Week 4 With the Foster Kittens: Seven Weeks Old and Part of the Family

Taboo

 Seven-week-old foster kittens are so fun!

They're mostly responsible enough now that they can have free range of the house while we're up and awake. Old habits die HARD, though, so there are a few pee spots here and there that I just can't seem to make less tempting--any and all advice is welcome, please!

Anchovy

Taboo

My favorite kitten is still the one that's sleeping on my lap and purring, but dangling a bootlace is now my second-favorite kitten-related activity. The other day I spent a full twenty minutes pulling the bootlace around for them (and I timed it because I was waiting for two teenagers to freaking GET READY TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ALREADY I SWEAR TO GOD YOU DIDN'T TAKE THIS LONG TO GET READY TO GO WHEN YOU WERE TWO AND FOUR!!!!!) and they were still racing back and forth for it when I stopped... although they did all collapse immediately into slumber once the game was over. 

Spots does not want anything to do with us these days unless we are literally outside, but Jones is even more on top of us--

--and even chases and wrestles with the more adventurous kittens. To be honest, it IS a little difficult to ascertain if he's playing or low-key trying to murder them (or both!), but it's terrific kitten socialization, at least!

Socks

from left to right: Socks, Athena, Anchovy, Taboo, and Pickle

The babies found themselves in the mirror last week and I didn't catch it on video, dang it, but this week they found their first sunbeams!

Athena and Socks

Taboo

I love watching each of their personalities develop. It's not safe to send them to their forever families until they're speutered, but it's kind of a bummer that they are being so adorable and sweet and charming and personable, and at seven weeks they're so hearty and easy to take care of (at least in multiples fewer than five!), but their families don't get to enjoy them. 

Socks

Pickle

Taboo

Athena

I really hope they all get adopted within minutes when they finally head back to the shelter in a couple of weeks, both for that and because my heart will physically hurt knowing that they're in a containment area instead of a comfy, loving home...

Athena

... especially Athena, who is my own personal little darling, and it is going to sting when I give her back. I just keep telling myself that everybody wants a kitten, and if I really want to adopt I should take a senior cat, but also I don't want to adopt, because when the kids are both in college I want to travel more. 

But then Athena climbs up into my lap and falls asleep, purring happily to herself, and I forget again. I should make signs and post them around the house at my eyeline!

Here's our foster kitten glow-up so far:

• Four Weeks Old
• Five Weeks Old
• Six Weeks Old

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!

Week 2 with the Foster Kittens: Five Weeks Old and Full of Trouble!

Socks

Whenever I look back at photos of all of our former litters of foster kittens, I ask myself why on earth I didn't take MORE photos of them? They're so cute and little! Did I not appreciate what I had while I had it?!?

I appreciated it all right. I just keep forgetting that it is nearly impossible to take a decent photo of a small kitten, much less five of them. Someone is always in motion, always blurry, always running out of frame. 

That's not my vibe so much. Everyone else can play with them, wrestle and dangle ribbons and toss curly strips of paper towel tube for them to chase. All I want is a kitten to sleep on my lap and purr while I pet it.

And when that happens, I take a photo!

Socks and Anchovy

Athena

Pickle

We've been moving them between their nighttime accommodations, the children's bathroom, and their daytime accommodations, my bathroom, since for several days they seemed happy enough to use the litter box, but also happy enough to simply squat wherever they were and pee on my floor.

This means we got a lot of fun bathroom floor photos in between doing a sanitary load of laundry and deep cleaning two bathrooms every single day!

Anchovy and Taboo

Taboo

Athena

They're more reliable in the past couple of days (although that back corner under my desk remains an unholy temptation...), so they've gotten to also hang out in my bedroom and nap on the bed, and every now and then a lucky kitten gets to come out and sit on the couch with us.

Anchovy

Anchovy

And sometimes a couple of them get to ride around the rest of the house in a shirt pocket...

Taboo and Athena

They are not very helpful when I'm trying to get some work done:

Pickle

So then you've got to distract them like you do any other ipad baby:

Socks

I still prefer when they lie on me and sleep and purr, though. Obviously, when you're catlocked, you have to stop doing all your productive things and instead play on your phone or nap while the baby's napping.

Socks

They've all been very good kittens this week and hit the one-pound mark, even little Pickle, who had insisted on remaining 15 ounces after all the other babies blew past her. For some reason, a few days ago all the kittens decided that they hated their canned kitten food, so Syd fixed up her go-to Plan B of baked chicken pureed in a blender with a little water, famous as the food that finally got Buttons, the runt from her last foster litter, to decide that eating solid food was a route she wanted to pursue. The kittens are ALL ABOUT the pureed chicken now, but now that they're all over a pound, Syd's next big challenge is to wean them off it and back onto regular kitten food. 

Chicken is too expensive to be feeding it to kittens that could eat their nice kibble perfectly well if they weren't so picky!

