Kittens!

Here is how we went from three cats to six.

Last summer, we noticed a big grey tabby cat hanging around the neighborhood. He looked pretty healthy and was friendly so he must have been somebody's pet at one time. Our neighbor who liked to feed strays had been feeding him, and we would put some food out for him sometimes, too. Everyone called him Buster, and he was definitely a boy with very big kitty balls. One day, I look out the window and see Buster with a little orange kitty trailing behind him-look, Buster's got a little girlfriend! A pregnant girlfriend! The little orange girl kitty would run off if you got too close, obviously a stray, and where'd these two kitties come from, anyway?

A few weeks later, our neighbor asked if we had found any kittens in our yard since the girl kitty wasn't pregnant anymore, so we went looking and found three very tiny very sick little kittens hidden under a woodpile in our back yard. We didn't want to give these kittens to our neighbor, who was somewhat of a flake and wanted a kitten for her daughter's little boy, the daughter being somewhat of a flake too, and currently homeless, living with her mother. Like you really need a kitten that needs lots of medical care right now.

So, here were these three little kittens, one orange (like his mama), one tortoise shell (a mixture of mama and papa) and one dirty white (no idea where that one came from). They were so very very tiny, and two of them had eyes that were glued shut from eye infections. Soft hearted people that we are, instead of taking these tiny kittens to the pound, we took them to the vet. All three had respiratory infections and eye infections and were dehydrated and constipated and had lots of fleas. They all got meds and enemas and we got bottles and kitten milk and gave them baths to try and get rid of the fleas. The vet said that they would have died soon, the mama cat won't take care of sick kitties, she'll just abandon them. The old survival of the fittest thing.

And so began the raising of the babies.
Here they all are after their bath-orange Buddy, white Mimi, and tortoise shell Lucy.
Look at that tiny little face!
Itty Bitty Lucy. Mimi was camera shy.

Festive Feline Finds on Etsy

There are some really cute kitties for sale on etsy!

This little tabby is from http://hamster.etsy.com
And this resin kitty necklace from http://stoopidgerl.etsy.com
And look at this little felt kitty complete with felt bed, pet mouse, canned and dry food and even a little felt food dish. How fun! This is from http://prettyflamingo.etsy.com

And Then There Were Three

Or, how we went from a two cat household to three.

Spring is kitten season, when all the un-spayed or un-neutered stray cats get spring fever and start mating, producing more up-spayed or un-neutered baby cats.
Our neighbors next door started feeding a huge litter of kittens in their backyard which ended when all the kittens got into their house one day, hiding under beds and leaving kitten poop all over the house. The dad is allergic to cats and we could hear the yelling that day: GOD D**NIT SON OF A B**CH MOTHER F**CKER GET THESE F**KING CATS OUT OF HERE!!!

Our neighbor has a very very loud voice and is well known for his 'colorful' use of the English language.

So, neighbor was not allowed to feed all of those kittens after that, and what did all of those kittens do? Migrated to our back yard because they knew we were soft hearted and wouldn't be able to resist those hungry little kitten eyes.
We started feeding them. Huge, huge mistake. Soon, we had ten little wild feral kittens waiting to be fed each day. We tried to tame a few of them, one that we called Rocket because he was as fast as, well, a rocket. He grabbed the entire food dish in his mouth one day and ran off with it, only to find that all the food fell out of it as he was running off.
There was one timid little grey and white kitten that we started calling Bear because we weren't sure if it was a boy or girl and it looked like a little bear.

This one we were able to tame.

We had to trap all the wild ones and take them to the pound-sad, but if we hadn't, each of those kittens would have grown up and produced hundreds of new un-spayed and un-neutered baby cats.

Bear became part of our household, a very timid little kitty, sweet, fluffy, and cuddly. She learned really quickly to stay out of Pepper's way unless she wanted a bop on the head. Even Harri would whack her if she got too close, and you'd think that Harri would have been a little more tolerant, seeing that she got her share of head whacking from Pepper.

So, they all learned to get along, and Bear has been my sweet little kitty who loves to have her face rubbed, and you can get her to start drooling if you rub enough. It's kitty heaven to her.
She's the only one that likes to get brushed, too, if you show her the brush, she'll jump up on the couch next to you and let you brush her forever. She'll drool if you do enough brushing, too, but then she starts giving you sharp little 'love bites' because it just feels so good.
Sleeping 'under' the bed. She thinks that if she can't see me, then I can't see her.

Sleeping again. Her favorite activity next to eating. She is a petite kitty, but has a very very round belly. It's so funny to watch her run from behind, these little legs running with this big bowling ball belly jiggling away.

Sleeping Lucy

Lucy really really enjoys her naps and especially enjoys taking them right in the middle of the hallway so that you always have to watch your step around here.

I had to take all angles of this strange position-she does this all the time, sleeps in the most awkward looking arrangements ever.
She's so trusting of us that you can walk right over her and she never even flinches.


ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ...kitty dreamland.

