We’re back from an exciting trip to Chicago for Christmas, and naturally we have pictures to share and tales to tell. For now, however, the news of the day is that we’re cat owners once again.

It seems like just a couple weeks ago that we said goodbye to Maggie, but to my surprise—I had to look back at old photos to check—it’s been five months. Before Maggie died, Julie mentioned to the kids that we might think about getting kittens sometime after she was gone, the idea being that Maggie was too old to deal with energetic youngsters looking to romp and play (and she was never big on company to begin with, if we’re being completely honest about the old girl). As a result, both Julia and Joseph looked at Maggie’s illness and eventual death with a strange mix of curiosity, sadness and anticipation, with the last of those feelings unnervingly dominant. From their perspective, they never really knew Maggie in the prime of her life, when she chased about the house snarling at Loaf and chattering at birds; nor did they know her when she was a kitten, always more than willing to distract Julie and me from our homework back at Rice.

As an aside, one of my favorite memories of the last few weeks of Maggie’s life was when I enticed her—with no small amount of effort—to play an old game in which I teased her with a pen hiding under a sheet of paper, just the way we used to back in Baker. It only lasted a few minutes, but everything about it, from the way she held her paw, poised to strike, to the tilt of her head, was just the way I remembered it.

The kids, then, have been growing more and more excited about the idea of kittens. The earlier, vague conversations about doing something after Maggie died became more concrete, with Julie eventually landing on a schedule that called for us to adopt kittens right after the holidays. She wasn’t kidding around, either: we arrived back in San José on Monday, she and the kids started visiting cats on Tuesday, and we had new housemates on Saturday.

Our new friends are Honey and Felix. Naturally, we have pictures. They’re a brother and sister pair from a litter of six kittens that was left at a shelter to be adopted out or euthanized. Luckily, the folks at Unconditional Love Animal Rescue bailed them out. Honey and Felix were the smallest of the bunch by a wide margin, so they were separated from the rest and sent to a foster home together. They’re about nine weeks old, but they’re still pretty small and still very much kittens.

Unsurprisingly, they were a bit nervous when Julie and the kids first brought them home. We weren’t sure how they would react to the house or the kids; nor were we sure how they’d do with respect to the litter box, so we penned them up in the front bathroom with a baby gate on their arrival. We expected to keep them there for a day or two to help them acclimate, but Honey scaled the gate and escaped within the first few hours, and that was that. They spent the night in bed with Julie and me and managed to avoid being crushed, so they seem to be blessed with decent survival instincts.

Julia and Joe are positively ecstatic. Julia loves picking up Felix and carrying him around, whether he wants to be carried or not; Felix has been surprisingly tolerant of this new treatment. Both cats love to play, and they’ve been exceedingly accommodating of Joe’s particular style, which involves swinging a stuffed snake in the general direction of their faces in the hope that they’ll jump up and grab it.