The Ones That Got Away

In between our accumulation of cats, this happened.

2ndhusband was working for a company that repaired oil well pumps and machinery and came home from work one day saying 'You're going to be mad at me!' Uh-oh. I thought he had been fired or wrecked his truck or something. But, no, he opens up his igloo cooler lunch box and sitting down there inside his lunch box were four very tiny kittens. A crew at his work had brought a pump in from the oilfields to work on and had found these kittens stashed way up inside the pump, and naturally thought of 2ndhusband, who was becoming known as the cat man at work because he would feed all the stray cats and kittens around the yard.

So, we took these four cute little kittens over to the spca to see if they could take them and adopt them out, but they were only 4 weeks old and they had to be at least 8 weeks and weaned for the spca to take them on. I was told that if we took them to the pound they would be euthanized because they were just too small and needed too much care. The spca said that if we took care of them until they were old enough, they would take them in later.

So, back home with the kittens, and over to Petco for kitten bottles and kitten milk. We put them in the bathroom so the other cats wouldn't be totally freaked by these small little intruders. The big cats would sit by the bathroom door going 'what the hell? what the hell?' As they grew, they would escape the bathroom and really freak out our cats by running and tumbling all over the house. The big cats were terrified.

The little boy kitten was the biggest, I started calling him Butterball because he was getting so fat. When they started learning to eat real food mixed with kitten milk on a plate he would put his tiny paws on the plate and grrrrr at the other kittens-get away from my food!
We were able to adopt two of the kittens out to a girl who worked at our doctor's office, Butterball and one of his sisters, and then took the other two over to the spca, where they were soon adopted. They were all white siamese looking kittens with the stripey tails-very very cute with big eyes that would just make you melt.

Why didn't we keep any of those kittens? Well, at the time, we thought we had enough cats. Little did we know what was soon to come.