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Her coal black fur grew soft and glossy
So there are these kittens.
They were born on March 12, 2014, the smallest two of a litter of five. Their mother was rescued, heavily pregnant, from an overcrowded cat-hoarding house; she gave birth almost immediately afterward in Angell MSPCA's care, which is how we happened to meet the kittens in their second week of life. They were tiny black fluffballs then, resembling Miyazaki's soot sprites more than anything feline. Lily had named them all after Greek gods and heroes—Zeus for the regal white blaze on its chest, Odysseus for its adventuring, Ares for its proclivity to pounce (at this point in life, a sort of coordinated stumble and flop) on its littermates. Dean and Nora were already calling the littlest one the runt. It was conspicuous by its huge seven-toed forefeet and its piercing cry whenever anyone tried to pick it up, so that the mother cat would come running, ears pricked and tail questioning, to retrieve and calm her child. I picked it up. It didn't cry piercingly. That was the start.
We couldn't promise, but we hoped we would have our lives settled enough to adopt within six weeks. We came back twice more. (We learned on our second visit that Odysseus—Odi—had died from congenital complications; it was upsetting, but at least not contagious. The other kittens thrived.) We watched Zeus' brows and whiskers come in white to match its tuxedo front, Ares' arms speckle salt-and-pepper, all of their eyes darken from kitten-blue. The runt was getting bigger, more and more fearless: trying to climb inside my shirt, leaping from my shoulder to the futon, falling asleep on Rob's chest and refusing to relinquish his lap even at the end of a visit. It had plainly adopted us. It ran right to me the next time. We had named the fourth survivor Hestia, because she curled so calmly while the others rough-and-tumbled, but she was such a self-contained little enigma Rob began to think of her as X the Unknown.
(And of course at this point we didn't know any of their sexes. It wasn't until the last visit, when the runt was on its back scuffling with Ares, that we spotted some previously undetectable undercarriage and wondered if it might be male. We had cautiously thought of it as Persephone before now, being so small and shadowy, its mother bearing it back and forth.)
And then at the beginning of this week our lives went from zero to kitten when we found out that not only were the kittens coming up on their eight-weeks-and-two-pounds deadline for return to Angell, but there were other families interested in adopting from the same litter. We notified Angell MSPCA. We secured permission from our landlord to keep cats in our apartment. We filed an application to adopt with the manager of the foster care program. And we did not expect to be told on Tuesday that we could take our kittens home in two days' time.
There was a lot of cleaning. There was a lot of running around. By![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
audioboy's good graces and driver's license, we picked up most of the cat basics from Petsmart in Fresh Pond on our way to Angell yesterday afternoon. We have the world's pinkest cat carrier. (It was the only color in its size.) And by five o'clock in the afternoon, we had two small cats in it, resting on my lap in post-fixing sedation, four pounds of black fur and paper collar nametag and soft breathing.
Once the sedation wore off, they turned into fire-raisers. As I type these words, Hestia is curled up on the windowsill behind the couch, watching birds and cars in the street, and her brother is curled up under the couch, occasionally nosing at my ankles, and this is the quietest they've been since they woke up. I watched them rocket over a sleepingderspatchel. They play-fight with ferocity and are death to the little toy fish-mice we bought them on Tuesday, before we got home and checked e-mail and found out we should have bought a lot more. Quick, clever, graceful. Polydactyl. Hestia is still wearing her paper collar, since efforts to take it off last night left my husband with scratches across his palm and eyebrow and my father with a soundly punched vampiric bite; she's calm enough now to lie near us, and brush against us, and even tolerate some gentle petting, but I think anything like being picked up is off the table for now. The ex-runt is enthusiastically affectionate. He rides shoulders and nuzzles into hands. I fell asleep last night on the couch with him curled against my chest, under my shirt. He walked back and forth across my laptop and confused it mightily.
