The Cats Are Back In Town

A few of you have asked for an update about our kitten fiasco. A couple of weeks ago, Akamimi took her kittens out of hiding for the first time. We recognized Chibi as the runt immediately. Akamimi set up the kittens in a thicket across the parking lot from our back door. She started coming around asking for food more, and eventually we bought a bag of cheap cat food and have since started feeding her morning and night.

At first Akamimi kept the kittens far from us until one day when it rained, and she let them sleep nearby, which strangely meant they were sleeping in the rain. The rain got torrential that evening, and we came home to hear one kitten crying in the bushes under the downpour. Akamimi was not in sight. Nor was Chibi. This was his sibling. We looked around for a while, a little concerned that Chibi was half-drowned somewhere. I finally grabbed the kitten and somehow avoided getting scratched by it after it FREAKED-OUT. We promptly named it “Oni,” which is something like troll in Japanese.

We put Oni in the box on our porch that Akamimi sometimes sleeps in. After sitting on the fluffy dry blanket for a moment, Oni got tired and went to sleep. We woke the next da with Akamimi and Oni on our porch and Chibi struggling to get up. Since then we find the three of them sleeping in the box almost every morning. Oni is pretty scared of us, Chibi less so, and Akamimi hisses if we get near the kittens. But they continue to sleep in the box, only at night, and Akamimi eats off our porch everyday. We’ve even see her weening Chibi, encouraging him to eat some dry food.

So now we’re obsessed with our kitty neighbors, and we hope that the kittens are friendlier with us than their mother is once they get a little older.