The classified ad said:  "Kittens, spotted cuties! 1/2 purebred Bengal.  Mom is a Floozy, Dad is a Dead-Beat."

Dilly's mother was sitting in the windowsill when she saw a handsome, attractive male in a nearby yard.  She pushed the screen out and joined him.  When her owner found her 20 minutes later, her purebred, in-heat Bengal had mated with an intact silver tabby - an alley cat.  Dilly and her 3 siblings were the result.

Dilly is presently 8 weeks old (born June 6, 2000).  She's spent the evening isolated in my bedroom - she had her second round of shots today, and isn't feel very cheerful or friendly.  Although none of the other cats hissed at her, she made it abundantly clear that she wasn't in the mood to be sociable (imagine an itsy bitsy kitten hissing and growling with great bravado in the face of cats that are 3 or 4 times her size - and each one of them backed away from her).

Her base coloring is a silvery gray (the picture above isn't very accurate, color-wise), with leopard spots on her tummy and mostly black and brown stripes elsewhere. She has a couple of beautiful gold splotches on her neck and on her forehead.

We're just getting to know one another, so there will be updates in the near future.

Update August 12:  Dilly has overcome her "shyness" completely.  She's also discovered the stairs, shoelaces, bare toes and ankles, scratching posts, how nice it is to sleep in the crook of Mom's arm, the cords at the back of the computer, that she can get away with sampling food out of every cat food dish, that the male cats behave differently toward her than the female cats do, and that Dad's lap is a great place to flop out and take a nap.

The three girls play rambunctiously with each other.  Birm and Stanley are curious about her, but distant (she hisses if they get too close), and Galahad is apparently on her "I don't like you, you were mean to me" list, because he hisses back at her.

Update October 22:  Dilly is growing in leaps and bounds.  She's definitely the most athletic cat I've ever known.  She also has full cat-conversations with me, talking constantly while I pet or cuddle her.
 
 

Our cats are a "merged" family - Su-Su was mine; we adopted Libby a couple of months after Bob and I moved in together; Stanley and Galahad (Bob's cats from a previous marriage) were shipped across the country to us a few months later.  Later, we adopted Buster, then Penny Ante, then Birm.  We adopted DillyDally a few days after Su-Su crossed the Rainbow Bridge.