State of the Kitten Report

Well, little Vir is seven weeks old tonight! He seems to still be doing very well. I'm letting him out and about the house now while I'm home, and that's proving much less problematical than I'd feared. He doesn't like to be out of sight of me for long, unless he's in the safe haven of Kitten World (aka the master bathroom), which makes it pretty easy to keep an eye on him. Aside from an unfortunate tendency to want to chew on my speaker wires when I put him on top of the computer desk, he hasn't seemed terribly inclined to do anything especially destructive or dangerous. And the other cats haven't offered him violence yet, although they do both hiss at him if he comes too close.

There's an amusing pattern developing there, by the way. Sweet, mellow little Happiness will hiss and glare and not do a whole lot else. Nova, the twelve-pound bully-cat, will hiss and then run away. Lately, I've started noticing that when Happiness hisses at Vir, his tail instantly goes between his legs in a submissive gesture. After an encounter with Nova, though, often as not the fur on his tail is standing up in that defensive/aggressive kind of way. Yes, my cats are sorting out the new hierarchy, and it looks like the one-pound kitten may not be at the bottom of it, thanks to the fact that Nova, like so many bullies, is a massive coward. (He only gets away with it with Happiness because she lets him, and has since he was not much bigger than Vir.)