Meet the Family Critters

We are animal lovers in my house. We already had two cats when we moved into this house, and shortly afterwards we added two dogs. Since then we have lost the two dogs and one of the cats to disease, but as you can see by the picture, we have a whole herd of new ones. Let me introduce them to you.

Coco

Coco was first introduced in a earlier post. I accidentally caught her shaking her head as I snapped the picture in the post “Muddled and Befuddled.” She is our over twenty year old mixed Tabby and Siamese and the undisputed queen of the household. She tolerates no foolishness from the youngsters she has to share this house with, including us humans. In this shot she is relaxing with her bottom on the couch and her top draped across my legs. She does this a lot lately.

Loki

Loki is the only male among the household critters. He is my buddy. I can count on at least one visit from him everyday so he can stretch out beside me or on top of me so he can get his daily loving. He just plops down somewhere on me or beside me and I have to pet him and scratch him for a while. The picture doesn’t depict very well how big he is. He is one of the most mellow, laid back cats I have ever seen.

Tia

Tia looks a lot like Loki because they are related. I can’t remember what the exact relationship is, but we got them together. They are as different as if they came from different planets. The first thing we found out about Tia is she liked to bite. This wasn’t unusual in that she was a kitten. We thought she would grow out of it. She hasn’t. She still bites and she has very sharp teeth. She has mellowed some. She used to want to bite you if you just petted her. She allows that, now. She has even started lying in our laps. Of the three cats, Tia is the one least tolerant of Nola, our dog. Quite often she leaves bits of her claws embedded in Nola’s face after they have tussled with each other.

Nola

Nola is the lone dog in the house. I actually got her for my youngest son, but she quickly became a family favorite. She is a mixed-breed mutt that I rescued from the city animal shelter. She treats the cats as her play toys, and she gets a little rough sometimes. It’s not so bad with the two youngest, but we don’t tolerate her getting rough with Coco, since Coco is so old. She loves it when anyone plays with her. She loves to go. All she has to do is see the leash and she goes crazy. And just look at those eyes…how can you not love her.

These are the critters. They keep us on our toes.