Planning wickedness

We have a tit nesting box in the walnut tree - placed by our landlord, not us. Some coal tits are taking an interest in it, which is making the evil beast very interested! She'll stand up against the tree like that for an hour, waiting for signs of movement.

After the hose

After an energetic round with the hose, she is very bedraggled and grubby, but very, very keen for more. And very disappointed when we'd rather take pictures than play.

Urchin and the hose

The people who say cats don't like water have obviously never seen Urchin. The hose is her favourite thing. She has been seen to lie on it and rub her face on it and purr at it. She also likes sitting in the basin and drinking straight from the tap.

The early days

I'm having so much fun going through Urchin's baby photos! What a tiny little bundle she was. It's particularly funny seeing how scant her tail was, when the most enormous plume just flicked past my nose, as she jumped over the keyboard to the windowsill.

You can see how quickly she adapted to life with us. And how quickly she learned to manipulate us with cuteness.

Because she was relatively old (almost 5 months) when we got her, we decided not to let her outdoors for a couple of months. We wanted her to become completely acclimatised to us, and we wanted to have her spayed and microchipped before she went outdoors. At the same time, we wanted to get her used to her environment, so when it snowed a couple of days after she came home, Paul brought a dish in for her to sniff.

She thought water that you could chew and play with was pretty good really.

We gradually introduced her to our home. For the first couple of days we restricted her to one room, then as she became comfortable, we'd open another door and let her explore.

Urchin's photo blog

In late January 2009, we brought a Maine Coon kitten home to live with us. She is a silver tortie tabbie with white, and of distinguished parentage. She was 5 months old and not very happy about being taken away from the other kittens. For the first couple of days she cried and cried, and hid behind the sofa, under the radiator.

Then she came to the realisation that it's pretty good for a cat to be a very much indulged only pet, and she came out from under the sofa.

Since then, she has become completely entrenched in our lives. She's won a number of fans through her regular appearances on my main blog, so I decided that she should probably have her own forum for photos and videos.

I thought I would go back to where it all began, and show some of her very early pictures - so you can see how tiny she is! I can't believe that isn't much more than a year ago. What did we do without her?