If You Can't Get a Hole in the Head, Get Five Four-Week-Old Foster Kittens

Syd and I are going to be playing around with idioms next week in her Creative Writing study, so it's relevant that I tell you that I needed five four-week-old kittens like I needed a hole in the head.

But to be fair, I did tell her that she needed to choose a regular volunteer commitment this year, and I did tell her that it should be something that she's passionate about. After all, those college application essays aren't going to be writing themselves!

She'd been making some noise about going back to volunteer at the little local food pantry we used to volunteer at weekly when she was a tot, so I thought that's what she'd be doing. Now that she's fully licensed she can even drive herself, so I could just sit my butt down in a quiet home for two hours a week while she built her leadership skills and logged service learning hours and created the foundation of a kick-ass college application essay about food insecurity.

But instead, somehow I found myself putting my name on a quite different volunteer application that she filled out, and then somehow I found myself going with her to pick up a litter of foster kittens. Another volunteer had already claimed the litter of four six-week-old kittens we'd originally planned to pick up, but the staffer said that another litter of five six-week-old kittens had just been dropped off that morning; would we perhaps like to take them, instead?

Five isn't that different from four, so fine.

As the staffer was examining them, though, she was all, "Hmmm... these don't look like they're six weeks old. I think they're more like five weeks."

Five weeks instead of six weeks means they'd spend just one more extra week in our care, so... okay, fine.

A few more minutes, and that became, "Actually, five weeks might be a stretch. I'm going to write them down as four weeks old."

And of course, by then I'd already been petting them, and seen that one is a tortoiseshell and one is a TORBIE!!!!!, so the news that we'd be coming home with one more kitten than planned and keeping them all at least two more weeks than planned sailed right over my head. An hour later, I was sitting on my playroom floor, holding both that tortoiseshell AND that torbie in my hands and giving them kisses on their little fuzzy foreheads!

Here are Socks, a tuxedo, and Athena, the torbie, the bravest of the litter and the first ones out of their travel crate:

The shelter gave them their first set of vaccinations before we took them home, so here are the other three tired babies sleeping off their shots in their travel crate:

And then Socks laid down for a nap, too:

Eventually, everyone was awake at the same time and whoa. It's been wild ever since!

Foster kittens are a LOT more work than it would be to spend two hours a week unloading produce at the food pantry. We've got to keep them isolated from the other household pets, and just sanitizing their area and keeping them cleaned up takes tons of time. They'll happily use the litterbox, but they'll also just as happily use the floor or their bedding--you will not BELIEVE what the kids' bathroom looked like this morning! I gagged, Syd literally almost fainted, and then five bad kitties had to get stuffed back into their travel crate while we spray cleaned and steam mopped and Lysoled the floor and walls. 

Seriously, the WALLS!!!! And then we had to come at each of the kittens with a warm washcloth, too. They were furious.

Thankfully, these guys are acting wolfishly healthy so far, wrestling and scampering and growling at each other over the bowl of wet cat food:

And they flock to Syd. Check them out sleeping and sprawling and fighting all over her lap:

A few years ago, a young friend's cat died, and in the condolence letter that I wrote to her, I told her that I believed that cats could sense when you were a person who had been loved by a cat, and she shouldn't be surprised if she found that cats were drawn to her even more now. Of course I didn't actually believe that; it was mostly just a pretty way to express to her that love is never wasted, and I wanted her to still feel like her Lavender's love was with her.

But looking at these five little foster kittens, happy and snug in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms--

--I swear I can almost feel the invisible spirit of Gracie standing there, telling five scared kittens, "Go over and climb on that kid right there. You're going to be so safe and happy with her."

And so they did. And I know that Syd actually has smiled since Gracie died--we've told jokes and had fun and things have, mostly, gone back to normal. She's definitely smiled and laughed, and she's definitely had her happy moments. But she hasn't yet been as happy as she'd been with Gracie, I don't think. I think she always misses her, and I think that remembering Gracie hurts her. I know it hurts me, and it hurts me to see my kid's grief, always just right there below the surface. 

So I'd like to imagine that the invisible spirit of Gracie really was there, that first time that those five foster kittens curled up in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms. I'd like to think that in some way Gracie, too, got to be there to see her beloved kid really, truly, genuinely happy again. 

See the Light that Shines from a True, True Friend

2017

This is a eulogy for Gracie, my kid's beloved cat. 

Gracie came to us in 2010, as part of a litter of foster kittens that I volunteered us to raise for the local animal shelter until they weighed enough to be adoptable. I volunteered us for that role because Will, who had just turned six, had also just broken her leg, of all things, and I figured that a month or so of tiny kittens would be an entertaining and distracting way to spend her time in a cast.

Here's Gracie and her human soulmate on the day that they met:

2010

I don't even have words for the bond between those two, right from the beginning. Gracie chose my kid to be her person, and my kid chose Gracie to be her cat, and from that moment on, they were each the most important thing in each other's lives. 

2011

For years, Gracie was my kid's living stuffed animal, her real-life imaginary friend. She was invited to all her tea parties, carried everywhere in a doll-sized ring sling or in her arms, spoken to like a best friend who carried her own half of the conversation. 

