[Disclamer: I have a soft spot in my psyche for pregnant females, and moms, of almost any species]

So, I'm browsing merrily away tonight, getting caught up on email and such, when I notice, on a trip to the kitchen to check on some chicken breasts I was braising, that MamaCat's food bowl looked like it hadn't been touched.

As it turns out, she'd not eaten, or I think drank, since she had her litter last night. I took her food and water from the kitchen over to her box. She jumped hungrily on it, now that she could eat and drink without leaving her new kits.

I had just assumed she'd leave them alone long enough for that while I was away working today.

Funny to find more dedication in a cat than you see in some human mothers.

Here are some of the pics I took of her tonight. (You don't wanna see the pics from last night when the kits were still all slimy and stuff.)

For sake of completeness, I suppose you should see her the day I met her.

The daddy of this litter is T-Bone, who you may have seen here when he was a muchkin himself.

Here as some assorted pics of the kits at about 24 hours old. I know they're not all that good, but I wasn't gonna do much more than stick my hand in the box and shoot, as I didn't wanna disturb them any more than I had to.

There's one that looks just like TBone, a pure white one, (dunno how that happened) two black ones, one of which is sporting some ORANGE highlights - obviously the purrfect cat for Halloween, and one that is a very strange sorta dark champagne color.

At this point they're very small, about the size of jumbo mice. Mama herself is a smallish cat, maybe about six or seven pounds, with a small head and dainty features.

The Champagne kitten, next to the orange and black one.

The black one and the Mini-TBone

TBone and his Dad, Smokey Joe.

There a nearly constant scramble for prime feeding stations, and the kittens roll around is sort of a Brownian circulation. A clear example of the common sayin' in these parts about "sucking hind tit."