The Lynx story is kind of funny and strange and wonderful all at the same time. We were living in Hyattsville and had Belly and Ariadne and had just gotten Athena a few months before. In the beginning of June, I started noticing this stray kitty who had started hanging around the house. "What a fat stray," I thought. We wanted to take her in and take care of her, but we couldn't get her near us. I started leaving food out for her and sure enough she'd eat it. We didn't actually take her into the house because we had to go away for a little while and didn't want the animals to try to get used to each other while we weren't there. So, our neighbors fed her and the other kitties and puppy. After we got back, Rich sat outside with some food and she immediately climbed into his lap.
"Her name is Lynx," he said.
"How do you know?"
"She told me."
Well, we got her in the house and realized that she was not fat, she was pregnant. We took her to the vet and he said that she'd be due in a week or so. So, I borrowed a birthing crate from a friend (our friend Teri's mom Carol) and put her in it. Rich had to go away for a few days. Lynx was really itching to get out of the crate on June 30th so I thought, well just for tonight, I'll let her out so I closed the doors to the room and left. Well, the next morning, I came in to find blood stains on the floor, but no Lynx. I tracked her down to this little bookcase with a closed door (but a side entrance) where she had taken her five newborns. They were incredible. Teeny tiny little things. But, they were big enough to shock me that they could have all fit inside her. She'd cleaned them up and they seemed to be doing OK. The five kitties were named pretty quickly: Othello, the biggest baddest kitten of them all, Puck, Pandora, because she was so adventurous and eventually got into everything, Medea, and the "Runtling."
Well, the little runtling as Rich called him started fading. He was listless and completely uninterested in eating and lost weight within the first few days of his life, and I freaked and called Carol and told her my story and she said that sometimes kittens just fade and it's natural and that I should pr epare myself for that. Well, I'm too stubborn for my good. So, after work, I went to the pet store and bought kitten formula and little eye droppers and all sorts of stuff and talked to the goddess an awful lot about how the runtling should live. Well, I came home all ready to feed him forumal to find him batting Othello (who was easily twice his size at this point) out of the way to get at Mom. He survived and lives with our dear friends, Dan and Lara. They named him Bagheera and he lives up to that name every day.
So, more kitten stuff. We were not sure how Athena would take to kittens so we kept her out of that room. Well, a couple of weeks after the kittens were born, we went out one Saturday night and returned to find that we'd been broken into. Lots of stuff was stolen, but the animals all looked all right. We realized that Athena had been in the room with the kittens and Lynx all evening and that no one seemed hurt by that. So, we took Othello (still the biggest, baddest kitten of them all) and held him out to her. Her only response was to lick his butt. Yep, you guessed it. She became a sort of surrogate mom. They'd go to her and she'd lick their butts so they'd do their business and then they'd go to Lynx to be fed. She played with them a lot, and it was quite fun to see an eighty pound dog running away from a nine ounce kitten who had just attacked her paw.
We found all the kittens homes. Puck and Pandora stayed together as did Othello and Medea. We still see Bagheera and one time we brought Athena over to Dan and Lara's. Bagheera hated her onsight. He wanted nothing to do with her until she somehow maneuvered it that she licked his butt. He immediately went into kitten mode, lay down and waited for her to finish. They were great friends after that.
Well, we knew that we had too many animals for our little house so we tried and tried to find Lynx another home. No one offered to take her so we kept her and moved to another house. She's been with us ever since and she is a total love bucket. She and Athena play a lot and she climbs trees and to the roof of the house and she's just a great kitty.
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