The Ones That Got Away

In between our accumulation of cats, this happened.

2ndhusband was working for a company that repaired oil well pumps and machinery and came home from work one day saying 'You're going to be mad at me!' Uh-oh. I thought he had been fired or wrecked his truck or something. But, no, he opens up his igloo cooler lunch box and sitting down there inside his lunch box were four very tiny kittens. A crew at his work had brought a pump in from the oilfields to work on and had found these kittens stashed way up inside the pump, and naturally thought of 2ndhusband, who was becoming known as the cat man at work because he would feed all the stray cats and kittens around the yard.

So, we took these four cute little kittens over to the spca to see if they could take them and adopt them out, but they were only 4 weeks old and they had to be at least 8 weeks and weaned for the spca to take them on. I was told that if we took them to the pound they would be euthanized because they were just too small and needed too much care. The spca said that if we took care of them until they were old enough, they would take them in later.

So, back home with the kittens, and over to Petco for kitten bottles and kitten milk. We put them in the bathroom so the other cats wouldn't be totally freaked by these small little intruders. The big cats would sit by the bathroom door going 'what the hell? what the hell?' As they grew, they would escape the bathroom and really freak out our cats by running and tumbling all over the house. The big cats were terrified.

The little boy kitten was the biggest, I started calling him Butterball because he was getting so fat. When they started learning to eat real food mixed with kitten milk on a plate he would put his tiny paws on the plate and grrrrr at the other kittens-get away from my food!
We were able to adopt two of the kittens out to a girl who worked at our doctor's office, Butterball and one of his sisters, and then took the other two over to the spca, where they were soon adopted. They were all white siamese looking kittens with the stripey tails-very very cute with big eyes that would just make you melt.

Why didn't we keep any of those kittens? Well, at the time, we thought we had enough cats. Little did we know what was soon to come.

And Then There Were Two

Pepper lived an idyllic life with her status of 'only spoiled kitty' until the summer that she turned one, when Harrison who I call Little Bit came to live with us.

That year 2ndhusband's daughter came to live with us for a while, which is a whole other story. In the house behind us lived a couple of young partying type men who never mowed their back yard but had an abandoned lawn mower sitting in the foot high grass One day we heard kitten in distress sounds so 2ndhusband climbed over the fence and found a litter of kittens under the abandoned lawnmower, one kitten of which was in the grass catcher part of the lawn mower, which was filled up with water from recent rain, crying, soaking wet, and trying to escape sure death by drowning. 2ndhusband rescued the kitten from drowning and put it back under the lawn mower with the rest of the kittens. We just assumed that these kittens belonged to the party boys that lived in the house and didn't think much more about them. Well, a few weeks later, here comes stepdaughter and her friend with three of these little kittens saying 'can we keep them?' Turns out the party boys claimed no knowledge of these kittens and didn't own any cats, so we let stepdaughter and her friend take care of these little kittens. The friend wanted to keep one, but her dad was allergic to cats, so she was going to keep this kitten in a cage in her backyard. Not. So we let stepdaughter keep the kitten she had become attached to and gave the other two away out in front of wal-mart. One of the kittens we called Popeye, he was all black with big huge bulging eyes, but a man outside of wal-mart saw him and just had to take him home. I'm assuming both of the given away kittens became cherished family pets, but who knows? So, stepdaughter named her little black kitten with the white stripe on her nose Harrison something something something. She had four names for this kitten, three of which I can't remember. Harrison is a stupid name for a girl kitty, and being a little bitty thing, I started calling her Little Bit.

I don't remember that much of her kittenhood, just that Pepper was a little pissed off at this interloper and would whack her on the head-bam, bam, bam-whenever she came too close. Little Bit would try to play with Pepper by leaping on her but Pepper would have none of that nonsense. We did have some houseplants that Little Bit would full body leap into and dig around in the dirt, so the houseplants soon went outside.
Little Bit grew up and became a somewhat reclusive little cat, she is very petite albeit really fluffy, and prefers to spend her time away from the rest of the bunch, just barely tolerating the other cats. She has vampire teeth that hang out of her mouth, so sometimes I call her vampire kitty.
She used to sleep with us almost every night with a little ritual that involved 2ndhusband getting into bed and Little Bit turning herself around and fitting in between his side and his arm in a convenient position for the ultimate in petting. She doesn't do this as much now because she is always on the lookout for another cat getting into her space. She gets stressed easily, especially when Buddy gets all worked up and starts chasing her around the house.
Little Bit is not the most photogenic of our cats, but in real life she is cute-here she looks a little cock-eyed. She reminds me of a reclusive movie star-'I just vant to be alone!'

More About Pepper-Or, Back When We Only Had One Feline

Pepper's shooting me the 'I wish you were dead except then who would feed me' look right now since I had to remove her from my chair so I could sit down at the computer.

