Personal Note: New Family Member Oreo

We have a new family member!  A spunky little kitten we named Oreo for obvious reason.

So here’s what happened.  I mentioned in a blog last year that a cat gave birth to kittens under our back deck and we fed them and they grew into our outdoor cats.  There were five kittens last year plus the Mama Cat.  We named the kittens Shadow, Star, Twinkle, Patches, and Witchy.  Shadow and Witchy were pure black cats.  Star was a black cat with a white star-like patch on his chest.  Twinkle was the same except the star patch on her chest was about half the size.  Patches was a black and white, almost in the tuxedo arrangement.  Mama Cat was identical to Twinkle.  Once grown you couldn’t tell them apart except that Mama Cat would hiss at you all the time.

Four of the five kittens survived.  Witchy either hurt her hind legs or developed some sort of physical problem.  She hobbled for a while.  I tried to catch her to take her to a veterinarian but couldn’t.  Ultimately she disappeared, either left or died.  The four kittens made it through the winter, grew into healthy strong cats, and commanded our backyard as their personal territory.  Mama Cat would come and go, but mostly stayed away.

Now I’ve used gender nouns so far, but frankly I can’t tell which of the kittens are male or female.  Come the end of spring, there were a bunch of kittens with the now grown cats.  At one count we had a dozen kittens running around our back eating the food we leave out.  How many different litters there are, we’re not exactly sure.  Mama Cat came back to deliver another set of kittens.  Patches is definitely the mother of another set.  It’s possible that Twinkle, who looks like her mother, is also a mother of a litter.  Here is either Mama Cat or Twinkle nursing her kits.

I can’t tell if that’s Twinkle or Mama Cat, but you can see the kittens are black or black and white.  Quite a few of the kittens are black and white, and that’s because I suspect the father is a big black and white Tom Cat that wonders the neighborhood.  Other colors of the kittens are either all grey or grey and white.  Here is an adorable grey and white we call Pickles.

Now we also have gone back through the pictures of the backyard and found Oreo with his mother.  That’s Oreo playing with the blue string. 

Only Oreo has that white ring coloring around the back of his neck.  So we know that’s him.  So his mother is either Mama Cat or Twinkle, I can distinguish the two. 

So what happened is Matthew wanted one of the kittens for inside for the longest time and was plotting to grab one when the opportunity presented.  One morning, while the kittens were feeding and Oreo was not on his guard, Matthew swooped him up and brought him in.  This was on Tuesday (Sept8th) just after Labor Day.  Rochelle and Matthew brought him to a veterinarian on Thursday who said he was healthy.  So in less than a week, he has become integrated into our home.

The vet assigned him a birthday of July 3^rd (7/3/26) which would make him eight weeks old, but frankly I think he’s closer to six or seven.  But July 3^rd is it.  The other important information we got from the vet is that he is male.  I can never tell with cats.

So here are some pictures.  Here’s Matthew with his new best friend.

Rosie and Oreo have gotten along from the beginning.  God bless Rosie for not being aggressively territorial.  However, Tiger, our cat of eleven years, has not.  He avoids Oreo, stares at him, and has even hissed at him.  If anyone has advice on how to get an older established cat friendly to a new kitten in the house, I could use it.  No pictures with Tiger yet.  Here’s Matthew sleeping with Oreo.

This recalls when Tiger was a kitten and would love to sleep in Matthew’s bed.  From eleven years ago when Matthew was five years old.

 

 

Let’s end with two more.  Oreo like most babies has bursts of energy and then crashes.  They seem to go in two cycles of two hours of running around and then crashing  Here he is crashing on top of the couch.

And finally what I consider a really beautiful picture, I’ll end with this.

One other note.  The name Oreo was Rochelle's idea.