How old do you think Tigerlily is?
She's a spry 11 years old, roughly. I could probably estimate better than that. We don't know exactly when she was born, but we know exactly when I caught her and tried to sort of tame her (she's not tame), which was when she was still pretty young...but pregnant too! She had kittens very young.
I brought her into the house, then one day I noticed some fuzzy things in her box with her. 3 little kittens.
She never was very healthy or active (bad hips), but she's about the same as she ever was. No obvious signs of senescence yet. My kids will want to keep her all the way to the end, so I might have to do some juggling around. I am nowhere near desperation (as you know), the trick being at this point juggling kids and a cat across 2 continents. It is dangerous to the animal to try to move them from one continent to another--most bureaucrats of most countries would not hesitate to kill pets for routine regulatory matters.
The one kid she's really attached to is my youngest son. She usually runs away when most of us approach, but he can not only approach her, but pick her up without a complaint. He will sit with her for a long time on his lap, stroking her and talking to her, and she seems to enjoy it...in fact she'll go looking for him. They both seem to enjoy it, and as he is rather moody himself sometimes when he's had a run-in with one of his parents we'll let him go outside for "cat therapy". She'll come to the rest of us asking to be fed, but not much else. If she's feeling lazy, she won't necessarily run away, and might even enjoy being petted, but does not initiate contact. She is particularly skittish around me, for no apparent reason other than I'm fairly good-sized (I'm rather gentle, actually). Ironically, I'm the one who frets the most when she's in trouble, like when she has run away a few times.
