Author: Vivien Nyström

On March 19, 2012, Lucky gave birth to five more. This time, it was Ronald who thought of finding new homes for the newbies. I felt sad though about the idea of giving them away after watching them roll out of their mother and seeing them grow a little bigger each day. If I hadn’t seen all that, there won’t be any kind of connection and I wouldn’t mind. So we agreed to keep them and named them Umeko, Cotton, Snoozie, Splash, and Dancer.

We had no idea when Lucky was due to give birth so we had accepted an invitation to a wedding and made prior arrangements to travel northbound to my hometown some eight to ten hours away from Manila that week. We did not wish to cancel the trip so I tried my luck with one of the neighbors to see if he would agreed to care for our cats in our absence.

The evening before the trip, our neighbor who just got back from work came over so we could show him around and talk about what he had to do. As soon as he walked through the door, eight furry creatures of various sizes run amok in all directions. It was a bewildering sight for the visitor. More so that he was not anymore sure about taking over the tasks for the cats after that.

So the next morning, we prepped the furries for a long trip to the highlands come evening. Ronald and I took turns rushing to the market to buy appropriate baskets, cages, and other needed stuff.

This was the cats’ first long journey out of the house with us and the first of many travels they were to embark on. With eight cats in the van, a quiet night trip was not to be expected. They cried most of the duration of the trip until our arrival in Kiangan, Ifugao. It was not at all different on the way back to Imus. 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBZ_0E-_7ko

Lucky gives birth to two lovely babies!

A couple of weeks after we took Lucky in, Ronald announced that she was pregnant. I would not have known as no lump was obvious. But if the catman says cat is with child, then it must be so.

Ronald and I were booked to travel to Europe to visit his family on the first of September. So we had to leave Lucky alone during her pregnancy. In late November 2011 after three months, I returned to the Philippines to find a mama cat shielding two very tiny babies huddled under the outdoor kitchen sink in the back of the house.

I am guessing Ronald met his first Filipino cat within a week of his return to the Philippines in July 2011.

Sometime in August, he started talking about keeping her which meant keeping her for good. Back then, we were constantly making plans to move somewhere more quiet yet not too far from a city in order to have fast internet connection for Ronald’s web-related work.

The Dutch and the Filipina

Ronald and I met on July 31, 2010.

We got engaged while on our first holiday together in Pagudpod, Ilocos Norte on October 8, 2010, my birthday. Then we decided to tie the knot in Manila on February 10, 2011 which was also on Ronald’s birthday.