Paws To Enjoy

Meet Asher, our new ragdoll kitten!

a little blurry...

The weekend before Chad and I left for Florida, we drove just outside of Harrisburg to visit a little cutie we had our eyes on.  Chad and I have talked about getting a ragdoll kitten since before we were married.  In fact, if you were at the wedding, you may remember these cool cootie catchers we made! Instead of telling fortunes, our Cooties Catchers had trivia about us including this this little tidbit:

When we meet Asher for the first time, we nearly died of cuteness overload.  This was just a tentative visit to see him in person and see what his personality was like… However, we decided very quickly that he was going to be ours.  We really wanted to take him with us right then, but since we were leaving for Florida in only three days, we were worried that he would be confused and scared to move and then be left alone.  So we hesitantly left him there.  However, we made plans to come pick him up as soon as we were home from our vacation.  In fact, we drove straight to get him from the airport after we landed in Baltimore.

Asher loves to be on laps

The first week was all exploration and getting used to us.  He was a little shy at first, but warmed up to us really quickly!  Ragdoll cats are a lot like dogs.  The crave attention.  They want to be in the same room as you all the time.  They are extremely playful with lots of energy, but will also simply go limp as soon as you pick them up, falling asleep in seconds.  Even as I type this Asher is laying on my desk, batting at my hand.

Every day he got a little braver and started exploring new areas, taking on one room each day until he’d been everywhere expect the basement.  He was terrified of the stairs.  I have no idea why, except I’m wondering if the breeder we got him from simply didn’t have any and he just didn’t know what they were.  We tried to get him to go down on his own for almost two weeks, and he just wouldn’t do it.  We carried him down there a few times, and he really liked to explore that area, but even when we held him on the steps he was very afraid – he would cling to us, claws digging in, like he thought we were about to throw him the whole way down.  So I came up with this brilliant idea to put his food on the steps.  He loves his food.  We feed him twice a day (we wanted to just fill his bowl and let him eat when he is hungry, but he was having some really nasty messes in the litter box because he wasn’t moderating his intake correctly – so we had to put him on a “diet”, poor thing).  Each time we fed him, we moved his food a little farther down the steps until it was at the bottom, and that solved our problem in 2 days!  Now the steps are awesome.  They are just another obstacle course for him.

He loves obstacle courses.  He always takes his toys under the dining room table or our bar stools, and kicks it around under there so that he has to jump through and around the legs of the chairs to get it again.  As can be witnessed here:

So anyway, we are loving Asher!  He’s a great little kitty, and I’m sure we will have many more stories to tell about him in the future! Stay tuned!!!

I'll leave you with a bunch of cute pictures of Asher sleeping on my desk. Enjoy!