2013

Once, her kid and I took Gracie to the vet for a sick visit, and it was ridiculous because even feeling like crap, Gracie was ALL OVER that office. She was on the vet's shoulders, under the sink, in the trash--he opened a high cabinet at one point and Gracie leapt up INTO the cabinet and started rifling through the stuff, knocking things over, just completely unafraid. The vet said, "I always know when a cat belongs to a little girl, because they're so well socialized."

2014

Gracie was like that because she knew there was never anything to be afraid of. Her kid was always right there to talk to her like a person, and if her kid was anywhere on the property, then Gracie knew where she was and was likely right there with her.

2015

For her entire life, Gracie was her kid's shadow. She walked beside her every day, and slept beside her every night. She vastly preferred being an indoor cat, but when her kid went outdoors, so did Gracie.

2016

 When her kid hiked in our woods, so did Gracie, following right beside her on the path until she decided that she was done walking and asked her kid to carry her. For her entire childhood, from the ages of 4 to 16, most of her kid's memories are wrapped in the presence and unconditional love of Gracie.

2017

As her kid became older and started spending less time playing ponies and more time reading, drawing, and writing, it became a running joke that Gracie never let her get any work done. She was always wanting to be on her lap--and not just over her lap, but draped over her arms, or sprawled across her chest with her face against her kid's face, purring so loudly you could hear her from the next room. 

2018

Her kid tolerated this exactly as indulgently as Gracie had tolerated being a living stuffed animal for years, and they stayed inseparable, a greying grey tabby spending her days and nights lounging on a teenager who carried her everywhere she went and held her on her lap while she did everything from online school to art projects to trying to eat lunch.

2019

Gracie was possibly the gentlest soul I've ever encountered--certainly the gentlest cat I've ever known. Spots leaves dead mice at the back door and must be banished inside when rabbits are foolish enough to nest nearby, and Jones never learned not to bite and scratch when he roughhouses with a human's arm, but I've never known Gracie to choose violence. 

2020

She never put a claw out other than to hang on, I never heard her hiss, I knew better than to rely on her for assistance for any mouse infestation, and her strongest protest at any sort of perceived mistreatment was a meow. 

2021

All Gracie ever wanted in order to be perfectly content was to be with her kid. Her kid wanted the same thing, and so I think Gracie lived the happiest life that a cat could attain.

2022

We thought Gracie had a respiratory infection, this month. Jones had one last summer, and sneezed and looked pitiful for a few days, then we took him to the vet, got him some antibiotics, and he bounced right back. So when Gracie started sneezing and looking pitiful for a few days, we took her to the vet. The local vets aren't super equipped for much more than well checks and dental cleanings and prescribing antibiotics, but they did tell me that there was definitely something much more wrong with Gracie than just a respiratory infection, so I essentially came home from that visit, handed her off to Matt, and he drove her up to a vet hospital in Indianapolis. That's where they diagnosed Gracie's respiratory infection, and also her kidney failure.

Gracie and her kid had another week together, after that. We doted on her and kept her comfortable while we grieved her and watched her fade, and then one morning her kid and I agreed that Gracie no longer looked as comfortable as we wanted her to be, so Matt called every vet in two counties to find her a same-day euthanasia appointment. 

Taking Gracie to be euthanized is one of the worst things that I've ever had to do, but also... I don't know, also healing, maybe? Or, cathartic? Where I come from, my family euthanized every one of my pets in secret. I was literally the kid who was told that my elderly dog had gone to live on a farm, and a few years later, that my sick cat had been put to sleep while I was at school that day. And I don't know if it's related or not, but I have a LOT of anxiety about the well-being of the family pets. I can't handle the stress of keeping short-lived pets like fish and hamsters, and I am extremely concerned that our cats, dog, and chickens are safe and happy. Like, half of every vacation is spent internally fretting about their welfare, since they're where I can't see them.

So although having my kid's best friend and childhood companion euthanized was absolutely awful, it honestly did comfort me to hold her head in my hands as she slipped away. I looked into her face and told her that she was okay and reassured myself that she wasn't scared, and she wasn't in pain, and then she was gone. 

And now, we just go on with a Gracie-sized hole in our family. It's weird to look at my kid and not see her draped in grey tabby, and it hurts to see all the places in her day where she grieves the absence of her beloved pet. I swear, every time a cat dies, I wonder to myself why on earth I go to the trouble of loving a pet, when I already know how agonizing it will end up. Why did I subject a child of mine to this much pain? Why did I let her love Gracie so hard? Why did I not warn her to guard her heart even a little?

I think you can only love a pet that way one time. You get one pet, that first pet that makes itself absolutely yours, that you love unabashedly, with a heart that does not know the grief you will inevitably feel. All your pets after that one, you love them just as well, but your heart knows how it will hurt one day with your love of them, and so it's different. 

So, here's to Snowball. Here's to Gracie. Here's to friends who love us with everything they are, and we who love them back just the same.