My father refers to him as the King of Greece, after the myth that the true heir of the Byzantines will have more than the usual number of fingers and toes. My mother calls him Tybalt, Prince of Cats. We have decided that Tybalt Autolycus is a good full name. (As soon as we knew he wasn't a Hermes, but saw the way his paws fanned into opposable thumbs with which he merrily lifted sticks and feather toys, it became clear he might do very well as a Mercury-littered snapper-up of unconsidered trifles and even some trifles people consider very dearly indeed, thank you. He stalked and slew my sock last night, then stuffed it in his mouth and trotted around parading his kill. I will probably never get it back.) His eyes are celadon green; he was a fragile thing at birth, but he looks like he might grow up into a monster cat. Hestia remains Hestia, but she hunts and fights like an Athene—Rob has seen her stalk her brother while he's echolocating for her, keeping stealthily just out of reach until it's time for a strategic strike. She has a more delicate, Siamese look, with wide gold-fringed eyes and a slender throat; the collar makes her look a little like Jenny Linsky. She is still protective of her belly, but she doesn't shy under the futon every time she sees me looking anymore. She has wicked claws. Any good hearth-defender should.
I have not had steady cats in my life since I was twelve years old. I like these ones very much. I am looking forward from here on.
They were born on March 12, 2014, the smallest two of a litter of five. Their mother was rescued, heavily pregnant, from an overcrowded cat-hoarding house; she gave birth almost immediately afterward in Angell MSPCA's care, which is how we happened to meet the kittens in their second week of life. They were tiny black fluffballs then, resembling Miyazaki's soot sprites more than anything feline. Lily had named them all after Greek gods and heroes—Zeus for the regal white blaze on its chest, Odysseus for its adventuring, Ares for its proclivity to pounce (at this point in life, a sort of coordinated stumble and flop) on its littermates. Dean and Nora were already calling the littlest one the runt. It was conspicuous by its huge seven-toed forefeet and its piercing cry whenever anyone tried to pick it up, so that the mother cat would come running, ears pricked and tail questioning, to retrieve and calm her child. I picked it up. It didn't cry piercingly. That was the start.
We couldn't promise, but we hoped we would have our lives settled enough to adopt within six weeks. We came back twice more. (We learned on our second visit that Odysseus—Odi—had died from congenital complications; it was upsetting, but at least not contagious. The other kittens thrived.) We watched Zeus' brows and whiskers come in white to match its tuxedo front, Ares' arms speckle salt-and-pepper, all of their eyes darken from kitten-blue. The runt was getting bigger, more and more fearless: trying to climb inside my shirt, leaping from my shoulder to the futon, falling asleep on Rob's chest and refusing to relinquish his lap even at the end of a visit. It had plainly adopted us. It ran right to me the next time. We had named the fourth survivor Hestia, because she curled so calmly while the others rough-and-tumbled, but she was such a self-contained little enigma Rob began to think of her as X the Unknown.
(And of course at this point we didn't know any of their sexes. It wasn't until the last visit, when the runt was on its back scuffling with Ares, that we spotted some previously undetectable undercarriage and wondered if it might be male. We had cautiously thought of it as Persephone before now, being so small and shadowy, its mother bearing it back and forth.)
And then at the beginning of this week our lives went from zero to kitten when we found out that not only were the kittens coming up on their eight-weeks-and-two-pounds deadline for return to Angell, but there were other families interested in adopting from the same litter. We notified Angell MSPCA. We secured permission from our landlord to keep cats in our apartment. We filed an application to adopt with the manager of the foster care program. And we did not expect to be told on Tuesday that we could take our kittens home in two days' time.
