The Stump Kids' New Kitty

Last month we adopted a cat. It happened a little earlier than we expected–Matt and I had talked about the possibility, but we figured his cat, Sean, was happier on his own. After weeks of him meowing a lot, being needy, and basically starting to act like the dogs, we figured maybe he was lonely for some feline company.

I started volunteering at the Woodford Humane Society in Versailles earlier this summer, so I was basically already scoping out all the cats. We knew we wanted to get an adult (did you know that adult/senior animals are the hardest to adopt out?), and that the cat had to be alright with playful dogs and other cats, of course. See, our two dogs definitely love to play, whether it’s with us or the cats, so the cat has to be alright with that.

So we checked the online posts to narrow down the cats we wanted to see in person, then spent an hour or so at the humane society loving on all of the finalists and trying to decide who we liked. We purposely did not bring a carrier with us because we wanted to sleep on it and come back later. If we had had the carrier then, we probably would have made a quick decision–not good.

After a couple of days of thinking and talking it over, we went back to the humane society with two possible contenders in mind. Welcome Sarabi to our family: 

Yeah....she's a happy girl.

She’s a big sweetheart with the littlest “mew” voice. Her name, Sarabi, is Swahili for “Mirage” and is also the name of the mother lion on The Lion King (I couldn’t even recall her name!).

Caught her red-pawed in Matt's drawers.

She gets along well with Sean–we’ve caught them playing every once in a while. Her favorite hiding spots are under the beds, and she loves sitting in the open windows. (We have no clue how she’ll act when we actually have to close the house back up when it gets cold.) Though she doesn’t care much for the dogs…yet. She’s not really scared of them, just tries to ignore them for the most part. She teases LaMesa a lot to get her to chase her, but then LaMesa ends up being the one in trouble. Poor dog.

This is the first animal I’ve adopted from a humane society–all of my previous animals have been barn cat rescues, or from a breeder. But we definitely feel good with our decision.

Any tips on blending new cats with the old dogs?