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.