Uh oh...

Well, I have some unfortunate news: the kittens and their mother have upped and left. I looked in the bush this morning to find it empty. My guess is that one of two things happened:

1. Moved to a new location.
2. Someone took them.

I think that likely it is #1 since the towel in it's nest was quite wet still from the rain yesterday morning. I also noticed that the cat was very eager to get back into my apartment. In fact, and I don't know how it did this, but when I came home yesterday, I opened my porch door to bring out more food for it and somehow it knew I was coming and as soon as I opened the door, it ran into my apartment and right to the closet I had it in briefly the other night. Clearly, it wanted to move back in pretty bad. However, #2 is also a posibility because I talked with my neighbor, Julie, who originally helped me when they were born and told her that I tried moving them inside and will probaby try again this weeked. I doubt she took them, but her mom (who came to visit once the night I took them in) seemed to show some interest in at least one of them. I'm leaning more toward theory #1. I suppose another theory is that some bigger animal came and attacked them, but I saw no incication of that.

I'm going to continue to put food out for it, so we'll see if it comes back to eat -- if it ran away, I doubt that it went very far from the food source. So, we'll see. If it is still around, then I'm sure it would still prefer to be inside, so I'm still planning on attempting to let it in this weekend. That should lead us to where it's moved it's home now, too. But, if the food I put out doesn't get eaten, then I think we can assume that it is likely gone for good -- probably stolen by my neighbor.

In any case, they are safe in God's hands! I'll keep you posted.