We got a cat!

Aaah you guys! Ok, this blog is long overdue since we already got him mid-July, but I still want give a recap and share a bit the storyline.

I’ve been wanting my own cat ever since I lived alone, basically. We used to have a dog at my parent’s house – named Tessa. She was a Labrador and the sweetest dog in the world. After we had to put her to sleep at age 14, we got a cat a bit later. Long story short: my parent’s divorced, the house was sold and I moved to an apartment.

Since I’m a firm believer that (most) cats are not meant to stay indoors, I didn’t want to get a cat in my 84m2 place. Then I moved to Amsterdam, to move in with Vittorio. Again, in an apartment without garden. So when we moved to Hamburg I said “Fine, but I want a place with a garden so I can get my cat.” We did get the house with garden, but I kept putting off getting a cat. Because I felt we could not give it the attention it needed in the beginning, to settle in.

And then corona came around…

Now I do know a lot of people got a pet during corona, and many of them for the wrong reasons. For us this was not the case. I just wanted to be home in the beginning when the cat couldn’t go out yet. So around May, I started scouting online for a nest of kittens. And I ended up with this suuuper nice lady, Jacqueline, who had a nest of 4 kittens. And she still had 1 available:

Omg, my heart immediately melted. I made an appointment to go check him out a few days later together with Vittorio. He was so small, he fit in 1 hand. At that point, he was 3 weeks old. The owner said we could pick him up at 11 weeks, when he was ready to leave the nest and socialized with his sisters. Eventually, she let us pick him up at 8 weeks old, because he was doing so well.

We named him Simba – and he is a European short hair cat. He was very brave already on day 1, and scouting around our place. The bookshelf was his “safe place”.

He already grew so much, right? We both fell in love with him from the moment he was here. Funnily enough, Vittorio was as smitten as I was. He turned into a soft egg that was not even able to punish Simba if he was biting our phone cables for example. He was like: “Nooo, Simba! Don’t do that!”. While I was raising my voice and tapping his paws.

I got Simba on a Thursday evening, since I am off on Fridays. As soon as we closed the bedroom door, of course he started miauwing in front of it. So I decided to sleep on the couch with him, just for the 1st night. Simba curled up against me and slept like a baby. I, not so much since I was scared to roll over on top of him…

To be fair, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Here are some downsides of having a cat:

• We had to remove some plants and vases that were next to the tv because he would run them over.
• We have to remove the extra chairs around the table when we eat, because he will try to get on the table.
• Our couch is his favourite scratching pole, even though he has one.
• He wakes us up every day at 7 AM by miauwing at the door – even in the weekends.
• Cleaning the cat litter smells really really awful
• We can’t really go on spontaneous trips anymore since we need to find a catsitter.

But the good outweights to less good for sure! We are both absolutely in love with him and he changed our lives for the better. It’s so nice to have this little creature to take care of together.

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Funny story: a cat can only go out after being with the new owner for at least a few weeks. We let him outside for the first time (without leash) when he was here for 4 weeks. On his third time out alone, he came home with his first prey:

Yes. A toy mouse. Our cat is a thief. At first, I didn’t see that it was a toy mouse and I thought he had a real one in his mouth. But after that I laughed my ass of that he stole another cat’s toy and brought it home.

And to end, another cheesy story. Vittorio and I met 5 years ago in Italy, in the garden of my aunt and uncle’s temporary house there. We recreated already our first picture one, and decided to do it again this year:

But we felt the picture would not be comple without our newest family member, so we also made this one:

Ok, enough kitten spam. I made him his own Instagram account so I would not be spamming my account the entire tim (yes, I’m that person).

Until next time! xoxo