The kittens have gotten rather large, round and mobile over the last couple of weeks. We still have them penned up in our bedroom closet, seeing as how we don’t know what they would do wandering around a room. One time years ago when we raised kittens, before we had children, we made the mistake of giving them the run of our apartment, even while we were still around. It was only after it was too late that we discovered they’d been using the end of a rug, under a chair, as a litterbox. This was a Turkish rug my grandparents had given to us as a wedding gift. Whoops.
So in the closet they stay, with plenty of protective padding all around, and the mama cat can figure out how to deal with it. We have a baby gate set up in the closet door so they can get light and air but not escape. Before long, they’ll figure out how to scale the gate, but so far so good.
One of the kittens in particular has been most vocal and eager to escape and frolic with the humans. This is the one my daughter has named Cornflower. She is a calico with a little pink nose, which is the only thing that easily differentiates her from the other calico with a black nose. (That one is very shy, so if you spend some time with them and get to know them—naturally their differences become more striking—like human twins.)
Cornflower has shown a kind of desperate streak to get human attention. After crying and scaling the gate, I finally pluck her out of the closet and put her on the floor, and she nestles between my feet, her tail upright, her body ready to spring into action. I took her downstairs with me and showed her the open front door, where River was leaving for work. She tried to follow him out the front step, which entailed a huge flip and hard landing on the porch, and then she tried to follow him down the front stairs. When we managed to get her to notice me again, and come back in the house, it was a hard scrabble up that big step again. Then I had her follow me all the way back up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. She had to climb each step with all her might.
By that time the mama cat had noticed that Cornflower was out and about and she tried to pick her up by the scruff of her neck on the stairs. That didn’t work, though; the kittens are too big to do that easily, especially for a stair climb. So the mama cat just meowed constantly until order was restored.