This night, ( 7 February ) Najra gave birth to six little kittens.

At 21.30 she was still rolling on the carpet in the living room. By the time we went to bed (around 23.30) she was laying under the quilt in our son's bed. We tought: hé, this could be the beginning. But at 00.15 the first kitten was born already. Perfectly in the box we had set up for her in the living room. She had not shown any interest in de box before. Dexter came, after the birth of the first one, to have a look and it was pretty odd, but Najra got very relaxed because of his visit.

Then there came nothing for an hour but after that, the other 5 kittens were born in one hour.
Very fast, all very exhausting for Najra, who didn't know which kitten to wash at a certain moment.
We think that there are 3 males and 3 females, but we do not know for sure. This afternoon I tried to check, but Najra got very stressed when the kittens started to make noise. So I put them back.

The lightest kitten (a male) weighs 68 gram and the heaviest one (also a male) 108 gram. The other weights are 88, 92, 99 and 102 gram.
They all seem to be very fit and Najra does a great job being a mother. Her motherinstinct is really good. We try to leave her and the kittens alone for the first couple of days. They lay in the livingroom so Najra can be everywhere, but to much noise around her makes her stressed.

There will be plenty of weeks to enjoy the company of the kittens!

Day two, all very happy. We now know for sure that we have 2 males and 4 females. 1 week old

Our six kittens are now 1 week old and they are doing fine.

The male that weighed so little (68 gram) when he was born has dubbled his weight and is now weighing 142 gram. The heaviest male weighs 201 gram and the weights of the females went from 88 to 173, 92 to 188, 99 to 192 and 102 to 196 gram. We like to see the birthweights dubbled after one week and almost every kitten has managed to do so.

The eyes are starting to open now and some kittens already find it nice when they are cuddled. But there are some who, when they smell something other than their litter smell, loudly start to scream and chug when a human hand enters their cage. Funny to see, this is nothing more than an instinctive reaction which will disappear next week. We are touching the kittens multiple times each day so the kittens don't really have an other choice than to get used to it.

The ears, noses and tails are starting to colour. We know that there will be some sealpoints and probably also some chocpoints. We hope for a bluepoint and that would be theoretically possible. But we just have to be patient and see.

Already two weeks old and they're all starting to look like real cats! The eyes are open and their ears too, because when we're talking to them they immediately react. The heads are coming up and the most boldly kittens are crawling very sturdy to us.
Things are going well and we can see them growing every day.

We're weighing our kittens every day but Najra doesn't like that. When a kitten is lying on the scales, she grabs her child in his or her neck and puts him back into the box at once.
And Ijoor, our dog, somehow does not look very reliable to her. When he's in the kitchen, he can get a lot of hugs from her, but the box in our living room is a forbidden area.
But every now and then he's allowed to walk along it quasi indifferent.
For the rest, Najra is a great mum, careful and watchful, totally in character!

Now that the kittens are getting into week 4, a lot of things are changing for them and for us.
Last week they all laid together, nu it appears that there's another world outside of the box and well... that has to be explored.

Last week didn't actually go as planned. All kittens were suffering from diarrhoea and the eyes of the little one were totally infected. We have, on advice from our vet, started earlier with de-worming than we would normally. Usually this is supposed to be done when the kittens are 4 weeks old. Within two days they all felt better.

Apparently the truth is that, even if you de-worm the kittens several times a year, you can never kill all worms.The worm-eggs develop into larva. This worm larva's pierce trough the bowel partition and make a complicated journey through the body of a cat. Some go back to the bowel and after approximately 56 days they become adult round-worms.

Some larvas don't develop and stay in a stage of rest in the muscles and the body tissue of the cat. When the cat gets pregnant, the larva's "wake up" and go to the tissue of the mammary gland, where they infect the kittens through the mother milk.
The kittens will get diarrhoea when they're a week or 2 old. According to our vet this is not only so for cats, but also for a number of other pets. They see it daily. We hadn't experienced something like this before, but the fact is that de-worming had an immediate effect.

At this moment they all have energy for ten, their weights are rising fast and our other pets are now able to have a good look at them. Especially Yuna has a lot of interest in the kittens and she had to "feel" the kittens for a moment. (Too much contact with those strange beings could just turn out to be a nasty experience, she must have thought.)
On the photo it looks really frightening, but she has her nails in and the only thing she does is touching them.

And Najra...? She is peacefully guarding the cage, nobody that dares to hurt her or her kittens!

Our minicats didn't only explore the world outside of the box, but they also conquered it!
The kitten cage has become a place where their food, water and cat box is. Nothing more.

From the very moment they set foot outside the box into the living room, they were always disagreeing when they were put back in the cage, which is with 72cm x 138cm not to shabby for them. On top of that; very ideal for us, because becoming house-trained goes very fast and almost automatically this way, with only once in a while an "accident" on the floor. But, putting them back resulted in a lot of crying; Najra started to lift them out and got really nervous of it all. We did too.
The cage is only present in the room for the show, but when the week progresses we will get rid of it and the mini-play-scratching post will appear instead. This way they'll be able to learn to sharpen their nails on the scratching post instead of using our furniture.

They're true scamps with a lovely character. Enterprising, not scared, cuddly and like a true Siamese, they talk back when you talk to them. They carefully climb into our jeans (we don't teach them that!) and fall a sleep on your lap. If we are still around in the room we have to watch out that we don't step on them.

Four out of six are eating little cat food of Royal Canin, meat from a dish, using the cat box and it's hard to imagine they all learned this in one week. The smallest male and one female are a little bit later than the others. But when it comes to cuddling, Junior, like we sometimes call him, is the best.

We've doubted a long time about the colours. That there aren't any chocolate-points was clear to us. Those are usually a little whiter on the back. But we clearly saw that there are lighter and darker kittens in the litter, maybe blue? But in the daylight the tails were too brown, so the conclusion is; six seal-points. Some with the lighter colour of daddy Farao and some with the darker colour of mommy Najra.