Good thing I didn’t start to write this post yesterday. 🙂 I *thought* we got the names for the kittens settled. But we may be rethinking that. First let me say that T. S. Eliot understood that the naming of cats IS a difficult matter. I’d been calling the kittens Thing 1 and Thing 2, nods to Dr. Seuss. I needed some way to refer to kittens I’d never seen (yeah, we had gotten some blurry photos but those did not convey any sense of personality).
When we got home and let them out of the carrier, we could finally see them in living color and action. Big kitten was quite active. She ate, drank, played and explored. Little kitten ate, explored, played a little but was nowhere near as strong or as agile as big kitten. We were concerned.
Big kitten was total kitten. We looked at her calico markings and her 3 tan paws and her name popped out of the ether: Cinnamon! Sweet and strong and yummy. 🙂 Of course watching her in action I thought we could give her the sobriquet “Destroyer of Worlds”. 🙂 She was non-stop action. She and little kitten would play and Cinnamon was too strong for the little one, who cried out periodically. I suspect, having been watching little kitten too, that the cries were fury at not being able to escape, not pain. 🙂 We called Big Kitten “Cinnamon” and have had no reason to change it. That name works for her very well.
Little kitten however – we could not get any name we liked. We needed something fierce and bold and daring yet beautiful sounding. We have a tendency to look to mythology for names or to foreign languages (taking a description and seeing what the word for that description would be in Greek, French, Hebrew, Italian or whatever. We tried matching spices – Cinnamon and Cardamon. Nope. Athena, Scout, Pebbles, Yael, Dido, Clove, Yata (I think that would be the transliteration for Cat in Greek), Spice, Minerva, and so on. Nope. A lot of those are really good names but they didn’t fit that little spitfire. The words brave, daring, fearless, explorer, intrepid in other languages just did not work either. Sigh. French & Italian often sounded too similar to English. Hebrew has too many words using the letter “chet”, which is NOT a pretty sound. We came close with Dido but the D sound is too harsh and abrupt. *grin* We are VERY picky.
Finally on Tuesday afternoon, since I couldn’t find a suitable mythological goddess, I took the word itself and looked in other languages. Ah Hah!!!! Greek might have been okay but many human beings have the name Thea. We tend to shy away from names that people use (exception being flowers). In Hebrew “goddess” is Eilah. We liked that (yes, I know there are some people who told us they did not but my son, husband and I agreed that we liked it – and we are the council of 3). You’d pronounce this name the way you would the city in Israel – Eilat – except with an ‘h’ at the end instead of a ‘t’. If you’ve never heard of Eilat, try this: A – lah, with the accent on lah, not A. Or go to Google Translate for English to Hebrew and type in the word ‘goddess’ and listen to the pronunciation. Eilah it was, our little goddess.
We were quite concerned about little Thing 2 on Monday morning. She was sneezing, she didn’t look as active or strong as Cinnamon, and really was skinny. She did not look 100% healthy. I called the vet and got their new kitten appointment moved to Thursday. They gave me instructions to call sooner if she seemed to be doing worse. We sat there and watched her and it dawned on us that while we’d seen her eat and use the litter box, we never saw her drink. We tried taking her to the water but other than getting her face into it and making her sneeze more, it didn’t work.
I got an eye dropper, filled it, sat on the floor, cuddled her in my arms and used the eye dropper to get water to her mouth. She started sucking it down like there was no tomorrow. My husband kept refilling the dropper for me and I’d give it to the little one and she drank and drank and drank. Guess who didn’t know how to drink from a dish? We spent the rest of Monday giving her water from the dropper and having her watch Cinnamon while Cinnamon drank from the dish. By Tuesday afternoon Eilah was drinking water from the dish like a pro! 🙂
By Wednesday morning Eilah was MUCH more active, was looking stronger and plumper. We now had 2 Destroyers of Worlds. The rough-and-tumble play was good with Eilah jumping on Cinnamon as much as Cinnamon tackled Eilah. The two of them raced about their room fulfilling every single kitten stereotype that has ever been.
Thursday morning we brought them to the vet. They got entered into the system: 2 calico girls, born January 6, Cinnamon and Eilah. The vet and the vet in training and the receptionist were all in the room, cuddling kittens. 🙂 And then the vet started really investigating Eilah. What does “really investigating” mean? It means holding the kitten in one hand while holding the tail up in the air so her little butt can be seen clearly. Maybe clearly. Hmmm. Look at this. Um, does that look like a little girl tushie or is that a BOY tush???? Her markings are clearly calico, which is something like 99% female. Her butt is uncertain. We may be entirely trendy and have the first non-binary kitten.
The fact is we still don’t know if Eilah is a little girl kitty, or if perhaps we have a little boy kitty who may need to be named Twister or Tornado. 🙂 Our vet came up with Twister given Eilah’s behavior as she was getting investigated and getting dewormed. 🙂
So when you ask us have we named the kittens, YES, we have. Maybe. 🙂
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