Week 3 with the Foster Kittens: Six Weeks Old, and Sort of Starting to Make Sense!

Athena

 Six-week-old foster kittens are MUCH better house guests than four- or five-week-old foster kittens! They've ceased their habit of simply dropping trou whenever they have the urge to pee, and now mainly hurry off to their designated litterboxes. Alas, old habits die hard, so there are still a few sneaky little corners that they're reluctant to be dissuaded from. If I can't completely block off a tempting pee spot, I'll liberally sprinkle it with a stinky but cat-safe essential oil, or put a food bowl or litterbox directly on top of it. 

Athena

My favorite kitten is still a sleeping kitten--

Taboo

Athena

Anchovy

--but it's also fun to see the kittens awake longer and playing more. We still need to introduce them to more people, but we've socialized them to vacuums and flushing toilets and other in-house chaos, although Will is still doing her best to turn Pickle into an ipad baby:

Pickle

And Syd FINALLY managed to wean them off of baked and pureed chicken and back onto wet kitten food and dry cat food. Athena is also down to eat her chicken straight from the source:

Athena

When we had them for two weeks, we passed the incubation period of all viruses they could be potentially carrying, which means that we got to introduce them to the other pets! Spots hates all other animals and just avoids them, Luna is mostly okay but I don't think she'll ever be predictable with other animals so I don't really let her around them, and Jones...

They are obsessed with Jones. He is their reluctant god. I thought he'd be a little more into them than he is, considering how much he pesters my uninterested Spots, but mostly he'll just wrestle with a kitten for a bit, then try to steal their food and get told off by a human, then ask to leave the room.

Taboo

It's good socialization for the foster kittens, at least!

We've probably got 1-2 weeks left with this litter of kittens. They need to be approximately eight weeks old but definitely two pounds before they can be speutered, and these guys are currently ranging between 1 pound 6 ounces and 1 pound 8 ounces. 

Athena

They're adorable and we all love them, but five kittens is a LOT, and I don't think we're going to be weeping into our handkerchiefs too hard when we send them off to their forever homes!

Anchovy

If nothing else, I don't tend to buy paper towels or commercial spray cleaner, but I think I have bought more of both those items than I have since the first time I saw them in stock after the pandemic started!

Pickle and Athena

Now, off to go help Syd move kittens to my larger bathroom that she and Matt deep-cleaned last night, then scoop litter, dish out new cat food and clean water, put down a new fluffy pillow, and wash dirty cat dishes, put soiled fluffy bedding in the washing machine, and deep-clean the kids' bathroom. 

And THEN we can snuggle kittens while we study Paleolithic cave art!