If You Can’t Get a Hole in the Head, Get Five Four-Week-Old Foster Kittens

Syd and I are going to be playing around with idioms next week in her Creative Writing study, so it's relevant that I tell you that I needed five four-week-old kittens like I needed a hole in the head.

But to be fair, I did tell her that she needed to choose a regular volunteer commitment this year, and I did tell her that it should be something that she's passionate about. After all, those college application essays aren't going to be writing themselves!

She'd been making some noise about going back to volunteer at the little local food pantry we used to volunteer at weekly when she was a tot, so I thought that's what she'd be doing. Now that she's fully licensed she can even drive herself, so I could just sit my butt down in a quiet home for two hours a week while she built her leadership skills and logged service learning hours and created the foundation of a kick-ass college application essay about food insecurity.

But instead, somehow I found myself putting my name on a quite different volunteer application that she filled out, and then somehow I found myself going with her to pick up a litter of foster kittens. Another volunteer had already claimed the litter of four six-week-old kittens we'd originally planned to pick up, but the staffer said that another litter of five six-week-old kittens had just been dropped off that morning; would we perhaps like to take them, instead?

Five isn't that different from four, so fine.

As the staffer was examining them, though, she was all, "Hmmm... these don't look like they're six weeks old. I think they're more like five weeks."

Five weeks instead of six weeks means they'd spend just one more extra week in our care, so... okay, fine.

A few more minutes, and that became, "Actually, five weeks might be a stretch. I'm going to write them down as four weeks old."

And of course, by then I'd already been petting them, and seen that one is a tortoiseshell and one is a TORBIE!!!!!, so the news that we'd be coming home with one more kitten than planned and keeping them all at least two more weeks than planned sailed right over my head. An hour later, I was sitting on my playroom floor, holding both that tortoiseshell AND that torbie in my hands and giving them kisses on their little fuzzy foreheads!

Here are Socks, a tuxedo, and Athena, the torbie, the bravest of the litter and the first ones out of their travel crate:

And then Socks laid down for a nap, too: