So my cat, Kiera, has decided that she’s going to be a lap kitty from now on.

I adopted my kitty back in spring 2006, from a shelter. Vet estimates that she was between a year to a year and a half old. The people before me had abandoned her – they’d moved out of their apartment and just left her behind. I don’t know how long she was alone, but she’s always been particular about her litter box as well as her food.

She has changed since I first got her, slow gradual changes. For example, probably about five years after I got her, she finally started to come up and head-butt my leg when I was fixing her food. I would say in the last year or so she’s finally stopped being freaked out by my feet. (I figure she was kicked, and so always jumped and scurried away when I brought my feet too close to her.)

She’s always been a cat who liked to hang out with me. I’ve always worked from home, even when I had a day job, and she would generally be in the same room with me all day.

She has always slept with me at night. I make the effort to wake her up during the day so that she actually will sleep at night.

She’s never been overly affectionate. She likes being pet and brushed, but always on her terms. I never approach her with an open hand (an open hand hits). Instead, my palm is down, my fingers bent down. I hold out my hand to her and then *she* decides if she wants to be pet or not, by head-butting the back of my fingers. If she doesn’t want to be pet, she generally looks to the side. So I walk away and I don’t touch her.

One of the tricks I’ve learned recently is to “hide” her food, so she has to go hunting for it. It’s more difficult to hide it in the tiny house than in the main house. Her wet food is always in the same place. But she also gets a very small amount of dry food as well as treats.

I hide the dry food dish all over the tiny house, along with her treats. The only thing I need to be careful of is to make sure that the food is not too close to her litter box.

She’s learned the term, “Go hunt.” So she’ll keep searching for her food. It’s good for her to have to use her brain that way. What I found really interesting was that by making her hunt for her food, she became more interactive with me in general, and she wanted to play more.

She has always been my cat. She tolerates Blaze at best. She will curl up with him sometimes at night because he’s warmer than I am. But she’s still my cat.

We came home from the con yesterday and I had to take a phone call right after we arrived. So she yelped at him, (she doesn’t really meow) insisting that he sit down on the couch so that she could sit down, they could be touching, and she could purr.

Last night, though I was sitting, I wasn’t sitting in the place I normally do. She still insisted on climbing into my lap for a while. Finally, when I moved and sat on the bed, I had full-on lap kitty, stretched out and purring.

I have changed so much over the course of my life. So has Blaze. If I can become someone new, why can’t she?