Our family of five

Because our family is made up of five members. We mustn’t forget about the TomCat! He has been with us since the summer of 2010 and for a very long time he was the centre of attention in this household.

I must admit that I was a bit worried about him. I wasn’t sure how he would react to the arrival of Pixie & Dixie, and I had also heard many terrible histories of families who had to give up their cats and dogs because of bad behaviour towards the babies. It would have completely shattered my heart to have to give Tommy away if he had been violent towards the babies…

But thankfully, he is being quite a trooper! He is behaving beautifully and he’s being more patient than ever. Before the babies arrived, we had spoilt Tom rotten (and by “we” I mean “I”) by letting him jump over me at night whilst I was sleeping everytime he was hungry. This could be 2 am or 5 am, time wouldn’t matter. In a way I always justified it as training for when the babies arrived (getting up multiple times a night for feeding? Tick!), but nothing could have prepared me for the shock of feeding the babies at night… Suddenly I could not tend to Tommy’s demands! So we started closing the bedroom door on him and just leaving food for him and hoping that he would eat it without causing much hassle.

And it’s like he understands! He comes in the bedroom when we are feeding the twins in the middle of the night (we open the door to go to the changing table in the nursery, and he is normally patiently waiting outside not making a noise). He will then jump on the bed and start wandering amongst us. He looks curiously at the babies, stares at them really, and smells them. But that is it. Before he would have been all over us, crying for food. Now he just stares and waits.

The only problem we’ve had with him is that he has tried to jump into the moses basket a few times when the twins were sleeping in it. He did this at the beginning a lot, and we had to keep a very close eye on him. But after discouraging him a few times, he seems to have understood and hasn’t tried to jump in it for a couple of days. We are not worried about him hurting them on purpose… It’s more the danger of him tipping the basket when jumping, or him covering the twins’ faces if he curls up too near their heads.

I am pretty sure Tommy and the twins will become best of friends in the future, and I can’t wait to see them playing together!