Life Cycle

Kitten is contributing to the cycle of life - she's killed two little birds in the last two days. Yesterday I saw her sitting by a dead one, so I wasn't sure if she was the killer or if she just happened upon the scene of the crime. But today, I saw her with one in her mouth, still flapping its wings a little :(. I went outside to see if I could get her to drop it so it could fly away. She dropped it once I got close, but then circled me, attempting to recover her prey. And the bird made no attempts to fly, or even flap. So instead of letting it die a slow and certain death, I let Kitten have back at it :(. What do I do now though?! She needs to stay inside for a while because the more she's outside, the more undomesticated she becomes, and thus, the more birds she'll kill. But her mouth is undoubtedly teeming with easily-transmitable-to-humans-and-babies diseases! It's a Catch-22. Well, I guess right now, it's only a "catch 2"... only 20 more to go... poor birdies.
A picture with this post just seems like bad form. Use your imaginations if you must.

More cute sleepies.

Cute sleeping pictures.

The various sleeping spots for the kittens: Behind the laundry bin in our closet, the shelf of my nightstand, under our bed, under our dresser, in Mama Cat's bed, in a box, in Dave's slippers...

This is Kitten when she was pregnant. We had a really funny video of it, but Dave accidentally wiped his hard drive and we lost all our videos. :( Kitten climbed in the bottom drawer, so we took out the second one up and caught her trying to climb up to the 3rd one! Her pregnant belly looked soo funny with her just hanging there! You can kind of tell in the picture that her belly bulges on the side.

Crook. Born with a crooked tail. When he was a newborn, Kitten (or Mama Cat, as I like to call her) picked him up and bit a little too hard. The wound became infected and we had to take him to the vet to get it cleaned out and bandaged up. For a week or two we tried to keep human band-aids on it, but his siblings kept removing them when they'd climb all over each other. He was such a sad, pathetic, cute little thing. He and Tiger were Dave's favorites. He was the first to be adopted.

Tiger. Adopted by Pete & Tiffany Hinman. He is now known as Bobby. By far, the coolest looking of all the babies - stripes on his back and spots on his belly. I know that shot above is a little indecent, but it's to show his spots.

Here are some of the rats... I mean, newborn kittens.

Our shed. (Again, Elvis.)

Our back porch. (Elvis is atop the grill. He's the only baby that we kept.)

Our kitchen

Our bedroom

Shortly thereafter, we bought a house and moved. Good timing too, because pets were NOT allowed in our apartment. And not only did we have a cat, but we also had 5 kittens.

Next, we found out the hard way that Kitten hadn't been spayed prior to her adoption.

Ode to Allie

For Allie's birthday, I decided I'd finally post pictures, lots of them, and videos of everything she's been wanting to see for almost 2 years now. So I shall start with the cats. These first ones are of Kitten, when we first "acquired" her. She was quite shabby, but very friendly. She immediately made herself right at home.