The most adorable hellions you will ever meet.

Xander and Riley at 13 weeks

Riley and Xander at 4 months (photo taken last night)

Don't they look so sweet and innocent? IT'S ALL A SCAM. Let me enumerate the ways in which Riley and Xander have enlivened my life considerably over the past two months (keeping in mind that "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse).

The challenge of feeding a pig and a fussy eater.

Riley and Xander get wet food about three or four times a day and dry food when I'm away from home. I have to sit with them while they eat their wet food or (a) Riley will wander away from his food bowl to investigate what I'm doing, allowing Xander to eat Riley's food or (b) Xander will decide that he absolutely must eat out of Riley's bowl or vice versa, which is not allowed because Xander eats at approximately twice the rate of Riley (he often sounds like he's trying to choke himself while he's eating). I frequently have to hold the bowl to Riley's face to keep him focused on his food while simultaneously fending off Xander.

Furthermore, they are randomly fickle about their wet food. There's a turkey and giblets canned kitten food that they generally won't eat by itself and I've had to mix it with certain other brands/flavours of wet food or wait until they're starving before serving it. (Only five more cans to go.) Now they're turning their noses up at premium canned foods that they happily devoured before, and the common ingredient for all but one of the shunned foods is carrot. (To be honest, I'm not really sure why carrots are being put into cat food, especially since vegetables are not part of a wild cat's diet unless they've eaten a herbivore).

One food that they always eat is pouch food, which is food shaped into little rectangles and immersed in gravy. It's supposedly fresher tasting than canned food, and my cats do get extremely excited when I show them a pouch. Even Riley will eat this food with minimal fuss (although it is prohibitively expensive to serve to two cats on a daily basis). The first time I gave them this food, Riley licked up all the gravy and then started playing with the food in the most obnoxious way: he would drop a rectangle of food from his mouth and try to bat at the food with his paw before it hit the floor. Fortunately, mashing up the food into gravy with a fork beforehand forces Riley to eat the food if he wants the tasty gravy.

When the shit hits the cat...

If one cat is using the litterbox, the other one will often jump in to harass the one relieving himself, so I often have to run interference so that the cat using the litterbox has some peace. It's also necessary because once Xander got in the line of fire of Riley's explosive diarrhea and emerged from the litterbox covered in runny feces, and on another occasion, Riley got urine on the scruff of his neck. Even when they're not using the litterbox, they love to dig a little hole in the litter and plop themselves down. I try to discourage this as well, because Riley has gotten shit on himself from lying down in the litterbox too soon after Xander has taken a dump.

If it's not food, water or a litterbox, it's a toy.

• toilet paper - now they do a better job of shredding any paper products they find within their reach

• garbage bins - they tip them over and rummage through the contents, looking for tissues or toilet paper to shred
• rugs - they lie on top of them, play with the fringe, burrow underneath or roll them up into a heap
• shower curtains - they've ripped out the magnets in the shower curtain liner, and like to attack each other through the shower curtain
  
• bags or backpacks - within two seconds of placing a bag or backpack on the floor, Xander will be chewing on the straps and Riley will be sitting in or on top of it
• shoes - they play with the shoelaces (if available), chew on the edges or try to stick their heads through any openings
  
• ponytails - they try to pull my hair out of the elastic holder
• anything resembling string or cord
  
• anything that I drop on the floor
  
• each other's tails (I guess that's why they play with my ponytail)
  

Books are a special type of toy because they serve two purposes: they're fun to scatter all over the apartment, and they are also good for biting. Some of the covers of the books on the lower bookshelf are really chewed over. I was reading an Agatha Christie novel one afternoon on the couch, and Riley, who was sitting on the side table next to the couch, very deliberately leaned over and bit the cover of the book.

Another favourite game is to pull the towels off the towel rack, and this led the cats to trapping themselves in the bathroom on more than one occasion. The first time that it happened, I came home from work and found the bathroom door almost shut. When I opened it, I was greeted with the sight of Riley and Xander lying on a towel behind the door. They had managed to wedge the towel underneath the door while it was nearly shut so that they couldn't move the door anymore and couldn't get out of the bathroom. Riley ran immediately to one of the litterboxes (which aren't kept inside the bathroom), and Xander followed soon after. Judging by the size of the urine clumps in the litterbox afterward, I'd say that the kittens were stuck in the bathroom for most of the day.

