It wakes up at the crack of dawn, annoys you until you get up, cries until you feed it, pulls at your dressing gown, messes up your newly folded clothes and hangs around your feet until you trip over.
It is basically craving affection 24/7, which is tough when you’ve got 104 other things you have to be doing.
Now the girls love having a new playmate around but there have been a few teething problems.
Figuratively and literally speaking.
Smokey seems to bite and scratch a fair bit when you play with him. Which has caused a few cuts and welts on the arms and legs.
And my girls are nowhere near as tolerant to pain as I am.
So, on the one hand, I’ve got Ayla running away from a little kitten in fear for her life and Maya covered in Band-aids because ‘‘he’s too cute not to play with’’.
We have to put numbing cream on Ayla’s arm before she has a blood test that’s how terrified she is about pain. But on a good note, I’m guessing her whole body won’t be covered in tattoos by the time she’s legal.
Another thing is Ayla loves her sleep. Especially the sleep-ins on school holidays.
Smokey is not a fan of sleep-ins and would rather jump on us, meow and walk on our faces until we wake up.
Not the best thing when you’re not a morning person, which, you guessed it, Ayla is not.
Being the night owl of the family, Ayla job is on the night-time feeds and litter clean up.
Maya does the morning shift.
Which I am pleased to report has been going well so far.
I guess the alternative was a lot worse than picking up dry cat poop. So I guess that means they really do love Smokey. Bad habits and all.
Just like the way I love my girls — unconditionally. No conditions. Warts and all.
In saying that, I can’t say I’m too upset about the girls returning to school this week after more than two months of holidays.
It’s all fun and games when you’re on holidays and you have all the time in the world to be as spontaneous and fun and carefree as them.
But when the holiday ends and you have to go back to adulting and working for a living, school holidays become the stuff of nightmares.
Where will they go tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that?
‘‘Please Mum, send me to school holiday care,’’ said no child ever!
And so it becomes an endless juggle of who can have the kids on which day — it’s a shame cats can’t be good babysitters too.