No photograph can capture the pandemonium that happens at this time of night!! There are paws thundering around me everywhere……furniture being leapt on, lego being knocked off the table….unfortunately Richard has been fiddling with the settings on my camera again, so I cannot take any pictures.

I have had to move all remaining plants into the bath for the night. I found 2 kittens climbing them, and they were rocking so precariously, at any moment, plant and kitten were going to go tumbling over the banister!!! They are a joy to watch, but words and still pictures alone, fail to capture the scene!!

When I returned this afternoon, after a brief trip out ( it is like having a small child, you dare not leave them alone for long!!!) I found all Lily’s Rosettes from the Cat Show in Glasgow, scattered on the floor!! Maybe they were trying to tell their mum something!!

Well, it is that time of night, when I have to get ready for bed, and they will do their best to stop me !!!!!!! I am surprised they have not developed the skill of lighting candles, then they could mount a proper vigil outside my bedroom door!!!!!

I wrote the above on Thursday evening. My apologies for not keeping up the entry today. I have met some lovely people coming to visit my kittens and this has left me with little time to write. But I would like to announce, that upon getting up this morning ( 6am, as the kittens were waiting outside my door!!) 2 baby Stick Insects had hatched out of their eggs. Just over a year ago now, we were given 3 babies. Unfortunately, they all died a month or so ago, but they left us with lots of eggs. Now we have a new generation to look after, that is nice. In addition to the Stick Insects and my wonderful Siamese, there is also Annie, the dwarf rabbit, but she is another story, which I will tell you about another day. She is a little bit crazy!!!

The kittens have slept for the past 4 hours or so. We have some lovely beds/bedding/baskets, which have been left by their new families. They now have so many choices of places to sleep, and it is lovely that they have this opportunity to get to know something that will be going with them to their new homes. Parting with them will be upsetting, but knowing how happy they are going to be, is making it so much easier. I just know that I am going to be so very, very proud of them all……………………

I thought that I would write this tonight, as tomorrow I will be quite busy, it is the children’s end of term and there are lots of things happening. As I type, 4 kittens are asleep on my lap, and it will not be long before they all settle on my bed!!

I took a few photographs tonight. I was running late on most things, including getting my children to bed, washing up and preparing supper for the kittens. A couple of photos show them on the table, sniffing anything and everything in the hope that I had put supper out!!

Richard asked if he could help, he only has a half day tomorrow, so he claimed he did not have to go to bed early! I gave him 3 bowls of chicken to take through. As he opened the kitchen door, one of the kittens leapt at his legs, and he dropped one of the bowls of chicken! So I took 2 photographs of some of the kittens diving in, regardless of lack of bowl!!!

Another of the photos I have just taken. As I was on the pc, 4 of them snuggled up onto my lap, so I tried to take a photo of them all. They are almost too big now! Smeagle, Goldberry and Arwen are still asleep on my lap, but I do not think they will be for much longer, as the others are rampaging through my room!!! Maybe sleep is not on the agenda after all!!

As I wrote the above, all but 2 of them have just joined their mother on the bed………………maybe I could sleep on the floor????!!!!

This morning is a very rare morning. All the cats are asleep!! Merlyn is on the top bunk bed, and Lily and the kittens are downstairs, all squeezed onto the one small chair. It was difficult to take any photos this morning, simply because when I arrived back from the school run, EVERYONE was asleep. So I decided that I would just take 2 of them all sleeping together. You may smile at the shot, which shows the legs hanging over the side of the chair. Now that they are growing up, they cannot all fit on so comfortably! In fact, my largest boy now weighs 1 ½ Kg. Even Goldberry, who was the smallest for a while, has been eating heaps, and she has just weighed in at 1 Kg. She does make me smile. When she wants to be fed ( she is a little fussy, so she gets her selected diet!! ) she will run after me, with that cute little voice of hers, telling me to drop everything and go and get her food! And being me, I drop everything and go in search of the things that she loves the best. She will sit quietly outside the kitchen door, waiting for me to reappear with the goodies. When I do reappear, she will yell her head off until it is put on the table for her! Last night, she showed considerable interest in the fish fingers on my plate, but I knew it was safe as she would never eat it, unlike her mother, who ate a whole plateful of them ( with the batter removed).

