One more cat thing to round out the week: when I got home yesterday, the kittens had been moved again. They had already been moved from one closet to another a couple days ago, but now it appeared Lucy had taken them out of the bedroom completely. I searched likely spots throughout the house, finally coming down to the basement. I walked into the band room and found kittens all over the place!

The gray kitten and one of the ginger cats were crawling through the room, mewling and generally getting dangerously close to crates full of dusty cables. Lucy had set up shop behind my bass amp, NOT on the nice rug, NOT on the comfy blanket I put on the floor, but on the cold, paint-spattered cement floor. There was no way to corral the kittens, who were busy making themselves scarce under the reel-to-reel. The ginger cat somehow started climbing up the metal grill of my bass amp and got halfway up before I noticed. Even Lucy looked like she regretted her decision.

Mother cats move their litters for a variety of reasons. She may have felt the closet was too exposed to potential predators, she may have decided we were futzing with the kittens too much, she may have just been too hot in there and wanted to lie on the cold cement floor of the cellar. But most of all the experience reminded me that cats largely run on autopilot.

There really isn't any other place for these kittens to go except our bedroom or the room directly adjacent to it. So two by two I brought the kittens back upstairs. Lucy followed and I tried to somehow prove it was a safe place. But she stuck her head into the closet and plucked out the calico kitten in her jaws. She walked towards the door, which was now closed. Along the way she passed her food dish. Suddenly, she put the kitten on the floor and just started eating. After a minute, she got back on track and picked up the kitten again. She walked to the door, and finding it closed, dropped the kitten and went back to the food bowl. The kitten sat there, looking around patiently. Then Lucy just strode over to the closet, went inside, laid down and started nursing the other 3 kittens. The calico was still sitting halfway across the room.

So thus, I realized that cats are largely a bundle of instinctive behaviors and not necessarily the caring and thoughtful mothers we want to believe they are. As of 8AM they were still in the closet but who knows where they'll be when I get home. I am hoping they can be relocated to the room next to our bedroom, it's the room we use the least, except as pass-through to the other rooms, we just have to put some barriers up so the kittens don't spill out.

More kitten developmental milestones: Two of the kittens have their eyes sorta open. The gray kitten is furthest along in that regard, and seems to be the best walker of the group so far. But these skills come at a terrible price: he's really annoying.

He whines more often and louder than any of the others. He doesn't seem to be in distress, he just seems impatient with this phase of kittenhood. He cries when he's hungry and can't immediately start nursing, he cries when the other kittens step on his head (but not when he steps on them!), he cries when he crawls away from Lucy, he cries when he's nursing, which is quite a feat. The other kittens are pretty quiet, although this morning they were literally swarming all over Lucy, squealing the whole time. Here's some video of Lucy's daily routine, feeding the kittens and try to groom them while they run roughshod all over her. UPDATE: I have uploaded a lighter version to better reveal the antics of the black kitten.

The calico cat also has her eyes open, but she's relatively silent. She's really cute but all the photos I've taken of her come out looking like the crate monster from Creepshow. Perhaps she's photograph better in another week or so.

The ginger cats haven't opened their eyes yet, but it looks like the corners are giving way, so they should be open soon. They're significantly larger than the non-ginger kittens, I'm not sure why that is. They're all getting enough to eat, although they still haven't learned how to share nipples yet. Luckily, the first-served will drift off to sleep after a while, allowing the next team to move in.

Here's another video in which one of the ginger cats leaves the safety of the box to seek his fortune on the outside. I kept waiting for him to turn around and go back in the box, but instead he chose to just to spin in circles ad nauseum. Meanwhile, Lucy, who normally would come out and pick him up, was dealing with all the other kittens, so I had to put him back in, where he promptly burrowed under his mom.