Our New Family Member

We have added a kitten to our family! Springtime (summertime?) is also Kitten Season, when there are many, many kittens looking to be adopted and brought into new homes. Older cats are also always to be considered, but for our household with a young boisterous dog and a grumpy old-man dog, a kitten that would be adaptable seemed the best choice.

So, now we have Sebastian. It has taken him a few weeks to acclimate, but he seems to have decided on a course of action.

The first week we kept him restricted to the bathroom until he and the dogs became acquainted (which made for very interesting shower time, as he is a super talkative kitty and seems to think he owns all towels). Week 2 he was allowed to a few more rooms in the house, and enjoyed seeing how high he could jump. The answer: about as high as a corgi. He quickly found hiding spots under beds and couches, but was rather unpleasantly surprised to learn that Mia (the younger corgi) could  wriggle into those places as well. The area under our couch became very thumpy in the mornings. I'm not sure if I want to know what they were up to or not. Sebastian started to take the dogs toys out of the toy box and hide them under the couch, trying to stir things up with the dogs. The joke was on him though, because that is the same thing that Mia does with them. I guess she thought he was helping her?

Eventually Sebastian figured out how to climb his way up to our bed, where Mia sleeps next to me. He also wanted to sleep next to me (seriously, my husband also sleeps up there, does he emit some kind of odor repugnant to animals or what?). Mia and Sebastian spent an entire week fighting over the sleeping-next-to-Mommy space, each of them trying to creep closer and closer to my face. It was great fun waking up in the middle of the night to have a corgi sharing my pillow. Eventually Sebastian gave up, settling for sleeping on Mia's butt. But not before peeing on the bed next to my face. At 5 am in the morning.

Sebastian has also discovered a love of computers (is this normal? I have never had a cat that is so into prancing across keyboards before). Whenever I am on the computer, he has to come "help" me type by dancing across the keyboard and somehow always pressing the keys that make the touchpad stop working. Every. Single. Time.

For the most part though, Sebastian and Mia are partners in play. They play chase and hide-and-seek and other games that they have made up together. This morning, Mia was laying down and Sebastian crawled onto her back and bit her ear to let her know that he was ready to play. Bailey joins in sometimes, but is happy to have more time to sleep. It's always interesting to watch Mia and Sebastian interact (especially now that they have worked out the whole bedtime thing and I have my pillow to myself again).

First Day of Spring

As we move from winter into spring today, the sky celebrates with us by dropping the first snowflakes of spring on the ground. The corgis are quite excited by this, as they love snow.

Bailey thinking deep thoughts as he watches the snowflakes

Yesterday was almost sixty degrees, much closer to our normal spring weather. The goat kids were quite excited to be outside and zoomed around, showing off for their moms. The mothers were rather unimpressed, having seen the antics of their kids before, and rather more interested in finding any greens that were sprouting. Below are some of my favorite pictures from yesterday's fun in the sun:

Springs for feet

Zooming around mom

Karate kid

How high can I jump?

And now for the adorable pictures:

Voltron - he's a sweetheart

Quinn and Graupel - snowstorm babies

Our angora girls

Spring Preview

Based on a True Story...

Voice-over Guy: After surviving the week of below-freezing temperatures and single-digit wind chills, the weather has finally taken a turn towards a temporary thaw.  With it has come rain and mud.  Lots and lots of mud.

This is a paraphrasing of a conversation that happened in our home last night. 

Hubby: What is this brown stuff all over our kitchen floor?

Me: Dirt.

Hubby: Why is there dirt all over the floor?

Me: (Really, really wanting to be snarky and say that someone came in and dropped dirt all over the floor.) *Sigh* It's muddy outside. Everyone is bringing in mud on their feet. When it dries, it becomes dirt. 

Hubby: Oh. 

After-note: We have lived in this house for eight years now. We have mud season EVERY YEAR. I did not think this was a big surprise to anyone, but hey, I was wrong. 

Also, my daughter is currently obsessed with life hack videos on You Tube. After an article I read a few years ago, I stopped reading/watching any of those, because as far as I could tell they were just common sense. Among other things, the article had to do with.... cleaning up mud off the kitchen floor. Their recommendation: wait until it dried so you could sweep it up rather than trying to mop up the wet stuff. Um, thanks?

If I could also get the humans in my family to leave their shoes in the shoe area (which is before the kitchen), it would also help this problem. Hence the whole "mud room" thing. I don't think there is much hope as far as the corgis are concerned. Their low rider status just attracts mud like a magnet. Every other year I get the bright idea to towel them off as they come in and then run out of clean towels as the stack of dirty towels piles up by the door. Eventually I give up and they make nice little mud patterns with their stomachs on the kitchen floor. Maybe I should have told my husband that the brown stuff was corgi art.