Kitties

As many of you know, Mark and I have two beautiful kitties. Everyone who comes to our house meets Cassie, almost immediately.

Yes, that's really what her eyes look like. Cassie was born blind and she is very inquisitive. She wants to know what's going on at all times. If there's a knock at the door, she wants to be the first one to know who's there. If someone new comes over to visit, she has be on their lap. Everyone wants to know how she gets around, being blind. She does just fine. She has a very keen sense of hearing and knows her way around the house. She's lived in 3 different houses, and been able to learn her way around each new place very quickly. We were concerned about her falling down the stairs when we moved from our apartment to our duplex, but she proved to us again how adaptable she is. Here's what happened... we let her out of her carrier on the top floor. She sniffed around for a few minutes and found a wall. She walked along the wall until she came the corner, and then turned. She kept doing this in all of the rooms until she came to the stairs. She started to put a foot down, then realized there was nothing under it and pulled back. She sniffed for a minute or two, then tried reaching her foot down and finally found the step. After determining that it was wide enough to put two feet on, she did that. Then her whole body. This process was repeated until she found the bottom of the last step. Then she walked around the perimeter of each of the downstairs rooms. After that, she had no problem finding her way around. She would go running up and down the stairs and chase her sister through the halls. She acts just like a regular cat. She figured out how to get around our house even faster when we moved here.

Our other cat is Dinah. Some of our friends and family who visit often have never seen Dinah. She is the complete opposite of her sister.

Our cats were the kittens of one of Mark's parents' cats. When they found out that Cassie was blind, they asked if we could take her so that they would know she'd have a good home. We decided that she should have a playmate, so we chose to take Dinah as well because she was the kitten who always stayed behind with Cassie while the other kittens went off exploring. At the time we joked that Dinah was Cassie's "seeing-eye cat" but I'm convinced now that Dinah stayed back because Cassie told her to. She's a very timid cat. Unlike her sister, when she hears something at the door, she bolts. She runs down to the basement and will not come back out until she's sure everyone is gone. While Cassie is very social and doesn't really care who is petting her (as long as someone is), Dinah is very much my cat. She'll usually allow Mark to pet her, but very rarely does she come to him seeking attention. On the other hand, she's very vocal when she wants attention from me. She'll stand in front of me and meow until I let her come sit on my lap. A funny thing about Dinah is that she loves to lick me. She's done it since she was a kitten. Whenever I'm petting her, she's purring and licking my arm or my hand with her rough, dry tongue.