Oh Fran.
Fran, Fran, Fran, Fran, Fran. (insert visual of me shaking my head in quiet exasperation).
John and I finally took our big summer vacation we've been planning for months to celebrate John graduating USC with his Master's Degree and accepting a new job that he started at the end of August. But with the Vegas move and life itself getting in the way, we finally found a week in August for our celebratory getaway.
Which meant that we would be gone for the week.
And since our normal cat sitter, JC, lives in Los Angeles, we had to get a new cat sitter.
Kap, as always, is super friendly. He loves attention and he loves food and snacks even more. So he'll be friends with anyone, like for example, our new cat sitter.
Franklin is still in the "anti-social stranger danger club," so he is still unwilling to make friends at this time. :(
Which means any time our new sitter came over (we'll call him R), Franklin hid and refused to eat anything R gave him. We tried a variety of tactics, like hiding bowls of food in Franklin's high-up hiding spots, but it never seemed to work. Thankfully Franklin is fine. He still drank water, roamed the house, and got hours and hours of beauty sleep. He was just very hungry when we came home and ate two bowls of food in the span of 6 hours (which is a lot for our picky eater).
John and I just felt so awful for Franklin. We originally decided not to board the boys because we wanted them to feel comfortable in their space, but I fear we are going to need to start boarding them just to ensure that Franklin eats. Even though they won't have much room to roam, they'll at least have plenty of love and attention from the vet's office (as we would board through our vet) and if anyone can get Franklin to eat, it's probably a vet tech.
Plus, I actually really like the idea of boarding them at the vet for at least shorter 2-3 night trips because it will ensure Franklin gets the socialization he needs. The issue right now is that we hired R through a cat-specific sitter site, so we paid for R to go to our house twice a day for 20-30 minutes at a time. And he felt terrible that he had such trouble finding Franklin, and no luck getting Franklin to eat.
At the vet, Franklin wouldn't be able to hide. All the vet techs love him and Kap. Every time we've taken them to the vet we have to wait awhile for the boys to be brought back because they are being showered with affection. And this way, we'll know 100% that Franklin is eating.
So a shoutout to R for trying his best. We have security cameras set up in our home to keep an eye on the boys and every time R came over, we saw Kap easily accept food and then attention. As for Franklin, we saw that he became very aware of what angles the cameras could see and became a light-footed ninja, avoiding being seen by most cameras for most of the trip.
By day 3 it was clear that R wasn't enough for the boys, so I asked my friend Abby to come over for a bit to simply give love and attention to the boys, and as a huge animal lover she jumped at the chance to spend some time with Kap and Franklin. As if by magic, she got Franklin to eat a little bit of cat treats she brought for them, and Kap was a big fan of sitting on the floor with her and receiving lots of head pats. I am extremely grateful she came over. Franklin may not have changed his "stranger danger" take on life, but at least he ate and Kap was very happy for the love and treats.
Not all cats are comfortable with just anyone entering their home. It is a bittersweet thing, as we want our boys to feel safe and be taken care of, but also want them to be safe in the God-forbid scenario of strangers with malicious intentions entering the home. So if any of you reading this have anti-social, difficult pets, know you aren't alone.
Thank you all for following along and reading about Franklin and all of his adventures with me, John, and big brother Kap! You can receive email updates for blog postings by filling out the form at the bottom of the page, and you can follow Franklin on Instagram for daily pictures and videos of our little family. :)
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