On Tuesday morning this week, right after breakfast, I was doing some last minute preparations for a presentation at work. We were out of milk so my wife decided to take two of our kids to our dairy-supplier-of-choice to restock for the week. While she was gone she started sending me text messages, e.g. "I love you", "you are wonderful", etc; I thought she was trying to help pick up my mood and self confidence prior to the presentation, so kept working away. When it came time to do the presentation I locked myself in a room to avoid the anticipated interruptions from when they returned.

About thirty minutes into it I hear them arrive home and then start shuffling around the door to the room I was in, completely with our toddler fussing because he wanted in on the fun; because the room was adjacent to our older two kids' room I figured he just wanted to get in to play.

Anyway, another fifteen minutes go by, I finish up the presentation and head back to my primary work desk. I first noticed that the house was really quiet. Because it was still only 10:45 this was fairly normal as our youngest would be having his morning nap. However, I expected our other two to be playing or talking, ie. not quiet. As I passed the bathroom I noticed the door was closed, which again was perfectly normal, except it had a different baby gate in front of it than it had earlier that morning. As I made my way around to my desk and to the living room where my wife would be, our middle child comes up beside me and says...

"We got kittens!"