They’re really moving around now, and doing a bit of adorable kitten wrestling.

Also, white kitten is perfecting his moonwalk.

Two weeks old now… eyes and ears are open and soon they’ll start moving around an awful lot more.

The two boys have surpassed the girls in size now, but all of them look very good.

The two faces you can see are of the biggest two… the white boy is the largest of the lot, followed closely by the blue girl.

They’ve really settled in now, far less whinging than before. Happy little kittens. 3 blue, 1 white.

I had a look today, I think the white one is a boy and two of the blues may be female. It’s so hard to tell!

We haven’t determined sex yet… we’ll leave that until they’re a bit older. But we have 1 white kitten (we suspect he’s a boy because he’s the largest of the lot) and 3 blue kittens. There was another white kitten, but it was stillborn as it had become detached from its placenta.

All the kittens were born between 20:55 and 23:21 last night. Even though it was all done at a rather reasonable hour, it was 2 am before we were done settling Snowball and heading to bed ourselves. I won’t say we slept much. Every little sound from a kitten jolts me out of whatever rest I was having and makes my heart stop. Is she sitting on them? Are they not feeding? What’s wrong? I suppose it’s not dissimilar to the first few nights of parenthood.

You’ll see on the video, the blue kittens have tags on their wee legs. We use that to tell them apart. While that may seem silly, it’s really important to monitor weight gain (and loss) at least through to successful weaning. So keeping track of them is important.

We also DNA test when the kittens are old enough to go an hour without suckling (suckling will confuse the DNA sample) so we obviously want to get the right results for the right kittens. The tests will tell us that they are free from common diseases (we know this already because both parents are), what sex they are (with certainty), what blood type they are (important if they’re to be bred or if they ever need a blood transfusion) and what colours they carry if they are bred. We’ll also know if we have any longhair carriers, which I think is always exciting. British Longhairs are adorable and still very uncommon.

I hope some of that made sense. Super sleepy, I am!

…Get ready for a long night!

We hope to have news for you all in the morning.

This morning, we woke to a horrifying noise. After I checked on Snowball, I checked the other cats and discovered Xena (one of last year’s kittens) was calling her head off. It’s her first call, even though one of her sisters already had 5 kittens for Martin at Sliabh Cats. Goes to show, they’re all individuals!

Longer answer:

There are two possibilities. Snowball had four white kittens last time, which is pretty improbable since the stud cat is blue. We know from genetic testing (both cats have been fully tested) that the possible colours are:

Blue (like Dad and Mum*)

photo by westpark on flickr

White (like Mum*)

Snowball by Rubistyle.com

We’ll only know for sure when they arrive in mid-August!

* White isn’t strictly speaking a genetic coat pattern. The gene that makes a white cat white is a “masking gene” and masks the cat’s true genetic colour (that’s why white kittens have spots of colour that eventually disappear). According to Snowball’s breeder, she is blue underneath all that white.

She does seem to have a busted wing, so she’ll be off to the vets first thing in the morning.

We’re having trouble figuring out what kind of bird she is… so, photos to follow. Any ideas?