Colleen brought a “present” home last night….

(I shall pause here briefly for all the “awwwww”ing this picture surely provokes….)

To provide a bit of backstory, last week our friend Sarah discovered a stray kitten while out walking her dog. As it was in a neighbor’s yard, she enlisted the neighbor’s help to retrieve the kitten, and in the end the neighbor kept it. This caused Sarah a bit of heartbreak, as she’s been talking about how she’s really wanted a new kitten lately, and felt that one was going to come into her life soon (after this turn of events, she was rather upset at the universe for taking the kitten from her).

Though the universe quickly smiled upon her again with multitude of blessings, as she and the neighbor soon discovered the kitten’s feral mom and four brothers and sisters living in a drainage inlet. They eventually captured mom and the babies, with the intention to get the very feral mom fixed (so as not to introduce further kittens into the world), and find homes for the youngsters (apart from who Sarah’s keeping).

All the while, as this is transpiring, my lovely spouse received regular photographic and video updates, particularly of one little calico. It seems that She and Sarah were conspiring a little bit to place a particular kitten in a particular home. My (mostly reflexive) objections were quickly dispatched by the cute and professions of short term concessions regarding being able to see the floor again in certain family member’s bedrooms on a regular basis.

So now there’s a six week old kitten camping out in my downstairs bathroom until we can get her to the vet for a check-up, vaccinations, and fixing…Okay, when I say “camping out in my…bathroom”, I mean “hanging out in the bathroom for the few minutes a day when she’s not being carried around by whoever and getting snuggled and fussed over”, but you know the drill. It makes sense to keep her somewhat isolated until she’s got a clean bill of health and the rest of the felines gets used to her (so far, there’s been some hissing, but mostly, everyone’s generally tolerant and non-aggressive).

So far, for someone who spent her whole life apart from the last 48 hours living under a sewer grate, she’s very clean, healthy seeming, and well socialized toward humans, full of purring, nuzzling, and general pleasantness. I didn’t really need another cat, to be perfectly honest, but this one needed a good home, and we had a pretty good approximation of one. Stuff happens. Plus, with Sarah keeping one of the siblings, we now have a kind of joining of families beyond most of our kids being pretty much inseparable anyway.

For now, we’re trying out the name Sif, the Norse goddess of earth and wedlock, but really, it’s more about the Sif from Thor comics, because the ladies in my life are fans of badass warrior goddesses. We’ll see if it sticks, but I’m guessing it probably will.

So welcome, little Sif. Stay cute.