Update on the Kitten Project

Someone pointed out that I missed the other BIG summer project of 2010 -- kittens!

The good news is that there are no longer 15 cats in the house. The bad news is that there are now 14 cats in the house. And no, we did not adopt all those foster kittens.

To backtrack just a bit, we were fostering 7 kittens for the city shelter. There were two single kittens and one litter of five kittens.

Technically (as far as the city is concerned), all five of these kittens and one of the singletons were adopted by other people. In reality, two of these kittens are still living with us, though which two is our secret. We also formally adopted the other singleton kitten, a beautiful little female named Kaylee.

On the day that we were accomplishing all these adoptions, we -- and the other adopters --spent several hours at the city shelter dealing with paperwork. And while we were standing around minding our own business, a man walked in clutching three tiny kittens to his chest.

I did my best to ignore the kittens, but the Drama Queen eventually went over and started talking to the man, who was suffering under the delusion that the city shelter has a good adoption record for strays. Long story short, the three kittens came home with us instead of entering the city system.

There really are three baby cats in that picture. There's the gray kitty on the left looking straight at the camera. There's the diffuse tortoiseshell (light gray and orange) with the split face on the right side. And in the background, there's another tortoiseshell kitten. She's almost all black, but you can see the orange blaze on her forehead if you look closely.

We may have a home for at least 2 of this batch of kittens. After that, however, I am out of acquaintances here in Dodge. The shelter has already called to see if I would consider fostering more kittens. I know what to say -- it's better if kittens never enter my life at all than if I worry about whether they were among the fortunate kitties adopted out of Dodge's city shelters.