It’s Freya and Fiona Friday again, and it has been two weeks since Freya passed away. It’s also the first day of a new year. So now it feels even more important to bring her and her sister along in some way.
Last week I wrote about adopting Freya and Fiona. They moved in with me at the beginning of July, 2004, at nine weeks old. I had bought a cat tree for them, which they adopted immediately. To them, it was huge!
See that purple/pink thingy that they’re playing with? It’s finger knitted! This was way before I really started to get into knitting in 2009. The kittens loved that string. Fiona is very focused on it here, but the camera flash distracted Freya.
See that plant sprayer behind Freya? That was my well-intentioned (but sadly failing) attempt at training the kittens. I had read somewhere that telling them no when they did something wrong would only make them afraid of you. Using a plant sprayer would make sure that they wouldn’t associate the correcting with you. Well, they didn’t really mind the water, and did the naughty things anyway.
Playing together with only one string is hard. Fiona is being very possessive here. Freya already has her trademark wide, fanatic eyes.
So what do you do then? Move down a level and play with the other side of the string! Having two kittens instead of one is really handy. They can play with each other!
Playing is a lot of work. After a while, you have to take a break and nap.
They were so small! And just like playing, sleeping was something that you do together. They were inseparable.
And then you wake up and it’s back to playing! I also played with them, of course, but it’s very hard to play and take pictures at the same time, so I don’t have any. And the selfie was not invented yet.
Even playing with toys was done together. One weekend, my now-husband visited and we played monkey in the middle with the kittens and a ping pong ball. They were great jumpers and it was so much fun!
Sometimes, they even played with things that were not toys at all. Here, Fiona has found a small bottle cap, and she’s actually growling at Freya because it’s HERS!
By the way, two weeks after Freya and Fiona moved in with me, my husband and I got together, and he sort of moved in with me almost immediately (we had been friends for seven years before that already, so we already knew each other very well). It was the summer holidays. I was working on house improvements, and he helped me paint and change the flooring. The kittens helped too, of course.
One of the first things I did was painting the doors dark blue. It was very hard to keep the kittens away… especially Freya.
Next, we painted the walls. Yep, the kittens helped here too.
And then we laid down the laminate flooring. The kittens really had to get used to that. The carpet was great, because they could use their claws to start and stop running and to take turns, but the laminate flooring was way too smooth. So there was a lot of sliding going on at first.
There was also a lot of cute sleeping happening.
Play hard, sleep hard. That’s kittens for you.
They were growing up so fast!
Kittens get into everything. Sometimes you just cannot find them until they pop up somewhere and show themselves.
Sometimes they are very long.
Sometimes they are very intimidating.
And they are always very cute.
Freya and Fiona were almost always together. Both were torties, but they had very different characters. It was hard to tell them apart at first when I couldn’t see their faces. But I quickly found out that Freya was the one with three peanut butter coloured socks. That helped identifying them when they sped past me in a brown-and-black flurry.
After a while, they started to like lap time, too.
I wish I had more pictures of their early days, but I already feel lucky that I even had a camera back then. Looking at these pictures, my memories of that time are coming back. They were so much fun and so sweet!