The third photograph I took last night. Just before I was due to go to bed ( they have cottoned on now what bed time means!!) they all made their way onto my bed and got themselves lovely and comfortable! The trouble is, when they are all comfortable, there really is no room for me! They kept looking at me, with those cute eyes of theirs, as if to say, ‘please don’t move us, we want to stay with you’. But I knew that I would get no sleep, there simply was not room for me as well. So I brought their basket up, gently put them all in it, and carried downstairs by the radiator. This did not stop them all leaping out and running straight back upstairs to start their vigil outside my bedroom door. They only stay there for about 5 minutes though, before they trot downstairs and go back to their own bed. When most of the kittens have gone to their new homes, I know that I will let Lily and Little G sleep with me again, Merlyn can choose where he wishes to go.

And just to finish, I was greeted this morning, but a very cute and purring Kili. That was such a lovely cuddle first thing in the morning.

I managed to have more of a restful weekend. I even managed to play 9 holes of golf on Saturday! Living in Aberdeenshire for 6 ½ years, I had forgotten how mild it gets in this part of the country. So I have really enjoyed the warmth this weekend.

The kittens have all been very good. They have played hard, slept hard and eaten well. A couple of them have learnt the art of climbing curtains! Therefore, all curtains which touch the floor, have been taken up and wound around the curtain pole!!! That soon put a stop to that game. My settee is straining under the constant attack by their little claws. I have it covered with blankets and throws, in an effort to limit the damage. But the little darlings like to then crawl underneath the throws, you can see lots of little lumps crawling around!

I was in a pet store yesterday, looking at scratching posts. I overheard a conversation by some people standing next to me. They were commenting that scratching posts were a silly idea, surely the cats should be trained NOT to scratch. They implied that having scratching posts in the house would only encourage the scratching, i.e. if the cats knew it was ok to scratch the posts, they would think it was ok to scratch everything else. I could see the logic in their argument. But I believe cats NEED to scratch, it is an inbuilt part of their behaviour. I had a little chat with them, and explained that in providing the posts, it encouraged them to scratch there and leave the furniture alone. Having good scratching posts in the house has certainly stopped Lily and Merlyn scratching the furniture, the kittens still have some learning to do!!! But they are getting better. However, they still like to use my legs as a substitute for a good scratch!!!

I took some photographs of the kittens last night, while I was enjoying a glass or two of wine, as you will see, they took some interest in it too! And as usual, one of them had it’s nose in the mug of tea. Now it is that peaceful interlude in the morning, where they are resting, after a few hours of eating and running riot. They are all asleep downstairs in the lounge.

There is not very much to report today. Things are ticking along steadily. They wake up in the morning, go crazy for a couple of hours, and then finally go to sleep. They should intermittently sleep now during the day, waking for the odd short play and eat. It is a lovely sunny day, so most of them are making the most of the sunshine on the lounge windowsill, as you will see from some of the photos. Little G and Kili are, however, asleep on my bed.

One little amusing thing, which I thought of last night. At the beginning of writing these diaries, I often mentioned how hard it was getting out of the bedroom in the mornings, the little terrors would ambush me as I got out of bed! Now, at night times, they all want to get onto my bed. However, there is just not room for all of them AND me! I have to evict them from the room. This means that they sit outside my door, making it almost impossible to get out again. If I try to open the door, at least one or two are ready to leap through the gap!! Once I am in my room, and the door closed, I feel like a prisoner! I know that I have to wait at least 10 minutes before they will all trot downstairs and cuddle up on the settee.

It is a lovely sunny day outside, so I hope that they will sleep for a while now. I want to take the children out for a short walk through the woods.

Last night the kittens managed to do what they have been trying to do for ages, knock my big plant off my chest of drawers!!!! I managed to get a photograph of two of the villains in the act, before I picked it up and removed it from the room!! Needless to say that it has been permanently moved now!!!

I will also mention something that made me smile this morning. The children were off to school, and I sat at the table to have my breakfast, gluten free organic porridge, with sugar and melted butter, lots of it !!!! Young Smeagle has developed an appetite for anything really. He was so keen to get his nose in my bowl, that I gave him a little of his own, which he gobbled up!!! He then decided to make a move on my drink, fizzy vitamin c……..that he wasn’t allowed. Having licked the remnants of my porridge from my bowl ( I gave up in the end) he then moved over to the other side of the table, where there was some cold tea……he is developing a taste for the finer things in life. But he was so funny to watch, when he got that glint in those beautiful blue eyes of his.

