The Kittens Saga

The continuation of the kitten rescue story.

After many trips to the vet, many many bottle feedings and bottom wipings-with new kittens you have to wipe their little behinds to get them to go pee after feeding them, just like mama cat does-and lots of medicine and tender care, our kittens began to flourish last summer.
Here they are last August, getting fat and sassy.

Since they had been so young when we found them, they still needed that sucking on mama thing, so they would suck on each other's bellies for comfort-and on each others genitals, which we had to put a stop to real quickly since that can damage their little private parts. As they got older, they would nuzzle into each other and get a flap of belly skin to suck on and you'd hear them just slurping away making each other's bellies soaking wet.
Whenever I'd find them sucking I'd make them a little plate of kitty milk mixed with baby rice cereal for them to lap up. These kittens were hard to wean, Buddy figured out food real quick and would (and still will) eat anything. Mimi wouldn't eat any dry food and lived on that kitty milk mixed with wet food for a long time. Lucy wanted nothing to do with the wet kitty food and only liked dry food, and still does. No canned Fancy Feast for her.
I think we finally got them done with kitten milk at about 5 months, they really liked that stuff.

Having three growing very active kittens in the house is something like having a three ring circus in your living room-constant motion and always something to watch. I wouldn't trade all the entertainment value of having three kittens for anything, though. Even the thousands that we spent on vet bills was worth it.

Kittens!

Here is how we went from three cats to six.

Last summer, we noticed a big grey tabby cat hanging around the neighborhood. He looked pretty healthy and was friendly so he must have been somebody's pet at one time. Our neighbor who liked to feed strays had been feeding him, and we would put some food out for him sometimes, too. Everyone called him Buster, and he was definitely a boy with very big kitty balls. One day, I look out the window and see Buster with a little orange kitty trailing behind him-look, Buster's got a little girlfriend! A pregnant girlfriend! The little orange girl kitty would run off if you got too close, obviously a stray, and where'd these two kitties come from, anyway?

A few weeks later, our neighbor asked if we had found any kittens in our yard since the girl kitty wasn't pregnant anymore, so we went looking and found three very tiny very sick little kittens hidden under a woodpile in our back yard. We didn't want to give these kittens to our neighbor, who was somewhat of a flake and wanted a kitten for her daughter's little boy, the daughter being somewhat of a flake too, and currently homeless, living with her mother. Like you really need a kitten that needs lots of medical care right now.

So, here were these three little kittens, one orange (like his mama), one tortoise shell (a mixture of mama and papa) and one dirty white (no idea where that one came from). They were so very very tiny, and two of them had eyes that were glued shut from eye infections. Soft hearted people that we are, instead of taking these tiny kittens to the pound, we took them to the vet. All three had respiratory infections and eye infections and were dehydrated and constipated and had lots of fleas. They all got meds and enemas and we got bottles and kitten milk and gave them baths to try and get rid of the fleas. The vet said that they would have died soon, the mama cat won't take care of sick kitties, she'll just abandon them. The old survival of the fittest thing.

And so began the raising of the babies.
Here they all are after their bath-orange Buddy, white Mimi, and tortoise shell Lucy.
Look at that tiny little face!
Itty Bitty Lucy. Mimi was camera shy.

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.