black nose and we knew he was the one.