These days, everything comes fortified.

Orange juice with extra calcium. Vegan “cheese” with extra riboflavin. Calcium with extra calcium.

Fancy breads with double the Awesome.

Word on the street bakery is that Baguette, Beignet and Bialy have been sprung from quarantine…and the lobby is getting an infusion of Awesome even as we speak.

Is there a recommended daily allowance of Rad? Have side effects been noted when one overdoses on Stellar? Is there a point at which we should clutch our hearts dramatically and beg, “stop the Awesome - I can’t take any more”?

Hmmm…come to think of it, maybe those megadoses of Phenomenal are the reason Bialy’s head is so big. After all, you can’t expect to cram all that Awesome into an average-sized head.

Yes, I am elated to report that Bialy - the kitten with the Big Giant Head - is thriving.  And today, he and his sisters (whose average head sizes are no indication of lower Fabulosity-levels) are ruling the lobby at Tabby’s Place.

It’s funny how you can love dozens - even hundreds - of kittens, and yet the faces and names and antics never run together or become boring. Watching the Mighty Breads romp and jump and sneak-attack each other, Jonathan, Ginny, Denise and I were completely transfixed. An observer might think the four of us had never seen kittens before.

But the show of silliness wasn’t for us alone. No, we had cats tuned into this fiesta from nearly every suite at Tabby’s Place. The windows of Suites B, C, FIV and Special Needs face out into the lobby. Normally, the suite residents are less than impressed with their lobby-dwelling counterparts, and vice versa.

But they were something beyond merely “impressed” with the Mighty Breads.

From Suite C, Natasha and Penny - Penny, who is usually invisible and afraid of everything made - stood with their faces pressed to the glass, mesmerized by the feats of kittendom just on the other side of the window.

From Suite Special Needs, large-and-in-charge Sarafina who couldn’t look away. Suite FIV’s Huckleberry was more enraptured than a dork me in a used book store. And over in Suite B, Barry was beside himself. Actually, he was also on top of, under and in front of himself - he just couldn’t stop moving, lifting himself to his full on-hind-legs height, then crouching down, a bundle of potential energy desperate to burst the glass and hug (eat? annihilate?) the kittens.

Oblivious to their newfound celebrity, the Mighty Breads just continued to bounce. And the funniest thing is, as long as they were at top speed, you almost couldn’t tell Bialy from Beignet. Moving at 600 mph, our littlest weeble-wobble barely bobbled, even outrunning his sisters. At kittenspeed (somewhere between NASCAR and the actual speed of light), you could hardly tell that Bialy’s head is…um, big and giant.

Slow things down, however, and the obvious became obvious. He’s the biggest of the Breads, and he’s thriving, but Bialy has not grown into his head. When he’s walking, as opposed to running, he seems to be experiencing a permanent gale-force wind, blowing him to the left, then to the right. (Kind of like the cub reporters the Weather Channel sends into apocalyptic storms: “I’m Eugene Buddle-Lubbers, and I’m reporting from the center of the hurricane. The hail is grapefruit-sized, and the earth just opened up and dinosaurs came out. Fortunately I’m wearing my Weather Channel branded anorak.”)

So is this wobbliness anything to worry about, or is it just an Edward-variety, untreatable-but-harmless sort of condition (i.e. cerebellar hypoplasia)? Honestly, we don’t know. By all indications, Bialy is growing up and hitting all the milestones of weight and strength we’d expect for a healthy kitten. Still, that big giant head is worrisome; cerebellar hypoplasia doesn’t cause big-giant-headedness, and our vet team fears there may still be something else going on.

When Bialy is old and big and strong enough, we’ll be taking him to a neurologist to find out once and for all.

In the meantime, there’s a whole lot of romping to do in the lobby. Good thing we have three Mighty Breads to take care of that.

Tags: baguette, barry, beignet, bialy, huckleberry, kittens, mighty breads, natasha, penny, sarafina

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