Miss Kitty
Miss Kitty is around 13 and is the oldest. We originally took her and her 4 brothers in after their mother died from a snake bite. Of course they weren't old enough to be weaned yet and I was already bottle feeding 5 newborn kittens that you'll hear about in a minute. We had a Gunsmoke theme going hence the name Miss Kitty. She is the little mother yet she can be hold her own with the boys.
Boomer
Boomer is our baby. He is about 2 weeks younger than Miss Kitty but looks and acts like an old man. I found Boomer and his 4 siblings scattered around my mom's farm. Apparently his mommy was inexperienced and didn't make a nest OR feed her babies. Of course I gathered them up and bottle fed them. Sadly I lost all but Boomer which made him even more special. Miss Kitty and her brothers came to my house and they adopted Boomer into their little group once he got big enough to keep up. Boomer has a rough life even though it has been sheltered. When he was a toddler, he received a blow to the face. We'll never know what happened but it was hard enough that it moved the little bones in his nose and let air up under the skin. I came home and my little baby had slanted eyes and a puffy squishy head. He was literally an "airhead". The vet reassured us that he was ok and his body would absorb the air which it did. After about a day or two you could feel little pockets of air along his back and then the sneezing began.....everytime he would sneeze the big bubble on the top of his head would go flat then fill back up. It was hilarious to watch. My husband tells me that poor Boomer has brain damage; which he probably does since this wasn't the only "bad experience" he has had. I'll have to blog about them sometime.
Isabelle
Isabelle is the kitty we adopted when I first started teaching and was commuting weekly to my job. My daughter and I would stay in a trailer in the town where I taught during the week then come home on the weekends. Of course Emily is an animal magnet and missed having a pet and was very homesick. We tried hauling the ones we already owned back and forth but they did NOT appreciate it. So we figured what was one more cat and found Isabelle at the Humane Society. She was very friendly and playful and seemed like the perfect pet. Boy did she have us fooled! She was a sweet little thing...... until we got her another kitty friend to play with! Apparently Isabelle would like to be an only child and hates her competition. She has become such a grump, but we still love her. The funny thing about Isabelle is she likes to tuck my children into bed. When Emily was younger, Isabelle would start pacing when it got close to bedtime. Then she would race us to the bedroom and wait anxiously on the dresser until Emily crawled into bed. Before I could get the covers up all the way, Isabelle would be on the bed working her way up to Emily's chest where she would lay down and put one paw lightly on Emily's cheek and start purring. She would lay like that until Emily would fall asleep, then move to the foot of the bed and wait for me to go to bed.
Honey
You're probably wondering why we have a black cat named Honey and of course there is a story behind it which I will get to in a minute. Don't confuse Honey with Isabelle because they do look very similar. If you will notice Honey has a tan stripe down her forehead and Isabelle has a tan tip on the end of her tail. I have caught my husband checking the tail to see which cat is on his lap many times. Now let's get back to the story of her name. We were going shopping one real snowy February day and as we were almost to the Interstate my husband and I looked at each other and one of us said, "Did you see that?" What we saw was a tiny kitten curled into a ball right on the edge of the highway where the blacktop meets gravel. We figured it must be dead or hurt but we turned aroundto make sure. As we passed the kitten again, a little head popped up and looked at us. I was sure once I got out of the car we would find major injuries or the kitten would be wild since there weren't any houses for miles around. But it came walking up to me meowing pitifully. I picked it up and it started purring. We turned the van around again and headed back home. My children were trading the kitten back and forth and the whole way home my toddler son kept crooning, "It's okay, honey! We're taking you home, honey! You'll be alright, honey!" And that is how she got her name. She was extremely hungry and had a big wound on her side that the vet thought could have been done by an owl and that is probably how she got so far away from her home. She recovered completely but wouldn't venture outside for several months!
Sassy
Sassy is our movie star. But don't let her beauty fool you, she is the biggest tomboy ever! Most of the time you will find her outside and she doesn't like to waste time grooming herself. She just rips the wad of hair out that is giving her problems and goes on. For the longest time the poor dogs were being blamed for the chunks of white hair we would find scattered around the yard. We thought they were playing tug of war with the poor cat!
Twinkles
Twinkles is the result of letting your daughter go somewhere with a friend and NOT letting their family know that it was NOT alright for her to bring home a kitten!! It just never crossed my mind. And you would think that in the era of cell phones someone could have called me so I could say,"ABSOLUTELY NOT!", but that didn't happen either. Poor Twinkles was probably a little too young to be taken from her mother but apparently there was a man there that said if the girls didn't take the kitten he was going to drown it in the river. As if my daughter really needed an excuse to bring home another animal. I tried to explain to her that was the oldest gimmick to get people to adopt animals and she had been taken but it didn't matter 'cause we now had a new kitten.
