Sheep Guarding Llama

The kittens, Orange Juice and Chemæra were snuggled on the bed with Liesl when I popped in to check on them first thing this morning. They are so adorable. It’s at least a good start to our project.

The kittens ended up staying all day. They mostly sleep in the daytime so it was easy for them to just nap away in the extreme comfort of Liesl’s room with giant cat tree, comfy bed, extra dog bed on the floor, and air conditioning. They’ve never had it so good.

I worked most of the day, there is a lot to be done. I drove Marcela to her church to pick up a care package, and then we stopped by La Colonia and I got the cheese that Luciana and I need to make our homemade mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner tonight.

The girls came out to run errands tonight. We stopped by Marcela’s house and they played with Happy (her kitten.) Then we went over to April and Ava’s house and hung out for most of an hour. We talked D&D, Mothership, and played a little Family Feud. Then we stopped by the pharmacy and I stocked up on expectorant (Luciana and I are both still quite sick.) Then we swung back to Marcela’s and dropped off some medicine for her.

Back home, Luciana and I cooked up mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner. It turned out pretty well. Then the girls and I settled in to watch Disney’s Zootopia and Zootopia 2 back to back. Not my favourate movies, but they are watchable.

It was a full day of the little kittens living in the house and it went well. They seem to be happy and have no interest in leaving. They are safe in there and we are planning on installing catios for them, there are spaces where the old air conditioning units were (before we installed the modern ones) so those old rebar cages should work just fine.

It’s going to be a challenge, but these are awesome cats. We are hopeful that they will work out.

This morning Marcela’s family surprised her by showing up from Managua. They were already on the road to León when they told her. So she asked me to take her to Maxi Pali to do some last minute shopping so that she would have groceries in the house. So we ran over to Laborio to hit the supermarket.

It was a decently quiet day, but we are so concerned about the safety of the kittens that we basically have the dogs on continuous lockdown and we are scouting the yard all of the time to make sure the cats aren’t out there.

It was a very hard day. Not only is everyone still super sad, of course, and Luciana and I are still quite sick, but trying to keep the dogs and cats apart is exhausting and clearly isn’t a solution. The cats show zero fear of Clive, even after what happened, and freely came into the yard seemingly to see him! Thank goodness I had him on a leash, they came right up to him. He was terrified, as he had been every time that they were in the yard. I’m convinced he sees them as a threat that he doesn’t understand and only killed Chocolate Milk to “protect the perimeter and the family.” Because that’s what he does. Not because he’s hunting them or anything.

So we have a major issue trying to keep the yard free of kittens. By late evening, we had to lock the dogs up completely as the kittens not only invaded the yard for an hour or two before sunset, but once it was dark they just came into the house and took it over. They went all over the house all evening playing all over and having a great time. We couldn’t let the dogs out in their own house all night!

We didn’t play with the kittens in the house, but they wanted to be there. Even when we’d leave and go into a room with the dogs for hours, when we’d come out they’d be lurking somewhere. They have declared it their new home.

Knowing that there was zero possibility now of keeping the dogs and kittens apart, we took to drastic measures and moved the kittens into Liesl’s room. We made a make-shift cat litter box out of a cardboard box and we set them up with food, water, and toys. They are super happy and played and played until exhausted. Then they climbed into bed with Liesl and spent the night near her feet in a little kitten pile. It’s so good to see them happy and together as siblings, but also a heart breaking reminder that the third is gone and they will always seem to be incomplete to us.

It looks like we have more housecats now. These cats took to being in the house with zero prompting. It’s wild how much they just wanted to live indoors.

It’s a hard morning here waking up without Chocolate Milk. The girls are struggling to process her passing. It’s difficult because she’d become a part of the routine. Check on her (and the other kittens: the buñuelos) as we called them because they were babies and their mother’s name is Fritter; feed them and play with them throughout the day; and then go to feed them at night. The girls would come to my office and be like “let’s go see the cats.” Every few hours we built them into our routine. And the cats loved to be close to us, they spend countless hours on the windowsills of the girls’ bedrooms or on my office window or the bathroom (like Chocolate Milk did two nights ago) or in the video game room.

And they have been such a part of planning. The three buñuelos are so close we were struggling with the idea of separating them and were trying to figure out how to move them with us in the future. The girls were dreaming of future two decades with these three siblings living with them. We’ve been watching over them since they were so tiny and we failed this one. This is one we saved from drowning in such a panic.

Now it is going to be so hard to look at Orange Juice and ‘Mæra without seeing the ghost missing between them. Calling them the buñuelos will always remind us that the other little buñuela isn’t there. Chocolate Milk was the mirror image of her dad, who sits in the garage watching over them at night from afar. She had one white leg and one sleeved tabby leg reversing his own markings. He went to her when she was hurt and we think she was with him when she collapsed; he likely only left when we gathered around her. He called for her long into the night last night, it’s heartbreaking. He did come into the kitchen at one point, something we’ve not seen him do in many months.

Liesl was up early and still crying. She sat out on the veranda with Dominica and played Animal Crossing on her Nintendo Switch to try to keep occupied.

Luciana didn’t get up until the afternoon. She was feeling a little less sad than last night. But she was sad enough that it seemed to have induced an anxiety attack or something akin to it and she was unable to eat for most of the day.

