I realized today that I haven’t written here since December 2009. Whoops!
Things have been busy, trying to keep the house clean, updating some things in the still not finished kitchen. Getting some things for scrapbooking area for me setup (still a work in progress.) A visit from Papa (hubby’s father) which coincided with some of the kitchen stuff.
“Schooling” hasn’t gone so well all of the time, but sometimes it’s been ‘chores, OK. Schooling, alright, back on track, for a few days here and there.’ It’s not a pretty picture, it’s been more un-schooling than anything, but they are learning.
My Asa is still not really reading, but getting closer, able to read SOME things, just not confident to read most things, thinking it’s supposed to be magic or something super easy, he just isn’t into putting in the “hard work” to get there. He’s 9, it’s time. By the time he’s 11 I want him to catch up to where his siblings were at 8/9 years of age. Read LoTR at least.
The feral cat that hangs around our house was pregnant again in early 2010. She birthed 6 kittens in our basement on March 9, 2010, which was a nice experience for my Victoria, 11 years old. Previous feral litters were born in our crawlspace. We’d tamed the mama cat enough to have her let us get her in the basement for a few days before the kittens were born. We have kept her in since then, going to get her spayed in the next few weeks.
Of her kittens one had a birth defect and while I pondered what to do about it mama cat took it somewhere in my basement, we’ve never found it, nor smelled anything weird. Strange. Five kittens left after the first day then, A very cute bunch. Three black and one a black & white tuxedo, and one a classic tabby tuxedo sort.
Mama kitty has only had black kittens previously, minus one DM/LH mackerel spotted tabby. Some have had smoke-like look in some places, a few white patches on throat or lower belly on many as well, but overall mostly all were black. One litter she brought to the house with her late 2008, the first time we saw her was with three older kittens, all short haired, but her, feral mama, is long haired (with a straight nose, tall round ears, muzzle a small square.)
Of those kittens one was super friendly, one super scared and ran away eventually, the other not scared but a rover who eventually must have gotten killed. The super friendly one lived most in our backyard for a long time, but we found him dead on the road down a few houses in the past couple of months. Very sad.
Spring of 2009 that mama feral had gotten into our crawlspace and had a litter of 5 kittens. We couldn’t get in there close enough, she was scary, crawlspace scarier. Eventually we were able to see the kittens when she left to eat, get rest away from them, etc. She moved them a few times, one time to the concrete structure that is under our “porch” a horrid space that no human can get into but stick a camera or mirror in to see what’s there. Thankfully she got them out and put them elsewhere. We did get to the kittens as often as we could, to make sure they were socialized. All 5 of them lived and I was going to keep two of them as my cats, but they became so awful, overly friendly, the one, TOO friendly, or just plain weird. Too many of them, we had them in a room in the house, but 5 teenage kitten/cats is just too much. We finally got them spayed/neutered when they were 8 months old or so. All the time we had them we had contact with adoption groups and no one would take them, we asked anyone we knew if they wanted a cat(s) but no one did. So we put flea collars & their rabies tags on them and put them in the backyard. It was our only choice. Anyhow those are different sorts of long haired DLH’s with large square muzzles that have a broad straight nose, and large ears. (Think black Maine Coons or something similar)
In August 2009 that feral mama had another litter of kittens. This time she had them in the crawlspace again, but we brought them into the basement and persuaded her to come in and take care of them there instead. She tamed a lot by then and more-so during that time. Unfortunately the beautiful litter of 6 long black newborn kittens became 5 by a couple of days, one died. Those next 5 went one at a time up to 6 weeks of age. It was the saddest thing for us. I loved one of those kittens, named him Claude, and really liked another, named Spooky. At the end there was one that seemed to be dragging, though she had progressed to using the litter and eating dry food happily, she just got so obviously downhill looking. Spooky & Claude looked fine at that point, 5 weeks old and cute as buttons. One day though we found her dead behind a bookcase. Then the other female died. Then at 6 weeks Claude was fine, ran across my bed to me, leaps and bounds, then later was weird, like had a stroke or something, and never regained consciousness and was dead before sunrise.
So, obvious to me, those kittens were not going to live to adulthood, they had something wrong inside, though they grew up, most of them, to the running around stage of 4 weeks, looking healthy.
