We have kittens!

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!