Fonts Graduation!

March 17, 2017 by Mr. Academy in Graduation, Adoption

The Fonts have certainly been a memorable class at the Kitten Academy! Pregnant momcat Arial was taken in, and then immediately delivered her babies while in the care of Animal Control. Shortly after, she and her kittens were admitted to the Kitten Academy. When Charlie later joined the class, she instantly accepted him as one of her own. While Charlie played the rougher, bigger brother to the Fonts, the Fonts also taught him a lot about being a cat! And Arial was a wonderful mom to all.

Normally, these graduation announcements are thinly-veiled pleas for adopters to adopt our graduates. But the Fonts class represents a milestone in Kitten Academy history - this is the first time that you wonderful Kitten Academy viewers have adopted all the kittens prior to graduation! You truly are the best people in the world!

Zapf and Baskerville were adopted together, and so were Gary and Winnie. It's always a pleasure to see these kittens go in pairs, since they love each other so much already.

Our momcat, Arial, has some potential applicants -- and so does our former momcat, Velvet, who's still enjoying her time at On Angels' Wings. However, Velvet's already had two applications fall through, so if you're thinking of adopting either of these wonderful cats, please don't let the fact that there's a line stop you from putting in an application now. If nothing else, it will help ensure you're pre-approved when the next wonderful cat comes available!

The Fonts had their spay/neuter, vaccinations, and microchipping yesterday. They will go to their adopters tomorrow, Saturday the 18th. Except Arial, who will go to On Angels' Wings in Crystal Lake.

Here are our graduation photos. As a quick side-note, the less awesome camera we are currently using had some issues focusing, and so just by chance, the majority of the good photos we got were of Gary. If you're following the saga of our good camera, which Custard broke when he knocked it off a desk, we've just recently been informed by Sony that as an apology for the length of time the repair has been taking, they are just going to ship us a brand new replacement for the good camera! We expect that to arrive in a week or two. Then maybe we'll be able to get back on track with some good video and photos!

As usual, here's the rest of the photos from our shoot:

Mewsbits, Photos, and Yearbook!

March 13, 2017 by Mr. Academy in Adoption, Graduation

Hello everyone! We'd like to open this Mewspaper entry by expressing our sincere appreciation for all of you! You are over 5,000 Twitterers, nearly 200,000 YouTubers, almost 500 Patreons, and almost 3,500 Facebookers! The outpouring of love and support for the kittens and the live stream are nothing short of amazing. You are surely the best people in the world!

And speaking of numbers, Charlie's adopter set up a Twitter account to share photos of him (which you can find by clicking here) and roughly 1500 of you had followed it within the first twelve hours! The mind boggles!

The Fonts are scheduled for Graduation (spay/neuter/etc) on the 16th! They will return here to recover for a couple of days, and then go to their adopters. In a Kitten Academy first (but hopefully not last) all four of the Font kittens have been adopted already! Gary and Winnie will be living together in their forever home, and likewise, Baskerville and Zapf will be sharing their adventures post-graduation. While there's at least one or two applications in for Arial, nothing is certain for her quite yet. If you're interested in Arial, who is a perfect and affectionate cat for a quiet home with no other animals, please apply via On Angels' Wings in Crystal Lake.

On the subject of adoptions, we're told that Velvet is in a similar position currently - there are a couple of potential applications, but nothing certain yet.

We don't have a new momcat or kittens lined up for after the Fonts' graduation yet, but we'll be sure to let you know when we do! We plan to have the main room empty for at least a couple of days, so we can properly clean and sterilize it. During that time, we'll have extra focus on the Angel Fish. Probably shortly thereafter, we'll be ready to announce the next class!

The new mailbag segments on Saturday mornings at 10:00 KATZ have been a huge success. Thank you all so much for contributing. I hope they are as fun for you as they are for us! And the donations have been so vast in number that we've had to share some of the overflow with other fosters at OAW. Someday, perhaps, we'll even need to share with other fosters at other shelters!

We've sadly been too busy here at the Academy to produce any of our special videos - and of course, a contributing factor is the continued absence of our best camera. We hope to be able to make some soon! Also, we're constantly a little behind in responding to e-mail, but we love hearing from you. We'll get caught up!

All right - we have a whole bunch of photos that we hadn't yet shared with you, which are at the end of this post. But first! The "Kitten Academy Fans" on Twitter have put together a yearbook for us, which is really wonderful, and must be seen! The photos are below, after the Yearbook.

That is amazing! Thanks to Ellie and Bates! And thanks for letting us share it here!

Here's the promised photos!

Charwee's Adventures Continue!

March 07, 2017 by DJ in Adoption, Graduation

Just a quick update regarding the next stop on Charlie's adventures! Charlie is going to be picked up by his adopter tomorrow, the 8th, at roughly 11:00 KATZ. We will archive the stream for those of you who want to see it but can't tune in live.

Charlie will be taking his favorite blue ball, his 'space age bachelor pad,' and a bag full of goodies that you all have donated. Thank you so much for your generosity!