There was a lot of cleaning. There was a lot of running around. By
audioboy's good graces and driver's license, we picked up most of the cat basics from Petsmart in Fresh Pond on our way to Angell yesterday afternoon. We have the world's pinkest cat carrier. (It was the only color in its size.) And by five o'clock in the afternoon, we had two small cats in it, resting on my lap in post-fixing sedation, four pounds of black fur and paper collar nametag and soft breathing.Once the sedation wore off, they turned into fire-raisers. As I type these words, Hestia is curled up on the windowsill behind the couch, watching birds and cars in the street, and her brother is curled up under the couch, occasionally nosing at my ankles, and this is the quietest they've been since they woke up. I watched them rocket over a sleeping
derspatchel. They play-fight with ferocity and are death to the little toy fish-mice we bought them on Tuesday, before we got home and checked e-mail and found out we should have bought a lot more. Quick, clever, graceful. Polydactyl. Hestia is still wearing her paper collar, since efforts to take it off last night left my husband with scratches across his palm and eyebrow and my father with a soundly punched vampiric bite; she's calm enough now to lie near us, and brush against us, and even tolerate some gentle petting, but I think anything like being picked up is off the table for now. The ex-runt is enthusiastically affectionate. He rides shoulders and nuzzles into hands. I fell asleep last night on the couch with him curled against my chest, under my shirt. He walked back and forth across my laptop and confused it mightily.My father refers to him as the King of Greece, after the myth that the true heir of the Byzantines will have more than the usual number of fingers and toes. My mother calls him Tybalt, Prince of Cats. We have decided that Tybalt Autolycus is a good full name. (As soon as we knew he wasn't a Hermes, but saw the way his paws fanned into opposable thumbs with which he merrily lifted sticks and feather toys, it became clear he might do very well as a Mercury-littered snapper-up of unconsidered trifles and even some trifles people consider very dearly indeed, thank you. He stalked and slew my sock last night, then stuffed it in his mouth and trotted around parading his kill. I will probably never get it back.) His eyes are celadon green; he was a fragile thing at birth, but he looks like he might grow up into a monster cat. Hestia remains Hestia, but she hunts and fights like an Athene—Rob has seen her stalk her brother while he's echolocating for her, keeping stealthily just out of reach until it's time for a strategic strike. She has a more delicate, Siamese look, with wide gold-fringed eyes and a slender throat; the collar makes her look a little like Jenny Linsky. She is still protective of her belly, but she doesn't shy under the futon every time she sees me looking anymore. She has wicked claws. Any good hearth-defender should.
I have not had steady cats in my life since I was twelve years old. I like these ones very much. I am looking forward from here on.
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Thank you! They are amazing cats already. We are kitten-proofing everything we can find.
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That is the correct icon.
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I hope to have cats someday, but Joe's condition is that we should get our own place first and I am in agreement.
Cats 4eva!
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Me, too.
(They are asleep on my shoulders—one per shoulder—as I sit on the couch and type this.)
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They have several already! The paper bag is a particular enemy of Hestia's. She has vanquished it multiple times by now.
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They are really wonderful.
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We've been taking pictures! There will be a post soon.
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Thank you! It's really lovely. They're settling in.
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They have such classic male and female cat personalities. She's probably feeling a bit worse from surgery than he is. Hopefully she'll calm down in a couple of days when she's had more of a chance to heal.
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We figured; she really couldn't be handled last night. We couldn't even give her the painkiller Angell had sent us home with; that was when she chomped my father. Today she was licking and nipping at her belly enough that we called the adoption center back, but unfortunately it was too late in the day for us to bring her in. (We're in Somerville. Angell MSPCA is in Brookline. Anywhere near rush hour on a three-day weekend, not possible.) We'll keep an eye on her over the weekend. The good news is that she's spent most of this evening comparatively chill. She lets me pet her. She's purred vigorously when near me. She curls up with her brother and doesn't try to disembowel him when he overenthusiastically grooms her ears. It's cool.
Hopefully she'll calm down in a couple of days when she's had more of a chance to heal.
That's the idea! And in the meantime, Tybalt Autolycus is burrowing into my collar, purring so hard his entire body shakes. He thinks my laptop is fascinating. My mother says, "I see you have discovered the cat's basic job: keep owner from reading or writing."
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Godzilla thoughts are up at my blog.
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We really like them! There should be pictures soon.
Godzilla thoughts are up at my blog.
Left comments!
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*hugs*
See comments to
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They call me Mr Tybs.
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. . . it's been proposed, yes.
(Her full name is Hestia Hermia Linsky. She'll take Rob's last name; he gets mine. It's in the family.)
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I am glad it is a continuing tradition.
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Thank you! So far, lovely.
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I suspect this may happen once everyone settles.
Are the kittens in that icon yours?
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Nine
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Thank you!
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No wonder, sir, but certainly a cat.
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Nine
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Nine
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P.