It's kind of hard to remember back in the days when Pepper was a cute little kitten-I know she wasn't cuddly, she hates to be picked up and is most definitely not a lap cat. She has always been feisty and her favorite thing as a kitten was to hide and then run out and bite your ankles when you least expected it. My hands were always scratched up because she liked to play rough.

We kept her inside for her first few months, deciding to get one of those cat harnesses so that we could take her outside but keep her from getting into trouble or hit by a car or something. We put the little harness on her and took her out front, attaching the end of the harness around a pole so that she wouldn't stray. I went back inside for just a minute and came back out to an empty harness and Pepper sitting a few feet away with the first of many many of the 'I wish you were dead except then who would feed me' looks she has given me over the years.

So, Pepper became an indoor/outdoor cat without a harness-this changed a year or so ago when we started keeping all the cats inside after Pepper left me a huge pile of poo that was filled with still squirming worms, we spent hundreds of dollars on Advantage for fleas, and all the cats were diagnosed with an intestinal parasite called giardia-sp?-that can cause internal bleeding and very loose stools. The medicine they give cats for giardia causes cats to foam at the mouth and run around the house like lunatics, and then hide under the bed for the next four hours, coming out only to give you more of the 'I wish you were dead' looks.

Since we keep all of our cats inside now, no big Advantage bills, no squirming poo, and no foaming at the mouth.

So, Pepper was the Queen of the house until we adopted a little stray black kitten about a year later, and she has never ever forgiven us for that one. She only puts up with us because we can open cat food cans.

Who Me?

If you are sitting in the bedroom working on the computer-and yes, I WAS working, getting orders ready to ship out, not just dicking around-and you hear strange clinking sounds coming from the general direction of the kitchen, by all means, GO INVESTIGATE!!
If you have a bad kitty or two in your house like we do, you might find something like this.
Now, the reason this glass was on its side and clinking around is entirely my fault-yes, my fault. You see, Lucy is one of those kitties who only drinks water that is in your glass or directly out of a running faucet. If you turn on the bathroom sink and Lucy is sleeping 2 rooms away, before that water hits the bottom of the sink she is jumping up onto the counter with her little tongue already lapping in anticipation of a cool drink of water direct from the faucet. It's a little difficult sometimes to brush your teeth or wash your hands when you have a kitty hanging over the bathroom sink.
So, I had left this glass with a few inches of water in it on the counter, and since it's one of our new smaller juice glasses she couldn't cram her face in there to drink and decided to knock it over and lap the water up instead.
And then, it looked like she tried to mop up the water by shredding paper napkins from the napkin holder all over the counter.
She is looking at me with that 'what-is there a problem here?' expression on her face. ' I DID try to clean it up!'

How it All Began

I was never a big cat person and neither was my (2nd and current-if he behaves himself) husband. He'd had a cat growing up and we also had a cat growing up, but I could kind of take them or leave them. When my kids were teenagers they convinced me to let them bring home a kitten from one of the never ending litters of kittens born at their Grandma's house. She loved animals but neglected to spay all of her cats so there were always litters of kittens at her house. So, they brought home a little grey tabby kitten, promising to feed it and keep its litter box clean, which of course happened rarely if ever. The cat box was in their bathroom and apparently it didn't bother them that a cloud of noxious fumes greeted them each time they opened the door. So, little grey tabby grew up, shredded my nice new sofas, and spent a lot of time sleeping at the foot of my bed. We never really named him, he was just known as Kitty, and then when he started spraying and we knew for sure that he was a boy (and got him fixed) we started calling him Mr. Kitty, which sounded a little more dignified. We are not good at determining cat sexes.
Of course, both of my teenagers grew up too and moved away, leaving Mr. Kitty with me, so when I got married and moved away, I gave Mr. Kitty back to my daughter, where he currently resides, very pissed off sometimes because in addition to Mr. Kitty, she and her husband have a dog and a new kitty. Grrrrrr...
We moved into a little house 100 miles away and thought our days of scooping cat shit and opening cans of cat food were done.
Nope.
A few months after we moved in, son calls and asks if we could take his kitten in-also a little grey tabby-because his crazy wife wouldn't let him keep it and was being abusive to it. So, soft hearted people that we are we said sure, bring the little kitty over. We didn't know if it was a girl or a boy but son assured us that it was a boy. Not-when we finally took HER to the vet, they assured us it was indeed a girl. A very rambunctious scratchy bitey little girl. After a few months we decided on the name Pepper, which suits her well, since pepper is kind of a bitey scratchy spice, not something you want to use too much of, and she's kind of peppery colored. She is now 4 years old and very fat and cranky. We had to put her on a kitty diet and she's not too happy about that, not that I blame her.
We have no baby kitty pictures of her since we had no camera back then, so here is a picture of her current fat cranky sassy self.
She goes nuts over the smell of celery and attacks the grocery bags if we bring celery home. And oddly enough, she likes pepper and will lick the top of the pepper shaker so now we have cat slime flavored pepper.
She's praying to the fancy feast goddess for opposable thumbs.