Kitten-tastic!

No pics as yet, but we are now the proud guardians of six tiny kittens, born yesterday at 5am in the back of our bedroom cupboard. Happily we managed to persuade Susie (or Siouxie as the Curse likes to refer to her) not to squeeze them out under the bed, which was her first choice, but to retire to the cupboard instead!

She ignored the lovely clean box with newspaper and bedding that I had prepared for her, and instead she settled down on the grubby bit of carpet in the corner, behind a suitcase, and produced six little kittens within the space of about an hour total. The Curse paced the rooms worrying about what we would do if something went wrong, I just gave her some vocal encouragement and let her get on with it. She's done it before, we know that much, but I keep telling her to make the most of it, this is going to be her last litter! We have kind-of adopted her from a neighbour whose son has proved himself a rather irresponsible, albeit well-intentioned and loving owner. He's a bit too young and easily distracted by other teenage interests to be able to look after her properly, so we have taken her on at least for now.

It wasn't till yesterday evening that I was able to finally establish that there were six, not five kittens - nearly all of them are black and they spent most of the day in a big heap next to/under/on top of their totally-black mum! And there is one tabby which has already established itself as a bit of a character, or some might say a bit of a bully!

Anyway I'll be bringing you cute kitty pics just as soon as I manage to coax them out of the cupboard. Which hopefully will be before they start making proper noise - it's not so bad at night at the moment, they only make little squeaking noises, but we're going to have to relocate them before the vocal chords really kick in!