To boldly go where no cat has gone before...

Within about an hour of arriving at my apartment, Riley and Xander figured out how to climb up the mattress in the sofa bed so that they could sleep on top of the mattress within the sofa back, far far away from my reach.

They soon graduated to invading my computer desk. They used to be content with just sitting on the cat tree behind my chair while I was at my computer:

When I came back from my weekend in San Francisco last month, I found practically everything on my computer desk in the living room had been translocated to the floor. Since I have no good way off keeping the cats off the computer desk (other than moving the desk to my bedroom), I have begrudgingly acceded to their territorial claims and mostly cleared off my desk so that they can explore and not find too many objects to knock onto the floor. Riley and I now have an understanding that I won't throw him off the desk if he sits to the right of the monitor or on my lap, but Xander generally likes to stand on the keyboard until I kick him off or stick him on my lap (usually on top of Riley because he's already there). Their latest favourite computer desk thing is to sit in front of the monitor so that they can watch the pretty pictures load or the mouse cursor move around and which of course has the added bonus of completely blocking my view.

The next piece of furniture that the cats conquered was the TV stand. As I came up to the door of my apartment one night, I realized that I could hear voices inside and found that it was because the TV was on. The cats had gotten up on the TV stand and dragged out two toys that I kept behind the TV because they were too long to keep in the toy drawer (the feather one, which they both love, was in the bathroom so that obviously got a lot of use). Then, one of them must have climbed to the top of the TV, knocked the remote control onto the floor and stepped on the power button. Judging by his behaviour that evening, I strongly suspect Xander of being the leader in this scheme:

The final frontier for the cats is the kitchen counter. Xander has figured out that he can get onto the main kitchen counter via one of the litterboxes, or onto the smaller, separate kitchen counter via the garbage can. While I can't move the garbage can to another spot, I did move the litterbox underneath the living room table so it couldn't be used as a stepping stone to the kitchen counter. The little brat had the audacity to whine about not being able to explore the kitchen counter until he realized that I wasn't going to move the litterbox back to its old location. Pretty soon both cats will be capable of jumping directly onto the kitchen counter; I fervently pray that I'll be able to train them not to, because I really don't have enough cupboard space to stash the items currently on the counter. I'm not so worried about Riley - he's a little easier to train than Xander because he is more attached to me - but Xander's curiosity tends to overpower any type of reasoning going on inside his little brain.

Two side notes completely unrelated to the (mis)behaviour of my cats:

Last month I met with a friend and her 19 month old, who loves dogs but is afraid of cats. Megan was calling every animal that she saw a dog, so in an attempt to expand her vocabulary, I showed her a photo of Xander and tried to get her to say "cat":

While Megan showed interest in the photo, I was completely unsuccessful in convincing her to call Xander a cat. Then I showed her the following photo of Riley:

...and she started whimpering in fear. We think that the difference in reaction was due to the fact that Xander is sleeping in his portrait while Riley is clearly wide awake and staring right at the camera (with his evil, evil eyes). I usually manage not to traumatize my friends' kids the very first time I meet them, but not this time!

The other side note is that while Riley is obviously a red or flame point, it's becoming more and more evident that Xander's points are more brownish and neutral coloured (his points are taking much longer to darken than Riley's). Out of curiosity, I have tried to figure out what Xander would be called, but cat breeders apparently like to simply give verbal descriptions for coat colour and either show a poorly lit photo which makes it impossible to detect nuances of tone and colour or not show one at all. So all I can tell you is that Xander isn't a one of the traditional Siamese colours and out of the non-traditional colours, he's definitely not a red or flame point.

Next on the agenda: neutering operations in December - although the cats will be one month shy of the usual age for neutering/spaying operations for cats, it'll be easier for me to take a random day off work in December compared to January.