We got another kitty at the end of the summer! I know, everyone thinks we're crazy, but we don't care. We now have 3 cats! All girls! Greg is outnumbered. The older two girls are about 7 and 8 years old and we thought it would be nice and do them some good to have a young energetic one in the house; get them running around and playing more. It worked, kinda.
Meet Maple
This picture (above) was her first picture. We introduced them in one of the rooms. We tried to make it as easy of an introduction as possible. It didn't go too well. The older two didn't like her at all! But they warmed up, eventually. At least Lily did, Sage still doesn't like her and turned into a real grump.
Isn't she a pretty kitty???
We could tell right away that she is going to be a big cat when she's grown! Look how long she is already!
Very curious!
It didn't take her long at all to adopt the same ways of the older two. They all love to lay on Greg's clothes. Sometimes just seconds after he takes them off, there they are. Sage is the worst about that, though.
And she just keeps getting longer and longer!
And now.......
Meet Lily
Lily is the oldest of all of them. She's also the most skittish. She's a very nervous cat, for some reason. We don't totally know why. We can think of a few instances when she was young where she got in trouble but not a whole lot. She's just really sensitive. It doesn't take a whole lot to get her to cry, and I don't mean meow, she really has tears come out! It's the saddest thing.
She loooooves her Momma. Her favorite spot to lay is on my leg (only if I'm wearing pants). She'll follow me around, or just sit and stare at me until I notice that she's there. That can be annoying sometimes, but nice to have someone that idolizes you, I guess. Most of the time if Greg's home but I'm not, she'll want nothing to do with him. She'll wait all day until I get home and then beg for attention like she's been starving for it. She's definitely a Mommy's girl, while Sage is the Daddy's girl. Not sure about Maple yet.
Lily isn't usually the cat in the box but occasionally she'll get in. She plays only in secret. Like I said before, very nervous. When she does play, we can't watch. The second she notices that we're watching her, it stops. So we have to just watch from the corner of our eyes. She's the fastest and most skilled one of the 3 for sure. She's got mad skills, just doesn't show them often.
Isn't she a cutie? Don't you just want to pick her up and squeeze her? That's the problem. She hates to be picked up and loved on, but she's so irresistible at times
Now that we live in cold Vermont, in the Winter you'll find Lily where ever the heater is. Poor baby doesn't like to be cold. She must be a desert cat. They all like to sit in front of the big main heater, though. Sometimes we sit in front of it too, so we can't blame them.
Last September I woke up and noticed little bloody spots all over the sheets! I looked all over the house and found no huge blood spill or anything. There were a few on the computer chair but not much. I started checking out all the cats and found that some of the nails on both of Lily's back feet were all bloody and mangled! We have no idea what happened! We thought maybe her nails got caught in between the wooden slats of the floor when she was running around playing but it was strange that it was both feet.
When we took her to the vet, they were perplexed as well. They said with the injuries that she had to her feet we should see "the scene of the accident" somewhere in the house. Like big bloody area. We scoured the place, and nothing. Lily had to have surgery so they could clean it all up and cut the nails down to the quick. Ouch! She stayed over night and bandaged her up.
Poor little baby! But look at her cute little pink booties!
We had to cut those off and re-bandage her feet every 2 days for a week, then twice a week for 2-3 more weeks until they checked them out and said she could go without. Not to mention we had to pill her with antibiotics every day for about a week. It was horrible for all of us! She's all better now, but we still don't know how it happened!
Below is a video example of our little nervous cat!
Please excuse our somewhat messy house!
Now meet Sage
Sage is (or was before Maple) our most personable cat. She loves to play and loves to get loved on and is the first to come out and meet people when they come over. She is a BIG lick-er. She'll give us kisses on demand and sometimes would rather lick you than be pet.
She's our little box kitty. Anytime we have an empty box of any kind she will almost immediately climb into it and adopt it as "her box". It's for this reason, that we pretty much always have some sort of box lying around, despite it not exactly going with the decor of the room. She's actually lying in the box cleaning herself right now as I'm typing.
Paper box, shoebox, makes no difference. We bought a box of oranges from Costco not too long ago, so now it's the bottom part of that box. We thought it might give her an orange-y scent but haven't noticed yet. She especially loves the ones with handles in the sides so she put her paws through and get us.
Doesn't look very comfortable, does it. She chose that spot though.
There's a lady that I work with sometimes that has a relative that is a Lobster-man just outside of Boston. So twice a year she takes orders and you can buy however many lobsters you want at the cost the restaurants buy them for! She brought them back up to Vermont and we went went and picked them up. Yes, they are still alive. It was such a great deal, that we bought 8 of them. The only thing was that we had to cook them pretty soon, before they died. So we cooked 4 of them the first night and the other 4 the second. They just stay in a paper bag in the fridge until you're ready for them. Weird, huh? We were warned "do NOT put them in water in your bath!" It seems like a fairly logical thing to do, but apparently it kills them (you know the whole fresh water, salt water thing). If you've ever had a lobster whole, then you know, they're a LOT of work! We cracked them up and got all the meat over the two nights (eating 2 of them for dinner the first night) and froze the rest of the meat in those vacuum freezer bags. So delicious!!
A while back we found these bow ties and thought we might actually get the girls to wear these. They're kinda like a collar. They let us put them on, but didn't really care for them.
We don't really have any pictures yet of all three of them cuddling up together. Lily and Maple lay together some, and obviously Lily and Sage lay together lots, but Sage hasn't warmed up to Maple enough to lay very close, let alone cuddle. She'll come around eventually. I think she's just suffering from middle-child syndrome or something. =)
Sweet girls!
What we see on the side of the road as we drive. 
Probably a little hard to see the pathway (white on white) but if you look closely I think you can see it. 
At the top of the picture above the mostly snowed over creek is the bridge we walked over. 
The North end of Mallett's Bay all frozen and snowed over. (Mallett's Bay connects to Lake Champlain) 
Not sure what I'm pointing to, pretty sure I didn't know Greg was taking the picture. We are walking along the edge of the bay, so on the ice at that point. I'm not brave enough to go out too far and had to, as usual, stop Greg from doing it a couple times. 
Funny, right? New Mexico Aggie shirt, standing on the frozen bay. Notice that he's wearing a t-shirt....it may look crazy cold, but once you get out and walking around you quickly get pretty hot and have to take your jacket off to welcome the colder temperature. 
Signs of a local woodpecker. 
So long Winter Wonderland, we're ready for a pretty Spring! Hope these helped cool some of you down. 
