Tonight after months of carefully watching over the three kittens who live in our garage – after having saved them from flooding when they were caught in a French drain, and hunting one down that was missing for days and finding her stuck up on a wall – tonight we had a huge breakthrough. While they, and they mother, have been known to come into the hard in the wee hours of the morning to hang out with Paul, they’ve not been able to do that since he has been in Colombia. Today, they started getting a lot closer. Chocolate Milk, the one that is earmarked for Marcela to be a companion with her kitten Happy, finally, for the first time, let her approach and pet her. I got to pet her while she ate as well, a rare thing. In the evening, I went into the guest bathroom at the front of the house and saw the outline of cat ears in the window and there was our timid little girl hanging out in the shower window.
Tonight, all three kittens, Orange Juice, Chocolate Milk, and Chemæra came into the yard and made their way into the house and spent HOURS playing with Liesl and Luciana in the house. They had so much fun: both the girls and the kittens. It was a huge breakthrough. We are hoping to be able to make them house cats. They really want to be with us. They come running to us anytime we go outside. And the three of them are inseparable. We have decided to try to keep all three, they are such a team and all want to be with us all of the time.
We check on them all day long. We see them first thing in the morning, check on them throughout the day, often sit in the garage and play with them, and we always see them just before going to bed. Sometimes their mother, Fritter, is around, especially in the morning. And their dad normally sits at the far end of the garage and watches them from afar (mostly to avoid us, he is very skittish.)
The girls were so excited to have the night with the kittens tonight. They’ve never had cats that would play like this and they’ve been taking care of these kittens for so long now. To have them suddenly leap from stand-offish to full on snuggly, pettable, playing in the house was a really big deal.