We know we're all somewhat sad to see him go - and it's OK to be sad. But we can assure you that this is what's best for Charlie! As we were saying on the stream this morning: many people have asked us to keep Charlie. But as special as Charlie is, it's not fair to only give him 1/17th of the love we have for cats (our six cats, plus the 10 fosters we have, plus Charlie = 17)! It's much better for Charlie to go to a home where he can have the lion's share of the love, as he deserves. On top of that, his adopters have promised to keep us up to date with a constant stream of news and photos. So it's not 'goodbye' - it's just 'see you later!'

We can also tell you that Charlie's adopters are wonderful people, and we're certain you'll agree. We can't say more today, but after the adoption we'll be able to tell you more about them. You're going to be thrilled for little Charwee!

Here's some of the most recent photos of Charlie.

Sarah Donner and Other Mews!

March 01, 2017 by Mr. Academy

Firstly - if you're here for news and photos of the newborn kittens, that's all in our previous post -- click here!

The big news this week is that we're planning to have our first celebrity guest at the Kitten Academy! The marvelous and talented Sarah Donner, who is a kitten foster, musician, and artist, will be visiting on Friday the 3rd! We're planning on seeing her around or after 13:00 KATZ (that's Kitten Academy Time Zone!) but because she has such a very long way to travel, please don't consider that an exact time!

You owe it to yourself to dig around her website and see all the super-creative kitten-related (and otherwise!) work she's done. While she is here, she plans to bring out her Ukulele and play a few songs to The Fonts and Charlie! It should be a good time for all!

Now for the rest of the news and housekeeping:

We still haven't caught up with the influx of e-mails that resulted from Angel's delivery of four healthy kittens, and our appearance on BBC Trending. We apologize! We hope to get completely up-to-date in the next day or so. In the meantime, rest assured that we probably did read your messages, and just haven't had the time to properly respond!

Charlie's back from his neuter and feeling fine! His adopter will be coming to take him to his new home on the 8th. We've been promised lots of pictures and stories to share with you all - so don't think of it as "goodbye" -- just "see you later!"

Also on Friday, we expect a visit from some potential Font adopters! We're not sure how they'll feel about being on camera - so we'll leave that up to them. Perhaps we'll have two guest appearances on the same day!

We feel that the advertising trial run that we ran was probably a success. The numbers seem to make it worthwhile to continue running advertisements - but the numbers are far from final. Not only do they still fluctuate from day to day, but YouTube's 'estimated' numbers haven't yet rolled over to AdSense or actual payments, so it's hard to know if they're accurate. We expect that to happen by the 15th.

If YouTube's numbers are accurate, then there's more coming in from views by YouTube Red users than there are from advertisements! We'd highly encourage you to sign up if it's available in your country. The best way -- the way we do -- is to sign up for Google Play Music, which is a wonderful service, and includes YouTube Red as a perk. If you have YouTube Red, you get access to extra exclusive content (not from us - but from other YouTubers) and music videos, but best of all, you never see an advertisement on YouTube!

We'll be sure to give you a more full update on the advertising after we've seen the process work from end-to-end, later this month!

Thank you all so much for your support, for watching, and for participating in Kitten Academy! Here's the photos from the "action" shoot from the 25th.

Introducing The Fonts! (Part Two)

January 28, 2017 by Mr. Academy

Now that Charlie has joined Kitten Academy, and the Fonts all have their eyes open, we thought it would be a good time for a second introduction! But before we get to that, a little housekeeping to get out of the way.

Thanks to our Patreon, Elennare for compositing this image!

Firstly, we finally have an official mailing address! If you have any reason to want to send us something, you can mail it to:

Kitten Academy
P.O. Box 123
Fox Lake, IL, 60020-0123
United States

Special thanks to On Angels' Wings for taking our mail in the interim.

Secondly, a reminder that The Textiles will be having their graduation ceremony (i.e. surgery!) this Thursday. They should be officially available for adoption this weekend, February 4th. PLEASE get your applications in to On Angels' Wings and adopt one of these rambunctious, loving kittens. Momcat Velvet will be getting spayed at the same time, but will probably need a few more days of recovery before adoption is an option.

We hope you got a chance to see Charlie appear with us and On Angels' Wings on WGN TV on Friday! If you missed it, you can follow this link to the episode! Charlie stole the show, of course. And that's probably why he was adopted within minutes of us leaving the studio! Thanks WGN! Charlie will remain at the Kitten Academy until he has completed his lessons.

Finally, we've had a lot of people ask about Charlie and his story. So just a little clarification! Charlie was born on December 19th, and hand-raised by one of the wonderful people who foster for On Angels' Wings. Meanwhile, Arial was picked up by Animal Control on January 5th, and delivered her four kittens at Animal Control on the 6th. Then she was brought in to On Angels' Wings, and from there, to the Kitten Academy. Once Charlie was old enough to be weaned, he was also brought to Kitten Academy, so that he could be socialized and hopefully, learn to cat! Arial accepted him as part of her family almost immediately, despite being about 2.5 weeks older than her own kittens. He sometimes plays a little too rough for his adoptive siblings, which is why we take him out of the Annex occasionally -- to give them a break!

OK! Now on to the photos!

As usual, here's all the rest of the photos from the photoshoot!