She was a funny baby and I was a horrible photographer but we were already together and that was the most important.
Usyaka the funny baby, 2008.
I get sentimental watching these photos.
My funny lovely baby.
I think many of you have missed these two early posts with other archive photos:
Usyaka and Pirate 
Her paws are huuuuuge! And her eyes are so expressive!
You are right, her eyes have always been very expressive. I think I understand her now much better than I used to.
Aww! She does look different! Not at all an awkward child, though – just as elegant as always!
Wasn’t she just a cutie? I didn’t know she was that tiny then, she seemed quite grown-up to me.
Oh my goodness! I can never fail to be overcome with little fuzzy feelings of awesomeness when I see your pictures of her.
Anna, you are so good with words! Thank you for the wonderful comment!
Usyaka was tiny little one.
Questions – cold rrrrussian winters: does that mean the old heating works was used for building structure (walls, etc)? And, how cold was cold? My imagination says very cold.
Well, that’s a piece of an old central heating there, a Soviet one, I guess. Theoretically it still worked, hot water was running in the tubes, warming up the metal layers which were supposed to warm up the rooms. In practice though they were just slightly warm, some metal constructions from the inside were missing and so Usyaka could fit inside and get as much warmth as possible. It was an old flat, with old types of windows, wooden ones, winds got easily inside. Sometimes we had tiny bits of paper and dust sliding along the floors. I often carried Usyaka in my arms and put lots of pillows and boxes around the flat so she could hide there. Before that winter ended, we moved to another, a much warmer flat.
That first winter wasn’t that bad. The next one, and the last one for us, was the worst. It was -35C outside. When you go out in temperatures like these you first of all feel that you consist of water, your eyes become like pieces of cold glass and you feel your eyelids sliding along them. Everything you breath out instantly becomes ice on your clothes. Usyaka didn’t feel any of that, we lived in a very warm flat with heated up floors and constant +28C. It was almost comfortable, but extremely dry, because that heating dries up air very much.
And then it was over. We moved to a place where we moan when it’s just +10C outside and we call it freezing. Usyaka loves that climate so much better and so do we 🙂
Wow! That is COLD! Amazing we humans manage to survive such conditions, isn’t it? Glad you gphave it warmer now, I know all of you like it a lot better, especially Usyaka.
-35C, that’s brutal cold. That gives a better appreciation of warmer temperatures.
She looks adorable! So tiny! So innocent, when she was a baby.
I don’t think you were a bad photographer at that time, you only got better! 🙂
Thank you, Dianda! Well, I was much worse and I wasn’t used to Usyaka at all, I didn’t know her that well. I’m still very happy I took so many photos, they are a treasure to me now 🙂 Just look at her, she’s so adorable I can literally cry looking at these photos now :))
I know exactly what you mean! I have that as well looking back at my cats baby pictures. 🙂
What a CUTIE pie! She really WAS a baby before growing into the self-possessed beauty she is now.
When you called her a cutie pie you reminded me about one of my early posts https://usyaka.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/cutie-pie-is-going-to-sleep/
The photos are not from archive, Usyaka is not a baby there.
She was very cute when she was a baby 🙂
Reblogged this on Gretchen Osowski Photography and commented:
This cat is so unique looking and the prospectives that the photos are taken from are interesting.