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.

Photo Essay: December 2025 Snow

The first snow storm of the winter always makes for some great photos, and this past Sunday (Dec 14^th) we had our first.  It was only supposed to be about three inches.  We wound up with over double that.  So much for having faith in their predictions.

Let’s share some photos.  First from my bedroom window looking out the back of the house.  I’ve mentioned this before, but behind my backyard used to be a convent.  It was sold and now is some Hasidic Jewish facility.  But I am still blessed with open field from my window.

 

It does look like a snowstorm, doesn't it?  It was coming down hard at the time of that picture. 

Now looking out my front window.

 

Here are a couple of snaps around my neighborhood.

 

It was only six inches but a fluffy snow.  It looks so much more.

Here is one from my backyard.  Look carefully and you will see one of the black kittens leaping through the snow.

 

I mentioned about the litter of black kittens born in my backyard.  They are still there!  Here is a zoom in of the kitten.

 

Speaking of black pets, here is Rosie standing out very well against the white snow.

 

 

 

The old dog (she's now eleven years and four months old) loved it out there.  

When I got over to my mother’s house, I took a picture of her Madonna.

Call her Our Lady of the Snows.  Actually that is a title of the Blessed Mother under Our Lady of the Snows.  It goes back to the year 352 when a summer snow storm hit Rome.    

Since it was Sunday, we made it to Mass in the snow.  Thank God for four wheel drive.  Here is Our Lady with the Christ Child covered with snow.

All the donated Christmas wreaths hung along the church fencing were dusted with snow.  Here is ours.

Finally since the day before, December 13^th, was the Feast Day of St. Lucy, our pastor still had the statue of St. Lucy by the sanctuary for veneration.

My family has a special devotion to Santa Lucia for several reasons which I will save for another day.

Personal Note: My New Backyard Family

We had unexpected guests this summer that have stayed around.  We have graciously fed them.  They are treating our home as if it’s their own.  They don’t really repay us in our kindness.  They just hang around thinking their cuteness is enough of a gesture to offset our generosity.  You know what, they are right!

The unexpected guests are a mother cat with five kittens.  I have a one-step platform deck in my back yard, and sometime around mid-July a mother cat took possession of underneath the deck and is raising her five kittens there.  I don’t know if she was pregnant and gave birth there or she brought her kittens over after birth.  I suspect she gave birth there but we only saw the kittens when they were small.  Tiger, our house cat, was estimated by the veterinarian to be five weeks old when we took him in.  When we first noticed the kittens, they seemed to be around the same size as Tiger back then, or maybe a shade smaller.

The mother cat is a black cat, and all five kittens are predominantly black.  Mama has a small white patch on her chest, so she is not all black.  Three of the kittens are completely black and we can’t tell them apart.  One kitten has a white patch on his chest like his mother.  Perhaps the white patch on the kitten is a shade bigger and from a distance looks like a star.  I call him Star.  The fifth kitten, the biggest one and perhaps the most skittish, is a tuxedo pattern.  He or she, I can’t tell the difference with cats, has a black overcoat with a white chest and belly.  He has white paws as well.  I call him Tux.  (Gender pronouns are a generic male because I can’t tell the difference.)

Rochelle started feeding them almost immediately. 

Let me share some pictures.  These are some of the early pictures when the kittens were really small.

Look at how tiny they are.  We have a couple of stairs from the deck to the backdoor and they love to scramble under there when we come out. 

 

I think that’s the mother all the way in the back, and that looks like Star up front.  I think I see the little white patch on his chest.

Here is a full view of Mama.

 

She hisses every time we take a step toward her or the kittens.  Here’s a little video clip of two of the kits munching away while Rochelle sits in the chair a couple of feet beside.

 

Matthew took that video.  Matthew and I want to take one of the kittens into the house for keeps but Rochelle won’t let us.  We have two pets already and she doesn’t want to take care of another.  Even though she has been feeding them twice a day regularly now for almost three months.  Plus I worry about how Tiger will react to another cat, especially a kitten.  Cats I understand don’t always like other cats.

Here’s a little one on the lounge chair.

 

One day from the deck above overlooking the deck below I saw the Mama nursing two of the cats in that lounge chair.  I did not get a picture unfortunately. 

Here’s a video clip of me intruding on them in the yard and the three or four of the kits scrambling to hide.

 

They are so cute.  You can see how much they’ve grown in that video, which must be around early September.  One of them is Star.  Here is a good photo of Star.

 

Here’s another video of two rough housing.

 

I think that’s Star and Tux.

We take a lot of pictures of them.  Here are a bunch.  Hope you don't get bored but I'm a proud daddy.

 

 

You can kind of get a view of my garden in some of these pictures and clips.  Most of my gardening is done in pots.  It’s been a magnificent year overall for my garden but especially for tomatoes and eggplant.

One of the all black cats has become the friendliest.  He might even be the smallest.  He comes close to me as I work in the garden.  I call him Shadow because he’s all black and because he sticks by me like my shadow.  Here are a couple of pictures of Shadow.

 

Here is Shadow playing with a toy with Rochelle.

 

 

Finally, they are getting big.  Here they are like a pack of lions feasting.

 

I must admit, they eat rather kindly with each other.  The mother has done a nice job of raising them with manners.  Finally all six in one shot.

 

Bless them.  I think they have blessed us.  I hope they stay in my backyard for a while.