Weeks with current fosters: 13, 7
Days without being hissed at: 9 (doing great, little guy!)
Days without being sneezed on: 0 (I was about to say 1 when Indiana ruined it)
Christmas napping
We started doing this thing where we let the kittens into the rest of the apartment. Kas calls it “releasing the pressure valve,” as in giving them more space to romp and play and get out that super high kitten energy means when we, say, want to retire to bed at 11 p.m. they won’t be midway through their nighttime frolic, having frolicked earlier in the main room, and thus the bed will be safe from spontaneous wrestling matches and snuffling noses. In theory. Of course this means that pressure builds in other places, namely Jenny and Clem, who fear and loathe the tiny invaders and feel very stressed about losing their precious kitten-free space. This is legitimate, and guess what: There’s no good answer.
We had a very fine Thanksgiving; the kittens ate copiously and wrestled and played and acted exactly as they did before their spay/neuter surgeries, which is to say that nothing phases them, at all, not a 6 a.m. trip to Queens or general anesthesia or being cut open and, like, glued back together — nothing. We got them back around 8 that evening and they were riotously hungry and bouncing off the walls after having been cooped up in carriers for most of the day. Other kittens post-spay/neuter we’ve seen be woozy from surgery, tired, sore, refusing food and not really wanting attention, but this pack of jackals? Unfazed.
I’m having trouble writing this today. We had a very long weekend, but also I have little visitors tromping along the keyboard, trying to delete paragraphs and turning on Caret Browsing, which is not a choice I’d care to make, thank you, Marlo. It’s been a while since we’ve had so many high-energy kittens; this time last year we had siblings Hazel and Piper and their best pal, Kiwi, who were all a little older than these kittens (13 weeks and growing!), plus Hazel and Piper’s year-old mother, Nadya. Hazel and Kiwi and Piper weren’t relaxed, exactly, but they’d stopped bouncing off the walls and none of them ever bit with the regularity that these guys bite. It’s like they’re discovering their teeth anew every five minutes. We’re doing our best to redirect the biting — or the kitten; sometimes you just have to remove them from the situation — but it can be a lot. These four can really be a lot. I suspect in pairs they’ll be much more manageable, not that kittens are ever really manageable, but certainly lessening the potential combinations of playmates will defuse the overall energy. I say this as now Kas, reclining on the couch next to me, has a literal armful of sleeping kittens, which is achingly cute and totally undermines my point about them needing to be separate to be calm.
I mean
He says he feels like he’s “on the surface of the sun” with four hot little bodies a-snuggled onto his, but that is a him problem.
We decorated for Christmas and thus far we haven’t had any tree climbing, not even any attempts, which considering the Christmas tree addicts we lived with last year (Piper and Hazel), surprises and pleases me. They’re already all up in everyone’s business all the time — never have I been climbed or leapt upon with such frequency, they just won’t stay off you — they can at least leave the tree alone.
Honestly, things around here are business as usual. It’s not exactly fun to have kittens underfoot — literally, you lift a foot and put it down again and whoops there’s a kitten where you were just standing — when you’re trying to cook a dinner or do some yoga, but I will concede that letting them out for a few hours every day probably was a necessary step. I just wish it didn’t come at the cost of Jenny and Clem’s peace of mind. I feel so bad to see them unhappy, the way they hiss and bap (no claws, never claws, they’re miffed, not angry) at the kittens and try to spend as much time as possible away from the madness. Clem isolates herself to one kitchen stool, which no kitten can access, and Jenny goes for aggressive lap action, plunking down on you no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable because you’re her person and it’s her right to be here now so get comfortable because she’s settling in. I wish they were better host cats. But they can’t be anything but what they are, and what they are is utterly lacking in patience for kitten antics.
Four naughty kittens and one soft boi
Buster, on the other hand, is a prince. He likes these kittens so much. He doesn’t always want to hang out with them, but he does spend a lot of time playing and napping with them. It’s heartwarming, like I actually feel happier seeing him gently wrestle with Indiana or cuddle with Marlo. Kas called him a junior camp counselor, and that’s a pretty apt description, the way he interacts with them; sometimes he’s right there in the mix, sometimes he’s above the fray. He seems to genuinely love these kittens, and if nothing else I’m happy we’ve been able to give him the gift of playmates again, since his brother Loko left us back in early October. Kittens shouldn’t be by themselves, and he may be bigger but he’s still a kitten, and he needed friends. These four are troublesome little menaces, but they are also open-hearted and ready to love anyone, and Buster deserved some unconditional love from his own species.
Since I don’t have any real news — Sidney’s breathing better after sneezing out a booger half the size of a human thumb! Everybody can climb the cat tree now! — I guess I’ll close with the usual pleas for food and litter donations, as again, Little Wanderers doesn’t reimburse and these kittens are going through something like 30 ounces of canned food every day, and my god can they poop. We’ve got six litter boxes going right now and if we had room I’d add two more, and maybe that’d be sufficient? You can also follow the adventures of our entire feline household on Instagram, but you probably knew that. Newsletter photos are exclusive at time of publication, which is nice. Nowhere else at this moment can you see Royal napping on my hand!
I could not move my hand at this time for fear of disturbing his slumber.
And I just scraped fresh snot off the couch. What a treat.