Not much news in the kitten front, other than they're getting really big really fast. They're certainly more cat-like than kitten-like. Now the hard task of trimming their claws is at hand.

We recently got some brown rice bowls from Costco, and they're really tasty! (And a really quick way to make dinner.) Our fancy rice cooker has a brown rice setting, so we got a bag of it and made some the other night. That was definitely not quick. It took over an hour for two cups. Why is that?

The things I do while waiting for my energy to replenish on Mafia Wars (a Facebook app game).

We took our kitten in for their first round immunizations today. They seem to be just fine, unlike their brother. We're dropping off a sample of their poop to check for worms but otherwise, they have a clean bill of health. I was rather relieved. Hopefully they'll be our companions for many years to come.

Jayna is the pretty one, with a great marbled tabby coat. She's the one in front in the picture below. We call her the princess cuz she knows she's pretty and she'll go up to anyone that will appreciate her beauty. She also howled up a storm when the vet was taking a blood sample to check for feline leukemia and FIV. Newt, though she's more skittish, was a trooper and barely made any sound when they were checking her. During the physical exam, Jayna was squirming like crazy, while Newt just protested a bit and then just resigned herself to the handling.

As promised, a picture of the ladies:

Rest in peace, Dorian Gray.

He had a good 8 weeks, where people loved him and an entire staff of veterinary professionals tried everything they could to keep him alive. But in the end, his trauma was too great and he was just too little to operate on.

The vets had a last ditch effort where they decided to stick a catheter in him and stitch it on so he'd have a permanent hole to pee out of. That's when they discovered that the scar tissue that held his prepuce shut was starting grow over his entire penis. Whatever damage had been done to him in the first few weeks of life had sealed his fate. Poor little guy.

But I'm glad he had a chance to live a good life, as short as it was. He was the sweetest kitten with the loudest purr I've heard coming out of something so little. He was always so happy that we never knew if he was in any pain. But comparing him to his two sisters, who are bigger and a lot more active and rambunctious, I can see that he has always been uncomfortable. He just never let it show. Even as we played with him last night, knowing it was last time he'll get to climb the cat tree, he was still so sweet and loving.

Watching the vet give him the drugs to put him to sleep and then drugs to stop his heart was one of the hardest things I've done. But I'm glad I was there. I was amazed at how quick it was. From the moment the first drug was administered to the time the vet listened for a heart beat before telling us he was gone was mere minutes. I'm glad I got to say good bye to this little guy who was in our house for such a short time but will forever be in our hearts.

Wow, where has the time gone!

In the time since my last post, my family has come and visited us in Austin, we've gone back to California to visit and for a friend's wedding, and then we got 2 kittens, returned one and got another.

Well, I can't write about it all, but I'll write a bit about our kittens. Our friend Kathrenne found three feral kittens on her back porch in the middle of May. They were about 2 weeks old, and she decided that she didn't want to increase the feral cat population in her neighborhood, so she took them in. Whateley and I have been talking about getting a pet, and we were debating between getting a dog or a cat. Then we decided that since we're gone 12 hours a day, four or five days a week, that we'd need to get two animals so they wouldn't get bored and tear our house apart. And then we got to thinking, taking care of two dogs is a lot harder than taking care of two cats. So when Kathrenne told us about the kittens she found, we told her we'd take two of them. She had been trying to get us to take all three, but jumping from no cats to three seems to be a bit more crazy.

Anyway, there were two females and one male, so we decided to take the male one and one of the females. We decided to name them Zan and Jayna, after the Wonder Twins. ("Wonder Twin powers activate! Form of a cute kitten!") Well, after we got back from our trip to California, the kittens were old enough for us to take. The day after we took them, however, we noticed that Zan was going to the litterbox a lot and peeing very little each time. He had had a urinary infection when Kathrenne first found him, but that had cleared up with antibiotics. Though, his swollen junk kept getting sucked on by the other kittens, so the swelling never truly went down.

Anyway, we took Zan to the vet and they told us his bladder was very full, and his prepuce was stuck together and he wasn't able to stick his penis out to pee. They pried it apart and let him pee, and they thought that may have cleared it. Three days later, Whateley notices that he's not peeing again, and he described one attempt by Zan to go to the litterbox and giving the most pitiful meow when he couldn't.

He took Zan to the vet again and they told him it was a good thing he brought him in since if we had waited one more day, he would've died.

Let's just say, these were emotionally draining days.

The prepuce had "healed over" and shut closed again. They weren't sure what they needed to do, but it looked like he was going to need careful watching and with us working and being gone half the day, it may end up with us coming home one day and finding him dead. So we gave him back to Kathrenne, since she doesn't work. But I did feel bad that we basically "returned" a sick kitty to her. But she's gotten rather attached to him, and was willing to take care of him, so we were glad that at least we can go visit the little guy should he make it. They recently operated on his prepuce and basically cut and stitched his prepuce open. They can't do any other surgical procedure on him until he gets bigger. He's only 2.5 months old, and with his bout of urinary infection, his growth got delayed and he's a week or so behind his sisters in growth. But should he make it a few more months where he's big enough, they may be able to do a more permanent surgery on him to fix this problem. Poor little guy. He's so sweet and friendly despite all the problems with his junk.

Whateley originally didn't want to take the other kitten, but we talked it over, and we originally wanted to have two cats to keep each other company, and our other perfectly healthy kitten would still need that. And we could also give Kathrenne a break from having to care for the other kitten while she took care of Zan. So we took the other kitten in and named her Newt, because her skittishness reminded us of the little girl from Aliens.

So our two newest addition to the family are Newt and Jayna. Funny, Kathrenne renamed Zan to Dor (short for Dorian Gray, cuz he's a gray kitty), so Jayna's themed name gets a bit lost there. I'll post some pictures as soon as I download them from our camera.