Cuties!
Lola gave birth to her kittens starting at about 11:00PM on Christmas eve and finishing around 3:00AM on Christmas morning. She had five kittens, but the last was stillborn. The remaining four are doing great, eating well, and gaining weight nicely.
Although the first kitten was born a bit before midnight, technically the litter birth date is the day when most of the kittens were born, so these are our first ever Christmas kittens. (Don’t expect a Christmas naming theme, though, because that’s just way too obvious for us).
We had just gone to bed and I was watching the Kitten Cam in night-vision mode when I could see that Lola’s water had broken on the blanket. The interesting thing is that we couldn’t have seen that in normal light. Before we turned off the lights she wasn’t showing any signs of going into labor so we had set alarms every few hours to check on her. We probably would have missed the first couple of kittens. (Well, maybe not. They are very loud kittens).
That said, knowing that Lola was close to delivering allowed us to run interference and keep her from going under the bed. She kept waffling between the nest and the bed. Before the first kitten came out she did get by us once, but we managed to coax her out. She has been content to stay in the nest since then.
Lola is growling as mothers do if we disturb the kittens, so we’ll get more pictures after we can move her and them to the kitten room. We don’t want her to change her mind about the nest being a safe place for her kids.
(Side story: This summer we actually ordered a new bedroom set where the bed goes flush to the floor so “mama under the bed” would no longer be a concern. Unfortunately, the delivery date kept getting pushed out and by November we decided to cancel the order. Maybe we’ll have better luck post-pandemic.)
All of these kittens are reserved.