I really do intend to post but I have no AA batteries and thus no camera. Everything that I want to post about requires photos!
We have had a rather traumatic past several weeks. We are now down to 2 cats instead of our normal 3. Several years ago, when we rescued our first cat, we visited the apartment office to sign an addendum to our lease that states we have paid a pet deposit. Check in hand, we notified the manager that we needed to sign some paperwork and make our cat “legal.” She was impressed that we had rescued a kitten and, being an animal lover herself, decided to waive our deposit and not add the cat to the lease. At the time, it was a real blessing. Our apartment requires several hundred dollars in pet deposits and an additional monthly pet rent.
Fast forward several years, several new managers, anxiously dealing with any necessary visits from maintenance (if the office decided to get angry about our cats, they could legally evict us)… We ended up rescuing three cats total. Our first was a 6 week old kitten found in someone’s backyard in the middle of winter, freezing cold and close to starving. The second cat was a 7 year old female that no one wanted due to her age. Our third rescue and adoption was a one day old kitten whose mother had been frightened off. My husband and I bottle fed that kitten and he’s now two years old.
We didn’t have any intention of adopting three cats. They all kind of adopted us. But the apartment only allows two at a time. For awhile, we ignored the limit but I started feeling really bad about it and wanted to make things right. After much discussion and prayer, hubby and I decided that when we renewed our lease this summer, we would add two cats. That meant one cat had to go.
No one wanted the seven year old cat 2.5 years ago when we adopted her. That would make it even more difficult for us to find her a home now as people tend to want kittens. I am VERY attached to our two year old cat as I’m his mom (seriously, he sees me as his mother because he never knew his). That meant that the cat we adopted first needed to find a new home.
Several ads online, much stressing, and a whole lot of prayer resulted in us finding a potential adopter on Sunday evening. We took the cat, some food, and his toys over to the new home and dropped him off. We stuck around for a few minutes and it looked like the lady liked our cat and that the cat would adjust well. It has now been 72 hours and we haven’t heard anything from the new owner, so I would assume everything is going well.
On Monday, we went to the office to sign a new lease and declare our two remaining cats. The paperwork wasn’t ready on Monday so we returned yesterday to sign everything. We dropped off our $300 check and received all the lovely paperwork for the one year lease we just signed. The manager gave us a rent concession so our rent dropped enough that when we added on the additional $35 monthly pet rent, our total comes to only $5 per month more than it was last year.
Praise the Lord.
Everything worked out really well, though I still feel guilty for adopting out one of our cats. I’ve always been of the opinion that when you adopt an animal, you adopt them for their life. It creates trauma in an animal’s life to move them around from owner to owner. However, there was nothing we could do in this situation. We either had to find him a new home or lie on our lease paperwork that we didn’t have any pets.
I think we made the right decision.
