kittens!

We have KITTENS!

Three of them, to be exact. And we also have one dog, one mama cat, one big-ass goldfish & 2 baby chicks. Oh, and an almost five-year-old. Whew! That's a lot of caretaking on my plate right now. It makes me tired just talking about it.



Everybody told me that cats will go off by themselves to give birth -- just disappear -- but not Sally. She wouldn't leave me alone until I followed her upstairs & wouldn't give birth until I stayed with her.

I usually am not a believer in the "everything happens for a reason" mentality...I'm more of a believer that everything happens by chance and things work out better when you follow the conscience God gave to your soul. But this cat almost has a magical quality to her. I wonder if she came to our door because she's my healer.

Here she showed up barely showing a pregnancy, but I figured it out the same night & insisted we keep her. I've watched her get bigger & bigger at the same time that I'm facing the fact that I don't trust my body anymore & feel it's inherently flawed. Instead, I've been watching her be completely at home with her pregnant self, which has been a great model for me.

I've been suspecting lately that I am probably supposed to learn something from her. The night the kittens were born, I was so, SO tempted to jump online & research the heck out of cats giving birth & the signs & how often cats will be with their humans when they do it, etc, etc. But I didn't let myself. I decided this was between me & Sally & she'd tell me everything I needed to know if I just trusted her & listened to her.

It was wonderful. I've never felt I understood a cat's body language before, but she communicated very clearly with me. I turned off all the sounds in the room so I could hear her & drifted to sleep. About an hour and a half later, I heard the tiny squeaks of a kitten, then another. In the morning, I counted 3. Yay!

I had to ditch that great glowing bastion of accumulated information and trust that nature will take its course & that Sally & I could handle whatever happened just fine. And we did. I think I need to apply this lesson to my own body.

She is a wonderful mother. She does it so naturally. I get so caught up in watching her sometimes, soaking in her calm.