I was mostly able to stay busy today and not have to think about it too much. This morning I was very sad. I went out several times and spent some time with the remaining kittens. I’ve not seen either of the parents today.

Tonight was so hard. Around nine in the evening I heard the dogs go running and the scream of a kitten. I ran from my office as fast as I could. It is so frustratingly hard to get from behind my desk into the front yard. It’s inches away but the distance on foot is ridiculous with so many turns. I was too late. I found Clive in the darkness with Chocolate Milk in his mouth as he was trying to kill her. I got her out of his mouth and she went flying. As far as we know, the other dogs never got to her.

She fled and went to the neighbors. We searched for a while and finally found her. She seemed okay, scared for sure, but moving okay. Her dad came to watch over her, but she kept disappearing. After an hour Liesl came running to get me, they had found her laying in the grass behind the garage. She was barely able to move. Barely able to breath. It was clear he had punctured internal organs. We had already scheduled a vet for the morning, thinking that she seemed just fine or maybe a little limp. We weren’t able to catch her and she didn’t seem injured at first. But once Luciana had found her out back, it was bad.

We called every emergency vet that we could find and got one that started heading towards us, but it was too late. We got Dr. Jorge on the phone eventually too, but he mostly just was able to tell us how to check for vitals. We spent probably thirty minutes all standing around her crying watching her shallow breathes, the occasional cough or gasp, but there was no hope. Long before the vet arrived, her heart and breathing stopped. It was heart-wrenching. Not just losing such a sweet little baby, but also the timing. Just last night she had gone from timid and always avoiding us to playing with the girls like a comfortable house cat. She had totally changed and loved playing with us. Liesl had been sending me so many videos of her playing in the house last night. Exactly twenty four hours before she died. She had come into our yard tonight to get to the girls in the house to play like last night, but last night the dogs had been locked up. Tonight they were loose and found the kitten in the yard.

The girls were petting her and talking to her as she passed. Dominica and I stood with them in the darkness with flashlights as she passed away. This is so hard, the girls don’t remember Oreo dying. We weren’t with him at the time. We were in Italy, having been away for months and he was with my dad. He was old and died of heart failure that we knew would take him one day. And the girls were very little, Luciana barely over a year! Luciana has no memory of Oreo, Liesl only a tiny bit. He was old and blind for them and they had been away from him for so long when he died that it wasn’t so painful. But it kept Dominica and I from having another pet for much of the girls’ childhoods.

But this, this is the first death of a pet for both of the girls. This is going to be hard. This is going to be a searing memory for the rest of their lives. I remember so many cats that died back on the farm. This is so much easier to remember. They are older, and they spent so much time with Chocolate Milk. They are really struggling with processing this. They’ve been shielded from this kind of pain for so long. It’s so awful.

Luis, the night guard, and I (but almost entirely Luis) buried Chocolate Milk in a grave on the north side of the bitter orange tree that provided shade on the garage where Chocolate Milk spent her life. She’s buried just two meters from where she spent her life, just on the other side of the garage wall where she will likely never be disturbed. Right by the French drain where we first discovered the three little kittens huddled together for safety.

This will be one of the hardest days in my daughters’ memories. Sixty years from now, they will remember this clearly. This is going to be a pain they never lose. It’s so hard seeing them feel that pain that I remember from so long ago, and feel again today. It’s never easier losing a pet, a life you loved and cared for and tried to protect.

Marcela is very sad too. She was so excited to be getting Chocolate Milk. She loves cats and she had this one picked out for many months and had just played with her yesterday and was ready to take her home.

Tonight after months of carefully watching over the three kittens who live in our garage – after having saved them from flooding when they were caught in a French drain, and hunting one down that was missing for days and finding her stuck up on a wall – tonight we had a huge breakthrough. While they, and they mother, have been known to come into the hard in the wee hours of the morning to hang out with Paul, they’ve not been able to do that since he has been in Colombia. Today, they started getting a lot closer. Chocolate Milk, the one that is earmarked for Marcela to be a companion with her kitten Happy, finally, for the first time, let her approach and pet her. I got to pet her while she ate as well, a rare thing. In the evening, I went into the guest bathroom at the front of the house and saw the outline of cat ears in the window and there was our timid little girl hanging out in the shower window.

Tonight, all three kittens, Orange Juice, Chocolate Milk, and Chemæra came into the yard and made their way into the house and spent HOURS playing with Liesl and Luciana in the house. They had so much fun: both the girls and the kittens. It was a huge breakthrough. We are hoping to be able to make them house cats. They really want to be with us. They come running to us anytime we go outside. And the three of them are inseparable. We have decided to try to keep all three, they are such a team and all want to be with us all of the time.

We check on them all day long. We see them first thing in the morning, check on them throughout the day, often sit in the garage and play with them, and we always see them just before going to bed. Sometimes their mother, Fritter, is around, especially in the morning. And their dad normally sits at the far end of the garage and watches them from afar (mostly to avoid us, he is very skittish.)

The girls were so excited to have the night with the kittens tonight. They’ve never had cats that would play like this and they’ve been taking care of these kittens for so long now. To have them suddenly leap from stand-offish to full on snuggly, pettable, playing in the house was a really big deal.