It’s snowing out, I feel like crap, let’s look at some kittens today!
Here’s the girls when they were mere shrimps of impending cathood.

For those who don’t know the story, Bella was found in a box of kittens abandoned at a central California rest stop. A guy walking his dog picked them up and drove them to a rescue in San Francisco, feeding them dog food along the way so at least they’d have something to munch on. She was three weeks old when we got her – a feline paramecium, just tiny – and she was an infected, filthy little creature. How could we say no? Here she is a week or so later, well on the road to recovery. Don’t be fooled by the innocent face. She does this right before the fangs chomp down.

Pollywog has pretty much been a vamp since infancy. She came from the SPCA, and adopting animals from shelters isn’t so much “picking out the best one” but more like “we can’t leave this one behind.” We ended up keeping the name the SPCA gave her – we tried calling her Lily for a little bit but it just didn’t stick – and according to one of novelist Judith Krantz’s characters, every beautiful woman must have a nickname to make her seem less intimidating. (It was in Mistral’s Daughter, I think.) And frogs are cute. So Pollywog she remained, and as she gets older she just gets better at making these sultry feline faces.