Huzzah

Today is my Dad's birthday! For once it does not coincide with a Jewish holiday, so that's a relaxing change. Yay! I bought him a little bamboo plant. I also gave  him a muffin recipe.

The cats loved the presents :) - Sasha would climb into the boxes we opened before we could even see what was inside! Mom went to a farmers marker in Decatur today and bought a bunch of raspberries and figs and pineapple and stuff, so that's good too! Since it's Dad's birthday, we bought a cake from Alon's, instead of having Dad make one. It's called a truffle cake.

Truffle cakes are really good! They have three thin layers of chocolatey cake stuff in creamy mousse with glossy chocolate coating around the top and edge. It's not to rich, and is very tasty! Dad is going out with Mom tonight, so we had cake in the afternoon.

Normally we would give the kittens some wet food to celebrate, but they just had wet food yesterday for Shabbot (we forgot Friday), and we really are trying to get them on a diet.

What's the deal with that???

Sasha's the deal with that! When Sasha is hungry, sometimes it's hard for her to stop eating - she doesn't realize that she's full. They've actually done a lot of tests about this sort of thing with people. Sasha isn't unhealthy or anything, just a little bit plumper than one might expect from a kitten her age.

What we've done so far with the kittens is to keep the food bowl full at all times. This is what you should do with young kittens - they are growing and developing so fast and burn so much energy that they need a constant supply. Our kittens are older now, though, and don't need as much food. Being spayed actually lowered their metabolism by 30%. We had been advised to start a feeding schedule when they were one year old, but since Sasha needs more defined meals, we're starting that earlier. (They are currently 8 months old.)

What we did with Lili is that she would get two scoops of food in the morning, to eat throughout the day. With our two kittens, the current plan is a scoop in the morning and a scoop at about five in the afternoon. Hopefully we can keep Sasha as stable as she is now, weight-wise.

We haven't actually been able to start this - if the kittens are without food and hungry, they will probably try to attack the bag of cat food. Although we're sure they'll adjust with time, we want to find a separate container for the cat food to avoid temptation.

That's basically all the cat news right now. I'm sorry to have missed school this past week, although I've made up most of my homework, I think. I'm actually thinking my history paper will be postponed till next week, as I didn't really have any time to learn much these past few days (aside from several facts I scrapped together on the internet).

I'll of course be returning to school Monday, and hopefully this week will be more productive.

Thanks for tuning in!
~Julia