After an impressively persistent campaign the DC are about to get their wish of a cat/cats. They don't know it yet. Its 25 years since I last acquired cats and things have changed! Very put off by pet-selling sites charging ££s for mongrel kittens and £££s for named breeds, instantly worried about exploitative breeders. CPL don't seem to want to home cats with families, and my local branch closes for a month to prevent cats as Christmas presents, which I sort of get but isn't helping. Plus, this is loosely associated with Xmas, at least from the DC's perspectives. I'm a bit bemused by the options, to be honest, and looking for advice and ideas. The main runners seem to be:
Get a kitten/kittens off a private seller where I can see the mother on gumtree in the next 2 weeks - there are some near me - and present them as an early surprise
Give DC a wrapped cat toy at Xmas and sort the whole thing out afterwards in relative calm with their input (they're 3 and 9, main cat enthusiast is 9)
I would rather have a young ish cat /kittens as my 2 beautiful girls each lived to 21 and spent the last 5 years getting increasingly frail, expensive and worrying- I'm over-riding DH anyway to do this as he's still traumatised and would rather have some young healthy time before the frail years. Plus I think younger cats will bond with the DC better. I'm very tempted to get 2 siblings rather than 1 but not sure how much that's me projecting human values!
Help me choose how to do this 