Kittens are gross. And AWESOME!

This morning I was awoken by a kitty licking my armpit. It's a strange wake-up, let me tell you. I was completely under the blanket, most likely in order to protect my hair (more on that later), so I couldn't see what was happening, and it took a few seconds for me to respond by pulling back the blankets and seeing a little kitten face inches from my nose, getting really cozy with my armpit. Gross.

Smokey and The Bandit (yes, we have settled on those names, though we had many good options offered up which we might have gone with had we not already spent a few days calling these guys Smokey and The Bandit, which feels quite right, especially when I use their nicknames: Smokestack and El Bandito), the two of them are perfectly at home here on the 10th floor. They are an absolute joy, even though they are kinda disgusting. Their favorite toy seems to be the litter box, in which they like to wrestle, which makes it really great that we have an extra bathtub in which it can live, because otherwise there would be litter EVERYWHERE in this place. I think they spend about a third of their waking lives in that litter box, either wrestling one another or pooping out half their body weight (seriously, how do such small beasties produce so much poop?) When they are not in the litter box, they are chasing each other throughout the apartment, wrestling on floors and couches and beds. Their next favorite toy is the collapsible hamper, which would provide hours of fun were it not for the fact that they keep collapsing it on one another. Still, every time I open it up, it's like Christmas for kittens. Very funny, and not the least bit disgusting.

And their next favorite toy, well, it's my hair. Oh, how they love to comb my hair with their little kitty claws! Generally I am woken in the morning not with an armpit licking but with a hair tangling. It's like a million tiny strings, and they get so excited they want to play with them all. Which means my hair, when I eventually make my way to a bathroom and confront myself in the mirror, resembles something a modern artist might title "Chaos Theory". I try to tie it back in an elastic, but that just gives the kittens something deeper to dig into. And in my sleep, it seems, I try to escape their clawing by tucking the blankets under my head, which this morning led to a kitten burrowing beneath the blanket and discovering the tastiness of my armpit. Gross. But then, how adorable are they? Just look:

I can forgive their being so darned gross because they're just so darned adorable. Sigh. Totally smitten with the kittens.