Well now, that was interesting for a second or two...
In scanning through the plethora of stuff posted since I last visited these pages, I read this as "Tom has made progress on painting the kitten."
The mental picture combining Tom's non-diminutiveness holding onto and painting a ittybitty kitty was... entertaining.
..then realizing that didn't make any sense at all because TC and her brood are mostly normal, I jumped back and re-read it.. ;-)
Tom (who is most assuredly not normal) would never paint a live cat of any dimension, but he’d let them walk through the paint and make pawprint trails across the tile. Fortunately for him, he didn’t.