12 years on DU. 39K posts. And now, four words I never thought I'd type:

[Autumn Colors]

100. OMG!!!!! (and a tidbit of advice)

She is adorable!!!!!

We adopted two shelter cats almost 2 years ago. Best thing we ever did was invest in the Breeze litterbox system and a Litter Locker. Breeze refills can be pricey but it will absolutely keep your place free of litterbox smell or litter scattered all over the place. You might need to get her some kind of a little ramp to get into the box until she gets bigger. The litter is pellets which do stick to any soft poop and the pee drains into a lower tray that has a special pad in it. The pee and smell stay down there in the pad. The only thing that will smell is the poop right after she goes. We have two litterboxes and two cats. We scoop the pans daily, change the pads weekly, clean the box weekly (litterbox wipes work well), and a package of pellets in each box generally last two weeks unless someone's having some "digestive issues". Once in a while, a pellet will exit with the cat, but they're big, easily seen and tossed back into the pan. One word of caution ... DO be on the lookout for one of them if you're barefoot or in socks because they hurt if you step on them. Neither of our cats seemed to mind walking on the pellets at all. They started using this box without a problem.

Litterbox looks like this (but we don't keep the scooper there):


The Litter Locker will save you trips to take poop out to the garbage can. We found that the refills for this were way too expensive, but that the refills for the Diaper Genie were a perfect fit and cheaper, so we use those). The scooper that comes with the Litter Locker doesn't work well with the Breeze pellets, so we just put the Breeze scooper in the little scoop holder on the Litter Locker. The smell stays inside this thing while it's closed. That looks like this:



We're trying to switch our cats over to raw food because one has a lot of allergies. It's expensive, but if you can afford it, try it. Our vet's been very supportive and says that he sees so many less issues with cats on raw food diets.

Lastly, we started ordering all our kitty supplies from this online place http://www.chewy.com They're amazing! We had tried our kitties on a brand of dry food and allergy kitty seemed fine, so we ordered a second bag. Then she refused to eat it, but we hadn't opened the new bag yet. I called to see if we could return the unopened bag and they credited us the full price and told us TO DONATE THE FOOD TO A LOCAL ANIMAL SHELTER.

Others' advice about scratching, getting a cat tree, etc are all great. I'll offer an additional word of caution about kitten-proofing the house. Check to see what her reaction is to plastic (i.e. bags). Our allergy cat chews on them and EATS the pieces!!! We've had to make sure she cannot get to any plastic bags or anything with soft plastic wrap on it (i.e. soft vinyl sleeves for CDs). Our other cat couldn't care less about plastic.

And I agree 100% with Marcelle being indoor only and NO DECLAWING.

Have fun! Your life is going change for the better!

EDIT: These are our babies, Aja ("Asia&quot and Isis