Warning: Cuteness Overload

As I sit here and type this, fair readers, I am accompanied by this:

That's right, guys. I have a pile of kittens curled up next to me.

It is glorious.

I had been pretty set on only getting one cat, since I'd assumed that my roommate wouldn't really want one of her own. But then we were presented with this brother-and-sister pair that couldn't be adopted out separately and... well, that was the end of that, really.

Allow me to introduce you.

This is Mr. Darcy, my kitten, and the most photogenic cat in the world.

Here he is being appropriately British in a photo I cannot for the life of me turn the right way. Alas.

He is SUCH a sweetheart. I have never known a cat as social as he is - he loves meeting new people, which is great since they've already met most of our friends. He loves to be picked up and will happily climb into my lap or Lisa's lap and pin us down for a good hour. He's incredibly adventurous and very intelligent - you can really see the wheels turning when he looks up at high places and tries to calculate what he can jump off of to get up there. He purrs like a truck and meows like a squeaky toy - but really only when he's reminding me that it's dinner time.

BABYYYYYY.

And this is Lisa's kitten, Charlotte (Bronte).

Charlotte is the more skittish of the pair and therefore the more difficult to catch on camera. She has two healed breaks in her tail that were there when she arrived at the shelter; our hypothesis is that she was stepped on when she was very young, as she is still a little bit afraid of feet. She's hard to catch and certainly won't crawl unbidden into a newcomer's lap the way Darcy will, but once she gets used to you and if you don't make any sudden movements, she can be just as affectionate as her brother.

She also very much likes being under things, which is problematic when she got under my bed the other day. We're trying to keep the kittens out of our bedrooms for now, but she probably would've been perfectly content to hang out there the rest of the night.

I am really glad we came home with two. They keep each other company all day while we're at work, and they play games of pounce-on-each-other that last for hours. Our house, it turns out, is a cat jungle gym - they get to climb up and down the kitchen chairs and under the room divider screen and in and out of the staircase. They love it.

And, the first night we brought them home, they both fell asleep in my lap. It was the most wonderful thing.

Now, I promise this blog won't devolve solely into cat picture spam... but there are probably going to be a lot more cat pictures on it. Prepare yourselves, fair readers. :)