We wanted to get mama feral cat spayed, but didn’t after that, and as fall and winter set in I knew she’d not be pregnant until closer to Spring. Winter was fairly Mild and indeed she did wait, but not quite as long as I’d hoped, she gave birth on March 9th as I detailed earlier in this post. These kittens are now 8 weeks old. We have two of them, three others were given to an adoption organization, pronounced healthy. The two I’m keeping are King Arthur and Red Queen. King Arthur is a beaut and Red Queen is very pretty. Of every litter mama cat ever had she never had any like these two. Both long haired, with doll-faced-persian-like faces. King is the B&W Tuxedo. Queen is a black/smoke mixture. They are gorgeous.
I’ve looked at the other cats we have and the cats outside and pictures of cats and none have the faces that these two have, not smooshed noses, but shorter a bit and pushed up, not straight like all the others. Their three other litter mates, the DSH classic tabby tux one had a general straight nose. The two others were black, one DSH one DLH. Both the DSH kittens were boys, and had super thick with a tinge of maybe some long fridges of hair growing out from their coats, but overall their coats were super thick and spongy like good quality velvet. (I speak in past tense since I will probably never see them again since they are in the adoption system.) Those two black kittens had a somewhat modified nose, half straight/half-smooshed like King/Queen, if that makes any sense.
Also my King & Queen kittens have cute ears that are really pointed, like a leaf, curved up on the sides to that point, spaced out further on the sides of their heads than the other kittens (who also mostly all had more round tip ears) yes, as if they are melting into their heads. So very cute they are, not full breed of anything, but somewhere in mama’s past must be some persian, and she must have met a very nice persian/persian-mix gentleman cat (father) that fathered these or some of them. The mother cat is DLH but hints at Maine Coon or something similar, but she has much less of a Maine Coon look than her April 2009 litter does (They are big and hairy and very outdoorsy, they NEEDED to be outside, the one of them that is male is HUGE, the other females are different sizes, one bigger but not as big as the male, and all are still growing, smaller females growing more getting bigger than a lot of cats.)
All in all this cat thing has been a great education for the children, never before had we had a non-neutered cat … I’m an adoption rescue kind of cat owner/fanatic, but love having kittens born in my house (I grew up with that, prevalent in the 1970′s) has always been something I love, and missed for many years. The thing is, something my daughter and I have pondered of late, is that if we had that Mama Kitty spayed in 2009 we’d have missed out on the prettiest kitties born to anyone from regular domestic cats, that includes anything I’ve had since … ever, ever seen in adoption places, ever. That’s something to think about. Good things coming when birth ability would have been stopped through surgery but then wasn’t. Implication of that thought process for cats and humans alike. What if we’d never had King & Queen, we’d never know what we’d have missed. I had a baby at the age of 40, when most people would have turned off their birthing ability by then. Life without our Quentin is unimaginable (especially now at his toddler nearly-3 horrible stage [read: anything can be thrown])
As that goes, Quentin is progressing, processing language better, repeats anything that anyone says, often so very funny, the way he does it, and also shows he “gets it” a lot in the process. His new one in the morning for the last week is ‘I’m hungry’ … vast improvement to previous ways of letting us know he wants food. 
Russell just turned 14. He’s got much to work on, still plays like he’s a lot younger most of the time, but is sleeping like a teenager for the last year. I need to get him into more formality for his own sake … getting too old to be the playmate all the time, 9 & 2 year old brothers … a difficulty for me organizing him to get chores done and sit down to do anything on paper or computer that isn’t a game or involving some toy’s website or book website with a forum, or researching about Toys histories … so along those lines I’ve decided to let both Russell & Victoria have blogs to use, invoked July 2009 but never did I get them to use them. This past week I decided to finally show Victoria how to use it and set it up with categories for making it their homeschooling work place. Book Reviews, Audio Book Reviews, Creative Writing, Copy work of sorts that I want them to remember … Research of topics into reports, etc. A blog is a CMS, great for homeschooling this generation. Why not just get it going, truly work it as a tool for an all in one place organizational place for well formatted document storage, printable too. Available anywhere there is a computer. It’s online, on my hosted sites.
Then at that point I can monitor their work since I have them setup to write, but not fully administer their posts. I publish when I see they have something done enough. Other than all that, I still want them to hand write and learn better writing on paper. The other things are Math and all the stuff that isn’t a report of some kind. It’s makes me feel better to see it this way in my head, all those book reports and research of things and writing of thing will be much easier as a separate one source with multiple ways of using it, totally separate & user friendly since it’s a monitor and keyboard that will connect them to it, more likely that all will get done now instead of NOT get done.