This is just a quick post to share the view I got when I went to get myself lunch today. They had plenty of kitten food at the time; they just wanted attention. Oh what I wouldn't give for them to be free of ringworm so I could just go in and give them a quick cuddle during the workday! Instead, these guys get to wait until evening to get pets, cuddles, and exercise by wand toy.
It's Saturday, and that means the kittens are eight weeks old! Usually this would mean we would be saying goodbye to this litter of kittens, but because they're still undergoing ringworm treatment we get to keep them for three more weeks. They all saw the vet this morning and they seem to be progressing normally for ringworm kittens. This is great news for everyone!
The porch is finally catified. The shelving is gone and has been replaced with a Litter Robot. We'd originally bought the Litter Robot for our house, but our cat won't use it so we put it in the foster room because the fosters will use it. We can't leave it on because cats need to be five pounds for the Litter Robot to sense it, but we power it on to clean whenever we come in the room and turn it back off before any kittens can get into trouble. On the other side of the room we have three more litter boxes, so there's plenty of places to pee! The fosters also have a brand new floor-to-ceiling cat tree, which Inara and Iggy in particular love hanging out on. The video above shows my partner teaching the others to climb it.
That's about all I have. Today was bath night / deep clean day, so between that and the vet we basically spent all day on the kittens. Good thing they're so cute. ;)
The kittens are seven weeks old now! Unfortunately, these little balls of energy are back in the foster room after getting diagnosed with ringworm a week ago. Ringworm is contagious to other animals and to humans and is a pain in the butt to treat. If you want an idea of what we're all going through, take a look at The Kitten Lady's ringworm page and video. Suffice to say, it's five weeks of cleaning, baths, topical treatments, and oral medications. The kitties don't want it and we feel awful for having to do it to them, but we have to do it if we want them to get better!
We're still reworking the foster room. The shelving you see in the video below are gone, replaced by another litter box. The scratching post has been moved so the kitties can use it to get onto the futon, the underside of which has now been blocked off so no one can get behind it. This means less area for us to clean so we can spend less time disinfecting and more time playing with the kittens - and oh, they may have ringworm, but they still know how to play! They are, after all, still kittens.
Note that this post was written two weeks ago but somehow never made it up. Enjoy it!
Welcome to the personality post! At five weeks old, we have five individual kittens, not a litter of five tiny furballs we can't tell apart. So, the kittens:
Iggy was our firstborn. Iggy is a total sweetheart. He's a calm, affectionate purrer.
Inness is the second of what I call "the tabby twins." He also loves pets; long back-scratches are his thing, though he he's up for scritches just about anywhere. He also loves to be up high and was the first to figure out how to get to the high parts of the cat tree.
Inara is our little cuddlebug. She was the first to lick my partner's nose and enjoys curling up and sleeping on you when she's not playing.
Ira was the first kitten to reliably use the litter box. He loves to curl up with his sister, Izzy.
Izzy will do anything for churu. She's our punkrock girl. She's not afraid of anything; from solid food to stairs, she does it first.
Izzy asks, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" To her, we say, "This is the night the kittens experience the wider world!"
We spent yesterday kittenproofing the living room. It was a massive project, but it's well worth it! The sunroom we set up for fostering was fine for Shadow and Kismet, but it's too small for six cats. They're playing on top of each other and it's hard to walk around to take care of them because there's too much furry body on the floor.
Of course, the kittens have been leaving the room in singles or pairs for the past week as we've been socializing them. We've found that when they're tired, they really like hanging out in our shirts and being skin-to-fur in a warm place. This works better for my partner's shirts than for mine because I'm a t-shirt girl and she wears proper shirts with better openings. I tend to do more "kitten in lap," which they really do best when they're sleepy. Otherwise you get climbing kittens, which can also be interesting. The following picture is Ira deciding he doesn't actually care what's outside that window and wondering how he gets down from the back of my chair. (My hands, of course!)
Developmentally, weaning is starting. They've all eaten some food, though they're still mainly nursing. Inara and Izzy have taken to food the most. Everyone's using the litter box, though there still have been a few accidents in the spot where they initially went before we had the litter box up. This makes sense because the area smells like urine to their powerful noses if it doesn't smell to us, but we bought a cleaner that should clear that up. This litter is teaching us a lot about fostering and the things you need to have on hand when you're raising tiny kittens! The kittens are also developing their own personalities, but that will be a different post because my partner is so much better at describing them than I am and she is currently busy.
The kittens turned five weeks old a few hours ago. Here's what we can expect in the next week:
