The last day of April.

This was the day I found a new app that made my photos dreamy and dramatic. And I love both of those things.

Jack and Sawyer Present: The New Toy

Two things:

1. I got the cats a new toy yesterday.
2. SocialCam now has captioning and music. We're going to have a lot of fun in videos to come.

And here we go!

Thoughts:

1. I just love Sawyer's awkward pouncing skills. The Little Prince wouldn't last a day in the jungle.
2. I also love that he catches me videoing him at the end and nuzzles the camera.
3. Techno music makes cat videos much more epic.

Success!

Look at that determination. It's like he's scaling Mount Everest or something.

Sure, he only scratches if we coax him, and then we don't see him at it again all day, but it's something....

February the twenty-ninth

It was cold in our house that night.

February the twenty-second: Leaf Watching

The story of today:

Chris asked me how my day was. I rattled off a list of things I'd done, including tutoring, my CA professional development meeting, what I had for lunch, leaf watching with the cats, working on homework, and taking a nap.

Sometime around 11pm, he was surfing through his Instagram feed and started laughing out loud. "You really did leaf watch with the cats!"He had found the above picture, and was highly amused that this was an actual event I had photographed during my day. What can I say? I liked the colors of the porch, wood floor, Sawyer, and my shoes. Seemed like a perfect photo op to me.

January the tenth (the one with the hedgehog)

Sawyer loves my socks. He's learned how to paw open my sock drawer and take them out, too, which means we find socks all over the house. Even in the kitchen sink. (Although, technically that was Jack who left it there, since Sawyer can't figure out how to get up on the counters.)

A few weeks ago Chris I loaned my old roommate Jenna some of our snow clothes for a trip she was taking, and she recently returned everything in a couple bags. Our nosy cats got into the bags, of course, and Sawyer fell in love with a pair of very soft, very thick, very expensive snow socks that were folded inside each other. For about a day, he carried those folded socks around the house, slept next to them, batted them around. I decided he needed his own little sock-sized stuffed animal.

Enter the hedgehog.

Found him at Target the other day. Just about the size of a pair of good snow socks folded inside each other. So I bought him and tossed him in front of Sawyer when I got home to see what would happen.

I think he likes it:

Disclaimer: After the first 45 seconds, it's much of the same. Please don't feel you have to watch all the way through. I'm just too lazy to throw this video in imovie and cut it down.

January the sixth

With my new tutoring students, I had to change my schedule up a bit. Now I get out of work pretty early on Fridays, with no tutoring in the afternoons, which is great. I came home, got out the laptop, loaded up my current session (the Moses'/Bishop's) and turned on season five of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. 

( I love having HIMYM on Netflix. No changing of disks whatsoever. I could watch six seasons straight through if I wanted.)

Jack was feeling mighty cuddly, and I let him curl up into my arm since he just wanted to nap there. (We usually don't let them on the table.) 

Apparently Sawyer, who is not normally very cuddly, was jealous of this snuggle session, because this was the scene two hours later:

I was mentioning to Chris last night how much easier Picture of the Day is with two cats. No more trying to made mundane activities or inanimate objects interesting. There's always something interesting going on with two pre-teen cats.

January the fourth

Not much going on today. Back to school/work. Back to tutoring. Wednesdays are now loooooooong days. Charter school in the morning/early afternoon, immediately followed by language arts tutoring with a seventh grader, immediately followed by math tutoring with an eighth grader (in Imperial Beach). Trying to get home from I.B. at 6:30pm is not so much fun, but luckily I've got my ipod loaded with the audio versions of all the Harry Potter books. I love me some multi-tasking, and I definitely don't have time to be lounging around reading once I get home.

I like this picture of Sawyer. He looks more like the kitten we brought home six months ago, and less like the teenage cat he's slowly growing into. This look here is one of limiting patience while he waited for me to get him unstuck from the little space he'd crawled into behind the TV. Poor thing couldn't figure out how to back up, and Chris' guitar rack was keeping him from just jumping to the ground. When I held out my arms to reach over the rack for him, he literally jumped into them. Love that our cats know when we're trying to help them and go along with it.

Christmas (with Kittens)

The kittens love the new Christmas tree. You'll notice that there are no actual ornaments anywhere near the parts of the tree they can get to. Our tree is very top heavy with ornaments.

Sawyer has developed a thing for my socks. He loves pulling open my sock drawer and grabbing the closest sock. Then the next closest sock. And the next. Until he has a pile of socks outside of the sock drawer. But his favorite socks are these Christmas funky colored ones I got from my roommate Jen two Christmases ago. When he gets a hold of one of those, he tugs it around the house with him, and we end up finding it in the strangest places. As you can see, he also likes pulling it up to the bed and cuddling up for a good nap with it.

The kitchen pictures... really have nothing to do with Christmas. I just thought it was funny that I set myself up in the dining room to get pictures of Jack being bad by getting up on the counters. And other places. Have fun playing where's Jack with those pictures!

You'll also notice you're seeing a lot of Green Mouse in these photos. Green Mouse (as Chris calls him, not the green mouse), is the current favorite toy. This is actually the second green mouse. We got a two pack when we first got the kittens, and they liked them enough, but both were supposed to have little bells on their tails that were missing. Green Mouse 2.0 has a full functioning bell, and Sawyer especially carried that thing around with him everywhere he went the first day we brought it home. (Sawyer might be a hoarder, now that I think about it.)

Merry Christmas, from Jack and Sawyer!

Cuddle time.

Don't hate because your cat is not nearly as cool as my cat. This is very representative of Jack's sleeping positions lately. He has learned that he LOVES the comforter, especially if he can wiggle in so just his head is out of it, like how we humans sleep. When it's bedtime, he comes to the top of the sheets, wiggles all the way down to my waist, does a 360, and comes back up to curl into my side with his head sticking it out. He's also begun reaching out to touch our faces at night, which is apparently something cats do to show affection sometimes. It's been a little frightening to see his clawed hand come at our faces (even if he does 'caress' he still snags us across the cheek sometimes), but we put the claw covers on again this week so it's much sweeter now.

Sawyer's the perfect bed cat: he sleeps at our feet and doesn't move all night long. Outside of bedtime, he has picked up this annoying habit of jumping on our backs whenever we bend over. As much as Jack LOVES the comforter and being near our faces, Sawyer LOVES being on our backs. As soon as he gets up there, he drapes his arms around our necks and starts purring and nuzzling our ears. It's really cute for a bit, then you realize you want to stand straight up and can't without getting lacerations down your back, because he does NOT want to be slid off. Usually we need to call each other for kitten removal to carry on with whatever we were doing. 

And now, after writing two long paragraphs about the antics of our kittens, I have to ask myself if I'm turning into one of those people. But really, I don't have a ton else to post about right now. Same old, same old at the Trementozzi condo. Chris is doing studio work. I'm doing a variety of projects on my laptop. I can't post about the many, many photos shoots we've just finished up this season (not until the husband gives me the okay- we've got our studio blog to pump our photography antics to first). The cats are our only source of entertainment currently. 

So stories about our lovely kittens it shall be.

Purrs.

Our cat babies purr like nobody's business. They purr when we get home. They purr when we're cuddling them. They purr when they're playing with their toy mouse. They purr when we turn the sink water on. They purr when they're wrestling like ninjas on the banister. They purr when before, during, and after we feed them, which Chris found highly amusing one night, and did a re-enactment of all the purring and chewing going on in the kitchen, while wondering how they didn't choke. (Someday, I will ask him to re-enact this re-enactment for my video camera.)

Anyway, all this is to say that I should be used to sudden motorboat sounds in my ear, and yet somehow I was startled out of my baby editing zone by this guy. 

Yes. They even purr while maintaining that zoned out stare. They are talented.

Saturday morning.

Love and Labor on Labor Day

What he is doing on Labor Day:
- Slept in
- Got morning kisses from the kittens (see photo)
- Ate dry cereal for breakfast, cuz we ran out (good) milk
- Editing Kayla and David Fish's photo session
-Currently: Still in his pajamas, looking up Nikon products on Craigslist

What she is doing on Labor Day:
- Slept In
- Wii Fit check-in and exercise (-2.2 lbs, heck yeah, green smoothies and dance workouts!)
- Made waffles with organic Grade B maple syrup
- Read an awesome web page (things you can sanitize in the dishwasher), went around collecting various things to wash, and got into cleaning mode
- Reinforced good behavior in the kittens for using the scratching post
- Became inspired to deep clean the kitchen and paw print covered hard wood floors in our condo
- Regretted the mopping part almost immediately, but committed nonetheless (see photo)
- Locked the kittens in the bathroom so they wouldn't get paw prints all over the newly washed, and paw print free, floor
- Currently: Hoping she can convince him to go down the street and get a pizza from Little Caesars for a late lunch

He makes us laugh.

Happy Friday, everyone! We made it through to another one!

My weekend will be consisting of a two-year-old's birthday party, taking the gigantic pile of recycling to the center (seriously, I'm not sure all the bags will fit in one car), Costco shopping for my Birthday: Family Edition coming up next weekend, photo editing pictures of the cute Cowen family, trying to make more headway with TPA 4 and the video that goes with it, and starting on my final PowerPoint presentation for my final week of class before I finally finish my credential.

Wow. I'm exhausted just thinking about it all.

I'm going to go start the weekend with a nap...

This is a scratch free zone.

We finally got the Soft Paws from Amazon. I waited two days for the kittens to be sufficiently asleep before attempting to get them on. Jack wasn't too thrilled when he woke up when we were half way through with one paw. Sawyer could've cared less while we put them on; actually, Chris did Sawyer's all by himself. 

And we've been scratch free over here ever since.

And eventually they'll forgive us for the whole thing, right?

Picasa for the win!

I think I found an awesome way to put up grids of photos- Picasa! Guys, blogger is the WORST for trying to format pictures. The. Worst. So I went a-looking online to see if people had found any workarounds, other than our default of creating a grid in Photoshop. And Picasa scores big. I did this collage in like two seconds. 

Love love love.

(Please don't judge that I take disgustingly cutesy pictures with my kittens. I've just discovered Mac's Photobooth program, and my husband doesn't want to sit still for pictures. These are my only semi-willing victims.)

Kitten play (during work)

This is what happens when we let the kittens into the office during work time.

My kitten is better than your kitten.

Jack is a cuddling machine. His life motto is, "I just... need.... to be inside... your face... let me in...."


Sawyer's life motto would be, "Yeah, I like cuddling. On my own terms." This is not represented by any video yet, but he much prefers to jump up on the balcony and be petted there than have you scoop him up in your arms. Unlike his brother, who spent half an hour yesterday curled into the crook of my elbow because he wouldn't let me put him down.

More kitty pictures:

This is what Sawyer and Chris were up to while that video of Jack was being taken.

And this was the following night. They were enthralled with Chris' video game playing skills. 

The pitter patter of little feet.

A few weeks ago, our insurance guy emailed Chris about adding on some extra life insurance, "just in case we were starting to think about the pitter patter of little feet." Chris emailed back a big NOT YET, but little did he know that those feet would be pitter pattering sooner than he thought. Just not baby feet. We're talking kitten feet here.

Chris and I knew we were going to get a cat at some point. When we moved into our condo, I said, "Now?" And he said, "Let's wait until we're settled."

Sometime in April, as we were lounging in bed one Saturday morning, he finally told me what I was waiting for: "I think we can get a kitten now."

Woo-hoo! I was on my laptop in less than a minute looking for craigslisted kitties, while Chris tried desperately to reign in my enthusiasm. You see, while I had finally gotten the okay, he reminded me we were taking two vacations in the coming months, and it just didn't make sense to get a kitten and then not be around for a week to keep it from eating the furniture. 

And though I've dragged him to Petcos and PetSmarts and fallen in love with no more than three different kittens, he held firm to his decision that we would not be getting our cat until we got back from the Vegas family reunion at the end of June. (Confession: I hit up both a Petco and an animal shelter the afternoon before we flew out to Vegas. I wanted to be ready when we got back.)

During our trips to Petcos, and meeting with various kitten foster parents, we were told many organizations would only sell two kittens at a time. That was pretty discouraging, as there was a beautiful little girl kitten at the Grossmont Center Petco that we really liked. But Chris wasn't sold on the two kitten deal. I polled some Facebook peeps on whether two kittens were better than one, and it pretty much unanimously came back as two kittens being the better way to go. Apparently they are less destructive that way.

Alas, Chris was not to be sold on the two kittens idea. I even asked him in Vegas, after I won us $40 playing Blackjack, if we could get two if I won enough money for the second. His response: "You can get two kittens if you win a thousand dollars."

(Obviously, from the photos above, our story ends with two kittens, but no, I did not win $1000 in Vegas. Not for lack for lack of trying, though.)

We got back from Vegas Saturday night, and Sunday morning I pulled my laptop into bed with me and began my search. Sarah and I had seen some fluffy looking little guys that would be at the El Cajon Petco that day, and I wanted to make sure we got there right away because they were soooo beautiful. While I was on Craigslist, however, another ad caught my eye. An organization called SNAP was having a deal on a set of kittens because the fosters were going out of town the next day. Only $65 per kitten, a much better deal than the $125 the other organizations were selling kittens for. The kicker, however? They have a rule that if you want two kittens, you get the second one free.

Let's clarify: Instead of one kitten for $125, we could get two kittens for $65.

Chris was interested. And even though the photos of the three kittens that were available weren't very flattering, we thought it was too good of a deal to pass up on. I ended up calling the foster parents to set up a meeting time that day, and he told me all about the kittens. They had two boys and a girl, and the boys were best buddies. Not only were they playful little guys, but they loooooooved cuddling. They were raised by the foster mom since they were ten days old, and the couple's giant dog had acted as their mama in the beginning. They'd been around people and dogs all their lives so they were super socialized, not shy or timid at all. They were fixed, vaccinated, microchipped, and all ready to go. 

So we went down to meet them, and guess what? We loved them. 

From the second she put them in our arms they cuddled our faces and licked our hands, and then we watched them play for a little while. They loved chasing a ping pong ball around, and we made a note to buy ping pong balls when we got them home. The foster mother also gave us two big bags of their food, which made the deal even better. 

So. Now we have kitten babies. We named them Jack and Sawyer, because we wanted them to have cute paired names, and I already kind of liked the name Jack. Jack's my cat, and Sawyer is Chris'. 

So here's what we've learned about them in the week and a half they've been part of our family:

1) Boy kittens like to play rough. There were times in the first few days I thought I'd have to intervene, but an internet search told me that was way normal and they really were just playing with each other.

2) Sawyer's super sensitive. Anytime we tell him "No!" to try to train him not to be on something, he'll freeze, stare at us sadly, and then turn and bolt. But he always comes back a few minutes later, happy as can be.

3) Jack is afraid to jump in a horizontal fashion. For instance, Sawyer has discovered he can jump from an armchair to the banister, but Jack refuses to try to jump. He looks like he's going to try every once in awhile, but he chickens out every time. He does, however, climb vertically very easily, unlike his brother. A few nights after we got them, I was eating soup at our tall kitchen table, and I watched as he circled the table several times trying to figure out how to get to my lap. Finally he just jumped, grabbed hold of my jeans, and scrambled the rest of the way up. He's super awkward, and super cute.

4) Jack is way more cuddly than Sawyer. Jack will let you pick him up and carry him around for awhile just to be with you, while Sawyer prefers to be loved on his own terms. Usually this means us walking up the stairs and finding him on the top of the banister, waiting for some loves. They're both especially cuddly when we come home and they've been alone for awhile.

5) When Jack cuddles, he just wants to kiss your face all over. I've got a cold right now, so it's especially difficult because he likes to press his wet furry noise right underneath mine. He also seems to want to crawl into our ears, nose first. 

6) Much as we'd like for them to cuddle up with us at bedtime, they're way too young and rowdy right now to just settle in to sleep. If we move a foot under the blankets, they pounce. So the bedroom door stays shut at night, but they've found plenty of places they like to sleep: the bathroom floor, a little cubby behind Chris' giant speakers, the armchair, and any other place besides their actual kitty bed. Waste of $15, I tell you. 

So that's our kitten story! We love them, and even Chris is happy we went with two instead of one. They really do keep each other busy, and less in our stuff, but they're still curious as all heck and will get into anything they have access to. Sawyer got stuck under the dishwasher the second night home, and today I had to search for Jack when I was playing with Sawyer and suddenly heard faint, desperate baby kitten squeaks. I thought he'd gotten himself stuck somewhere painful the way he was carrying on; turns out, he'd found his way into the hall closet while I was rummaging in there, and I must have closed the door on him later. Did that stop him from running right back in once the door was opened? Nope. 

Kittens!

We's has kitties!

I hear that's cat speak, yes?