February 10, 2003 - March 8, 2009

If we had just 2 words in which to describe Amaretto, those words would be "Earth Mother". Amaretto loved babies, not only her own, but every one else's babies as well. When she did not have any of her own babies in the home, she would simply adopt any kittens that were in the home. Despite some of girls not always wanting to share their babies, the one person they never objected to in their kitten box was Amaretto. She was born to be a mother.

Amaretto was the sweetest cat we have ever had the privilege to share our home with. As a rule, the Orientals can all have their little temper tantrums here and there but never our Retto. She was just the most peaceful girl we ever knew. There is not a cat in our home who did not adore Amaretto, and it was the same with everyone who ever came to our home to visit her. As soon as a visiting kitten family saw Retto they automatically smiled and wanted to hold her and wanted to know all about her.

We remember when Amaretto first joined our family in May 2003, just one month after Cacao joined our home. Both girls were to be our foundation Oriental queens and the start of the Schimmel line. However, this was not the case with Amaretto as we chose to concentrate on the Black Torties, and not the Havana's but during her time as a mummy, Amaretto gave us some beautiful, delightful and amazing children. When we were first offered Amaretto, neither Graham nor I really even knew what a Havana was as such but we jumped at the chance when we first saw photos of this gorgeous Chocolate little girl. Her sweet face and vivid green eyes were just irresistible.

As a baby, Retto was your typical Havana in that she was mischievous, extremely athletic and agile, sometimes stubborn, but when she had her first litter, Amaretto decided to leave all that "kitten" stuff behind. Once she became a mother, our naughty Havana turned into a doting mummy and became a much more serious cat for lack of a better word. She loved to go out in the cat run and lie in the sunshine watching her babies play.

Retto did have one true love in her life, and that was Ice, or "Iceman" as we call him. Ice was Amaretto's first husband and from the moment they met, it was love at first sight and despite later on having honeymoons with other stud boys, Amaretto never felt the same love for them that she did for Ice. Even prior to her death she and Iceman would be curled up together in a bunk bed, they were like an old married couple.

All of her life, Amaretto had been a tiny little girl, the smallest breeding girl in our home yet she sailed through all of her pregnancies and the babies she delivered grew up to be big strong adult cats. We were never quite sure why she was so tiny, her sire was quite a large boy and her mother was certainly not a small girl. Even her grandmother was much more substantial than Retto. On March 8, 2009, the reason for Amaretto's size soon became apparent.

We woke up on Sunday morning to find that our darling Amaretto had collapsed, I wrapped her in a blanket, ran upstairs, Graham tried to keep her warm on a heat pad while I phoned our vet. We got through to the emergency number and Jo told us to bring her straight in and she would open up the surgery. Our beautiful girl died in our arms on the way to our vet. Devastated, we asked Jo to do a postmortem and we left Retto with Jo and came back home in shock.

Jo phoned us later on that day to tell us that Amaretto had been born with very abnormally small kidneys and had died of Chronic Renal Failure and it was her belief that this was hereditary considering the size of her kidneys. Upon hearing this news, we had 2 thoughts, the first being thank God we have no babies from Amaretto in our home that are being used for breeding so it stops here, the condition will not be passed on. There is only one baby from Rett Retts that ever went for breeding and that was a Havana girl belonging to a breeder friend. We notified her that same day to make her aware that this is a problem in the line.

Our 2nd thought was our darling Blue boy, Sage. He is Amaretto's son, a strapping big boy, incredibly tall, leggy and muscular. Fortunately, the babies sired by Amaretto were all sired by big, strong, healthy boys (Ice, Sheridans, & Ashanti) with no incidences of CRF in the line to the best of our knowledge. The irony of this is that 9 months ago we began a raw feeding program in our home, and even though after the postmortem it was very clear that Amaretto would have succumbed to this at some point in her life, had she been on a raw diet from a kitten, we may well have had her for quite a few more years yet.

Amaretto was the perfect mother, the perfect fur child, we miss her immensely and her leaving has left a massive gap in our hearts and lives that can never be filled. Our darling girl will live on forever in our hearts and in her son, our neuter boy, Sage.