A decision reached.. of sorts

Jamie and I were just out in the garden, I was sitting on the bench and Crotchy jumped up and sat on my knee, kneading my cardigan with his front paws and purring his head off as I stroked him. He did this quite a lot last night as well, when I was outside chatting with Caro.

I asked Jamie what we were going to do about him, because we need a permanent solution. The most sensible option would be to call Cats Protection and have them re-home him. However, Crotchy's been a part of our lives for 4 years almost now, and we're as much attached to him as we are to our own cats. Neither of us have the heart to just hand him over to a complete stranger, to never see him again. So we've decided. We're going to make a massive effort over the summer to integrate Crotchy into our house. Fidget and Crotchy get on perfectly well outside the house, its just inside the house where Fidget gets a bit territorial about the whole affair.

I've just done some reading up online about integrating a new cat into the household, and I think it might be possible. Especially with Jamie home during the day for the forseeable. The study upstairs (Andy's bedroom, as was) is pretty isolated from the rest of the house, because of our ridiculous cowboy job hallway. So its perfect as a "safe" room for Crotchy, especially as we cleaned it up and hoovered etc the other day so it was fit for human habitation at the weekend. So its not so much filled with Fidget's hair and so on, but still smells of him enough to get Crotchy used to it. And as they already know and recognise each other, its just going to be a patience game, slowly integrating Crotchy's smells into the rest of the house.

We think we'll keep Crotchy out of our bedroom as much as we can though, keep that as Fidget's "safe" room.

I think where we've gone wrong before, is we've shut him in the bathroom/kitchen, so the place where Fidget normally gets fed is the area which ends up smelling of Crotchy. Which is obviously not going to go down well with the Fidget.

If it does work out though, we're going to have to rename him. Or at least, just pretend to rename him so that when I take him to the vet to get him checked out, I don't have to answer the "what is your cat's name?" question with "Crotchspider!". Will most likely shorten that to Spider, although I'm not keen on that because I already have a cat called Spider who has a small place in my heart, and I don't want to duplicate (my next door neighbours when I was young had a three legged tabby called Spider). So, any suggestions welcome for my little big nosed blue boy.

Here's a picture or two, to inspire you:
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