Kittens | Creating positive habits

Hello everyone,

So we’ve had our kittens for about 2-3 weeks and recently have began to let them roam the entire place. As of last week, I let them roam and they just remained upstairs, so we began carrying them downstairs with us and if they went back up, then that’s what it was, but we wanted to create the positive reinforcement that they were free to roam and eventually they have been. They run upstairs, downstairs, stall each other through the stairs and peep through the railing.

We’ll call them M1 and M2. We have began noticing some behavioral concerns with M1 who seems to have separation anxiety from M2. When they’re playing, if M1 loses sight of M2, she’ll start mewing and that’s M2’s cue to return back. They’re litter mates, and I would like them to have a positive relationship into cathood, but I don’t want them to rely on each other. In writing this, I’ve had the idea of maybe giving them time to explore around alone while the other is in their room, but I’m not sure if that will instill a positive relationship on the room as we tend to tuck them in there in bed at night.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you, I just have two more questions. I’d also like to create a positive behavior around bathing. Not like I intend to bathe them once a week or anything, but I think every 4-6 months would be good, and I’d like to start them early. Also, I would like suggestions on how to best trim their nails and navigate through that. I have a trimmer, but they don’t particularly care to have their paws messed with.