…..aaaaand baby makes seven.

No, not a human baby. A feline baby. Three of them, in fact, and they’re all sleeping now, crammed in a little pile between the head of my mattress and the wall. Aw. How sweet.

See, it is like this. The cat that lives in the woods behind my house [Toothless] is a girl cat, and she is not alone in the woods but lives out there with a number of other cats of undetermined gender [Beef, Smith, Wesson, Captain Morgan, Widowmaker, and Fluff]. We know that Toothless is a girl because, in the spring, she brought three little kittens to our yard. (In an really interesting corollary, this also established that at least one tabby and one orange cat from the undetermined group is a boy cat. But it still didn’t narrow the field enough to make legally binding accusations about anyone.) That was the point, in fact, in which I became a really hard core Cat Enabler and started feeding her every day. She had babies, everyone was hungry, I felt bad…you get the picture. Anyway, long story short the kittens eventually all disappeared and Toothless went back to being a pretty cat who came alone to my back porch every morning to eat.

The summer passed in this predictable and day-to-day fashion. In the meantime, Widowmaker was rehomed to Mike’s Farm, and the other cats appeared almost never, except for Captain Morgan. Who walks with his head on one side and always moves slightly to the left (instead of going in a straight line). That’s why I named him Captain Morgan. I do not know if he is a boy. But I couldn’t think of a unisex alcohol.

ANYWAY. Toothless came back to the house on Monday evening (as we returned from our whirlwind NOVA tour) looking painfully, distressingly, upsettingly skinny. How can she get so thin in just a weekend? I ask myself. She only went like two full days without food!

On Wednesday, I’m sitting there minding my own educational professional’s business and the piano student I’m teaching says: “Hey, kittens!” Well, poop. Sure enough, there’s ol’ Toothless with FOUR little furballs. In my yard. Hungry. Sooooooooo I feed them, and Joe catches three and we put them in a box in the garage, hoping to catch Toothless in there with them, and relocate the entire gang to a non-base location. No go. I catch her coming in and out around midnight, retrieving her babies and heading back to the woods. Not able to get the door shut on her. Time for plan B.

**Plan B on hold for Thursday while I make like a cadaver and lay around [with a really evil head cold]. While I’m sick,though, it gives me a chance to mention that once again a tabby cat and an orange cat are boy cats. Still isn’t narrowing the field much. Widowmaker was black and white.**

On Friday, Plan B. Toothless continues to bring back kittens to The Place That Took Them (dumb cat) but now consistently carries around the fourth kitten, the one we hadn’t caught during Plan A. They eat, but she won’t let them stay long, and then she comes back alone later to finish her entree. We wait, we watch, and we catch three kittens by Friday afternoon, this time bagging #4 and missing #3 from Plan A. What to do? Well, I’m not sure now. But they’re sleeping in my room. Me, baby, and three little kittens. No mittens.

Where is Joe, you ask? Sleeping in the guest room, because he finally had LASIK on Wednesday and is supposed to avoid all possible situations that could hurt/touch/damage/bother his eyes. Evidently my habit of playing ping pong in my sleep is not eye-friendly. Oh, and also V wakes you by standing up next to you in the bed and then body-slamming into your face.

Would you like a kitten?

Also, in other news, our lives are going well. You should send me an email so I can get you addresses for a couple dudes we know that deployed during this month. They like to get mail. :)