Since we had just started our winter hibernation on New Year’s weekend, we were a bit surprised to hear from the shelter last week. Could we take three kittens who needed a bit of touch-up work before going on view? We wriggled out of the mud at the bottom of the canal, shook our flippers, and headed up for air.

I picked up this trio on Friday and we decided to call them the Inaugurals… what with our being in DC, it being early January, and you-know-what coming up next week. That’s kind of a mouthful, so we going with Naugs for short.

Two of the Naugs, Isabel and Ivory, were the smallest siblings in a litter of five solid gray kittens. We’d seen the other three on view at the shelter already, and two of them had already been adopted. Inez is still on view. Yep, all their names began with I – straight out of the baby names book. Since we were only getting two of these gray sibs, we decided we could live with their names, even if that meant calling an all-gray kitten Ivory.

Isabel and Ivory are both very cute and quite healthy, and just a few clicks shy of the 2.5-lb cutoff for spay/neuter. After acting a bit squirmy on Friday, they’re now happy to be held for a minute or two, but then they want to be off to the races. They’re athletic, somewhat talkative, and eat well without being ravenous gluttons. In short, total charmers. They could still benefit from a bit more weight and socialization, but elsewise these are two hot little kittens. Since they’re impossible to distinguish at a glance, we decided to put a tagless pink collar on Ivory.

The third Naug is a stout little long-haired dustmop named Brennen. He’s quite shy and doesn’t move much or play with the gray girls. He looks like a sad little guy. When we reach to pick him up, he flattens his ears and sometimes hisses, but doesn’t cower or flee. He’ll let you hold him indefinitely, and if the room is quiet, you can hear him purr very softly when you pet or brush him.

We’re pretty sure that if we let him onto the playground, he’d disappear under the bed, or maybe burrow his way inside the box-spring, so we’re keeping him confined to the bunkhouse. We’ve let the girls romp around the playground, and they quickly mastered the basic skills, like climbing the bed and finding the window-shelves. Now that they’ve seen Par-ee, it’s going to be hard to keep them down on the farm, but they’ll deal with it – because of Brennen, we can't leave the bunkhouse door open. Since all three Naugs look and sound good, our main project during their stay at 50K will be prying Brennen out of his shell. We’ll see how things go on that front.

filed by: TS