The names we give our pets/Random cat musings from a plane

I’m a crazy cat lady and I like to blog about my pets.  Be warned.

Do you names your pets and then have that name stick forever?  Or do you name them and then add other names which may replace the original ones?  I’m in the latter category.  It apparently runs in the family – as a kid all of our cats got a second name, which usually became the main one.  Of the cats I’ve had as an adult, I’ve never renamed one, but only Luna goes by her main name most of the time.  Rugrat was so named because she was funny-looking and always underfoot as a kitten, but she never answered to that.  I usually called her ‘Miss Kitty.”  Lucy usually gets called ‘Honey Badger” due to her general tortitude, the fact that she is a lean mean killing machine, and my general fixation with honey badgers.  I probably would’ve named her that except that my honey badger fixation started a few weeks after I got her.  Sometimes I call her Lucinda, when she is being exceptionally bad or particularly sweet.  Molly is sometimes “Mousie”  or Molly Mouse because she was small, quiet and grey when I first got her, and I used to have a mouse named Molly.  Oh yeah, and Lucy liked to torment her.  She is no longer small or quiet, and is getting her revenge on Lucy, but the name has stuck.  I’m starting to call her Molly more often now that she is getting bigger.  I didn’t even think about the fact that she and Rugrat both got a rodent name until just now.  As for Luna, well, she is just Luna.  If I want to add more syllables, I call her “Big Miss Luna”. 

Molly the Mousie is almost six months old now.  She is almost 7 lbs, which I thought was massive until Missy told me that her kitten Thor, who is three weeks older than Molly and is also a Maine Coon mix, is 9 ½ lbs.  Maine coons tend to grow until they are two, and may fill out a bit more up until age 4 or 5.  The females tend to grow a lot more slowly after they hit adolescence and often end up a lot smaller than the males; Rugrat was around 6.5 lbs when she was 7 months, at which time she went into heat and I got her spayed.  She lengthened out the second year and filled out after that, but probably never topped 8 lbs.  Molly is scheduled to get spayed in a few weeks.

Molly’s personality is really developing nicely and I am reminded why I tend to pick out adolescent cats when I adopt them from the pound.  Kittens are super cute and sweet, but their personalities really develop around five or six months.  Young kittens are off in their own little world a lot of the time, but they become a lot more interactive and quirky once they get a bit older.  Molly is getting very talkative and affectionate, and bounds around the house like a gawky squirrel.  She has some of the same weird quirks as Rugrat, such as an obsession with dairy products, a fondness for climbing on my shoulders and chewing on my hair, scratching on the window when one of the other cats wants to come in, and a strange fixation with the garage.  She’s not particularly interested in faucets, but likes to sit on my chest when I take a bath.