I had some lovely visitors this morning, and the kittens more or less refused to wake up !!!!! How will anybody believe me when I talk about the destruction they cause, when they behave so angelically for visitors!!!!! They are all asleep now, Kili is on my lap, all soft and cuddly. Smeagle is a solitary kitten on my bed, the others are downstairs in Goldberry’s new basket, brought by her new mummy. So I think that it is time to take a leaf out of their book, and grab some zzzzzz’s!

This morning has been a bit of a rush. I had to tidy the house as I had potential new tenants coming to look round. I decided that as there were people wandering around the house, I would take the kittens out. So they were put into to carrier baskets, nice warm blankets, heated pads, and we went for a little drive. I had decided that it would be good for them to go out in their baskets, and not to end up at the vets. Hopefully they will not always associate pet baskets with the vets. I put 3 in each carrier to give them more room. I think that I will try to do this a couple more times to get them used to their baskets a little more.

They have just settled down to rest now. Lily was running around the house making a lot of noise, until I twigged that she was waiting for me to sit down at the computer. No sooner had I sat down, then she and 3 kittens came and laid down on my bed and went to sleep! We know who is in charge in this house! I even do what Lily tells me to , albeit eventually. I was a bit slow on the uptake this morning!

I have taken a few photographs this morning. Most of them are of the kittens playing on the bed. They are playing with the little red toy that they love so much, the one that makes them growl! The one that I am holding as I type is Goldberry. It is lovely when they are still small enough to hold in one hand. But they are growing quickly. Feli is well over 1kg now. The smaller girls are coming in at just under 900gms. They seem so big to me now. But they are still all very affectionate and loving, and I am really going to miss them when they have left me. Thank goodness they are not all leaving!!!

My diary is late today, and possibly a bit shorter. Last night, as I was doing the final litter tray cleaning, and putting their supper down, Timothy decided that it was a good time to be sick all over his bed covers, mattress, pillow, teddies………so it was rather late before I eventually got to bed. In the morning Richard was also not feeling well, so I found my self with 2 children home from school.

The kittens have had a wonderful day, as they have had lots of beds to snuggle down on. I had a sleep in the middle of the day, as tiredness caught up with me, and today’s photographs show all the kittens and the 3 of us, gathered around my bed. Smeagle and Fili are the kittens trying to drink my tea! Arwen and Goldberry are the 2 girls lying together on the duvet and Kili is the little one that Timothy is cuddling.

It is such a comfort to have all these little ones around, especially when they are as cuddly as they have been this afternoon.

I thought that I would start today by describing breakfast time again. These kittens are providing my already lazy children, with even more of an excuse to do nothing in the morning! I come downstairs at 6.45 to a scene of both boys crashed out on the armchair and settee, television on, and kittens sleeping in their laps. I believe that Timothy had 5 at one stage. When I ask them to organise their breakfast, I get told, ‘but mum, I can’t, I have kittens on my lap and I can’t possibly wake them. Please can you bring my breakfast to me here’ !!!!!!! That is emotional blackmail and unfair in my books! If I force them to get up I am made to look the villain for disturbing cute little furry kittens. So I end up delivering breakfast as ordered.

Yesterday I had lost my main bunch of keys. It caused me a lot of inconvenience. It was vaccination time yesterday, and I ended up having to ferry 2 cat baskets all the way from the back door to the car out the front. This was not the easiest manoeuvre. Eventually they did turn up. They were found underneath the plastic that the litter tray is standing on. I know that my kittens have been hiding things, but can they possible drag my keys underneath the plastic??? I was left with the thought that it was either them, or my children??

And finally, the visit to the vets yesterday. Having eventually got the 2 baskets into the car we were ready to set off. It is only a 2 minute drive down the road, so it wasn’t too far for them to travel. None the less, they made the usual squeals of protest at being caged in. When I entered the surgery, I was confronted with a very busy waiting room, full of lots of large, noisy dogs! I got strange looks from everyone as I carried in my 2 baskets which were covered over with towels. I think people were wondering what on earth I had in them. Then the 6 of them started squealing, which left people in no doubt that the identity of the animals had to be feline. Eventually, after a 10 minute wait, we went through. I made the mistake of putting Fili and Kili in the same basket. They are sometimes impossible to tell apart, and this was one of those times. After the vet had examined one of them, he put him down, and I was not paying attention. When he asked me which one it was, I could only stand there feeling a fool, and shake my head in admission that I did not have a clue! So they both had to be examined again! All 6 of them had their jabs, they were very good, and were home again within half an hour. I was jolly glad that job was over.

