Hello, Pretty Kitty

The newest member of the Doles family - Smokey!

We have 2 and sometimes 3 cats but they are not very loveable and don't like to be held or to let the kids pet them. We have two sister cats that we got as big kittens one year near Christmas and their names are Jingles and Bell (not very original, I know!) We also have a neighborhood cat that eats at our house fairly often and so we named her Molly Muffin. Well, I have been promising Reilly that we would get her a cat that would let her love it. Mike's sister has a cat named Pretty Kitty and she is very sweet and Reilly just loves worrying, I mean petting, her. We had the chance the other day to get a young Momma cat that had been left as a stray on someone's doorstep. We couldn't get a kitten because I don't think our other cats would be very receptive to that so we needed an older cat. Of course, now I also have a kitten maker that I have to get fixed unless I'm going to constantly be hitting people up to take kittens off of my hands. But, that's another story.

We got the cat home and started talking about a name. Of course, Reilly wanted to name it Pretty Kitty. You can tell by looking at the pictures that this isn't a very fitting name for her right now. She was probably too young to have kittens and so taking care of them has left her skinny and kind of straggly. But, we're going to work on that. Even though you can tell from the names of our other pets that we are not very creative in the naming department, I didn't want to have Pretty Kitty #2. We finally decided on Smokey and even though this doesn't sound like a girl name, we are sticking with it.

Smokey was fine all afternoon and night and she was there in the morning, which I wasn't too sure about since she had left two kittens behind when we got her. We took some pictures before heading to ballet and I'm sure it's obvious that the cat loved that. We went to ballet and did some shopping and came home to find the cat gone. She didn't turn up all night or the next morning and I just figured that she was on her way back to her kittens. I was worried about what the kids would think but they were ok when they thought she was going after her babies. Luckily, that afternoon she turned up at the neighbor's house when the boys went over there to play. They had been feeding her because they thought she was a stray. So, for the moment Smokey is back home unless she decides to make a run for it again!