As soon as the plate hits the floor, food begins to fly. The floor is covered in food. The kittens are covered in food. We’re covered in food. This is when personalities really start to show. Floyd and Twitch usually battle for the center of the dish, getting their legs and bellies completely covered. Grace can be pretty pushy as well, shoving aside her more polite litter-mates.

Lucky, on the other hand, gingerly picks at his food. He’s not particularly fond of the dry, so he attempts to eat around it. Victoria quietly takes her fill, ignoring the melee around her.

After several minutes of picking up kittens and putting them back in position around the dish, most of the food is pretty much picked clean. Kittens start wandering off–tracking food with them–to find a place to relax or play. Except for Twitch. Twitch likes to eat. A lot. I swear, he was so full last night we thought he was going to burst!

Check back tomorrow as I am going to make a post about the new kittens. They are all cute as buttons, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see their pictures! Until then, I’ll be picking cat food out of my hair…

We snapped this post-bath photo of the soggy kittens. From the top left, we have Grace, Victoria and Ranger. Grace was not covered with foam, but she sure needed a bath! In the middle center is Twitch. Floyd is on the bottom.

It was somewhat cathartic for us to finally get a chance to give everyone a bath. We’ve been picking foam off the poor guys for a solid week, so the bath gave use some sense of closure. The kittens, on the other hand, we’re slightly less appreciative of the whole bathing experience. They were happy to finally be clean, though, and spent the next thirty minutes purring while grooming each other. We don’t have the heart to tell them that we think they’re going to need another bath…

If you’ve never given a kitten a bath before, the progression is generally this: You place the kitten gently in the water. This amuses the kitten, and they’ll usually paw around for a moment. After about five seconds of pawing, the kitten is no longer amused. As you can see in this picture of Grace and Floyd, the sense of amusement is clearly gone.

The kitten, deciding that being in water is not something a kitten generally wants to do, then attempts to leave the water. Unfortunately, this is not an option, so you do your best to keep them in the tub. This is where you get wet.

After applying kitten-shampoo to your wet and unamused kittens, you begin working it through their fur. At this point, however, the kittens have probably decided that you need to participate in their bath as well. You are now wet and soapy. Kittens are still unamused, which you can clearly see by Victoria and Twitch’s unamused expressions.

In the end, however, they resigned themselves to their soapy situation. In this picture, Ranger seems quite soapy and resigned.

Now that they are all squeaky clean, the next step for these five is a vet appointment to make sure they are healthy and to get their first kitten shots. Providing that all is well, they will receive a second kitten shot in four weeks. As for when they will be ready for adoption, that is hard to tell. They won’t be ready until they have been fixed, and they need to be three pounds for that. Considering how they eat, however, they are all well on their way!

We will keep everyone updated on this blog, and I’ll try to post a few more pictures of them playing and being kittens in the next few days. They are a pretty fun bunch, and we’re starting to see some really neat personalities.