Two. Four? Five - SIX??!?!

We knew our Mama Kitty (so original on the name, I know) had kittens while back. She went from being a waddling basketball to a skinny slip of a thing overnight. We just didn't know where they were.

Finally the night before we left for vacation I figured out where they were. Paul was working nights, and I had just put Nathan to bed. I heard a sound coming from the basement cellar. Definitely a kitten. Since getting into the basement requires going outside, I decided to wait for Paul to get home in the morning to investigate. (Good thing I sleep with the fan on during the summer or that racket would have driven me crazy.)

We found two kittens in the basement. A mostly black one with a few calico patches, and a stripey one. That left pretty much no doubt as to who the father was. There's an ugly, mean black tomcat that comes sniffing around here every once in a while. (He is always picking fights with Brutus when he's around.) The reason the kittens were yowling all night was that they had "fallen into" the basement. Apparently she'd had them in a window well or something. (Our basement is definitely not rodent-proof. On my list of to-dos.)

Carlsie house-sat for us while we were gone, but she never saw them. The night we got back, we heard one yowling again. We went to rescue it and found.... Two more! There was a "pink" yellow one (what we call light yellow cats) and an orange yellow one.

Well, yesterday, I yet again had to rescue one from the basement. After finding no siblings, I decided to take the stripey one around to the front of the house, where we'd seen them playing and Mama Kitty likes to hang out. I put him down just in time to see another stripey one dash to the shadows.

Then after he got home from work last night, Paul took Nathan out to the deck to watch them playing in the flowers. He informed me that there's not one, but two black ones.

Needless to say, our cat population has exploded. We went from one outdoor cat to SEVEN. I don't anticipate them all making it to adulthood and becoming pets, though. I'm realistic.

Names thus far (don't knock my originality):

Pinky

Orangey

Tippy (black with white tip on his tail)

Callie (black with calico)

Cucumber

Mozerella (The two stripey ones. Because Stripey One and Stripey Two are even too unoriginal for me.)