New Cat: Finnegan

 We got a new cat!

We named him Finnegan! Finn for short.

Lee-Anne has a sister in law who breeds cats. A few months ago, they had a litter and yesterday, on Canadian Thanksgiving, we took one. We chose this guy because he was the favourite of one of Lee-Anne's nephews, who named him Lucky Charm. For this reason, we were going to name him Lucky until I pointed out that it sounded Irish, which fit with Kieran's name. So we looked up Irish names, and found out that Kieran means black, and Finnegan means white.

So by naming him Finnegan, we now have the Irish black-and-white duo, retroactively validating Kieran's name. Neither of them are fully black or white, but I think Kieran is more dark overall, and Finn is more light, so it kind of works. 

The name "Kieran" is really human. The person at the cat sanctuary who named him originally told me that I could rename him, but because I'm so bad at naming cats I took my time to think about it, and in the meantime kept calling him Kieran until it stuck. I don't regret it, because it's his name now, but I admit I do feel the need to preface his name with "my cat" to make sure there's no confusion if I'm mentioning him to a stranger.

Since I got Kieran on my terms, I'm happy that we got Finn through Lee-Anne's direction. I got Kieran at a cat sanctuary and Lee-Anne, as I mentioned, got Finn through a family connection. I've had Kieran only a few weeks before me and Lee-Anne started dating. In truth, while I was planning on getting a cat for a long time, part of the reason that I got one when I did was to impress Lee-Anne before I asked her out. So she did have an influence in Kieran's adoption.

Since Lee-Anne's been working in-person five days a week, and me for three, Kieran's been really whiny. Most of the time I've had him has been in the pandemic and he's gotten used to having someone around. We thought that getting a new cat would be good to keep him company. Throughout my life, it's been the general policy to have two cats at a time for this reason. Usually we try to have them at different age categories, because we've found that it brings out the youth in the older cat. Some people say that this makes the older cat irritable, and I don't know what to tell you, except that this hasn't been our experience.

Anyway, I'd always intended to get a second cat, but I wanted to hold out until Kieran was older. Now he's about three, so still a young cat, and we've got a kitten only a few months old. Meant to hold out longer, but I wasn't able to.

Introducing them went well. In my life I've only seen a few cat introductions. I was too young to remember Penny and Booshy being introduced, who were my childhood cats. After Booshy passed and we got Blackavar, I remember Penny attacking Blackavar and needing to separate them. They sniffed at each other under the door for awhile and after a slow introduction they actually became quite close. When we got Luna and Thor and introduced them to Blackavar, all three seemed apprehensive but not fully aggressive, just kept space, gave each other the stink eye, and slowly got used to each other. Introducing Cassidy to Blackavar and Thor, and Cassidy just found a small place to hide in, slowly warmed up and eventually integrated with the others.

So I was ready for anything between general apprehension and direct aggression. We brought Finn in the cat carrier. Kieran seemed surprised, and the two sniffed at each other and petted the bars of the carrier. We decided to try holding them outside of the carrier so they could smell each other and neither tried to tear their way out of our hands. We decided to put them down and see how they'd react and they were soon chasing each other around the house. Neither seemed scared, both were engaging the other. We felt Kieran might be playing a little too rough, so we're not letting them stay together without supervision quite yet. But still, I've never seen two cats be so amiable right off the bat.

They both have very similar personalities. Affectionate, goofy, high energy, and playful. I think it might be a good match.