As I finish for the day, Goldberry is sitting on my chest of drawers, talking to herself in the mirror……..

Another Monday morning, and the rush to get the children off to school on time, kittens fed, litter trays seen to, is over! Phew, I am sure that I take the mornings at a run. It would help if I got up earlier, but I think that 6.30am is enough for me.

Because we are still renting this house, and some of our things are still in the bungalow in Aberdeen , I am without a tumble dryer. This has meant that I have made jolly good use of the radiators over the past 9 weeks. I had forgotten to wash Tim’s P.E. kit, I only remembered yesterday afternoon. So I hastily put it in the washing machine, and then placed it over the warmest radiator in the house, the one in the lounge behind the settee. MISTAKE!!!! Kittens like to sleep there, and they have, unbeknown to me, started actually sitting on the radiators behind the curtains at night, maximum warmth! This morning, I couldn’t find Tim’s P.E. top anywhere, and we were already running late. I had visions of having to go into school, and explaining that I had lost his top!!!! Timothy then tells me that he could see it. The kittens had knocked it off the radiator and dragged it underneath the settee!!!! His warm fleecy top that he uses for outdoor P.E. is still missing, I dread to think where they have put that!

Last night, Richard, Timothy and I had a really good laugh. Little Goldberry had stumbled across a small furry toy. She decided that this was her prey, and we watched her running up and down the stairs with it in her mouth, growling her little head off. She would then bring it downstairs and sit in a corner with it, still in her mouth, growling. The others would come up to her, with their tails all fluffed up. It really was quite a comedy show. She is so sweet, and she really did look very, very funny. I have included a picture with her and her little toy in today’s photographs. One of the other photographs shows Timothy playing with the crisp packet on a piece of string, and Merlyn desperate to join in the game.

Lily is still calling, so things can get a bit noisy around here at times. My poor ears at breakfast. I had both she and Merlyn in the kitchen with me this morning. Merlyn was yelling ( and golly, can he yell!) for the chicken I was chopping for the kittens, and Lily was yelling because she was trying to persuade Merlyn that she was a very pretty girl! Merlyn being a neutered boy, takes no notice of her whatsoever, he is far more intent on stealing the chicken, which I am preparing for the kittens. The noise really was pretty loud, but I just blocked it all out from my conscious mind. Being in a semi detached house, I felt sorry for my poor neighbour.

Now they are all settled. Merlyn is asleep in a separate room, 6 kittens and a noisy mum was too much for him. The kittens have found various warm places, and Lily has worn herself out.

Peace at last!

(I spoke too soon, just as I typed that, 6 kittens bounded into the room, hotly followed by Lily! And by the aroma, I need to go and see to the litter trays AGAIN)

It is Sunday morning and I find myself with time to write an entry. It is nice to have a morning where I do not have to rush. I did not get up until 8am today, and I found that all the kittens were very keen to see me. Little Arwen was the first up the stairs, I suspect that it was more out of hunger than affection! Lily is calling again today, so she is a little noisy. She keeps trying to look for Merlyn, who has successfully hidden himself away.

The kittens have the run of almost all the house now. The children’s bedroom I keep them out of. They have too many things around that I would rather keep my babies away from. But they are used to sounds like, the electric guitar, hoover, children arguing, my singing! , television and other similar sounds. They are all confident and friendly and they are currently sleeping in the sun in the lounge.

Little G, the girl that we are keeping, amused me last night. It made me again think of Red Dwarf, and the things that The Cat does in the series. I had washed my children’s white clothes for school, and they were resting on the table before taking them upstairs. Little G trotted onto the table, and sat there, trying to lick the washing. It reminded me of the sketch where The Cat is doing his laundry by licking it. Richard and I had a good giggle, and then I removed the washing before she could lick any more!

They have also developed an irritating new game. When I clean out the litter trays, I use nappy sacks. They have started leaping at the sacks as I fill them up, resulting in their claws ripping the bag. As you can imagine, cat litter then goes everywhere! While I am trying to dissuade them from this game, I then find another one of them attacking my toes. Consequently, litter tray cleaning can take a while. I am going to have to resort to taking the tray into another room completely!

We have another fun new game that they like to play. I have tied a tied up crisp packet onto a long piece of string. They love to follow me around the house chasing it, it saves my furniture and tires them out beautifully. They love it far more than any of the bought toys.

But I have to say how proud I am of all of them. They are cuddly, cheeky full of fun, and in my eyes, very, very beautiful.