With Biden announcing his Covid Task Force, I would like to introduce our personal recommendations. They're a bit lacking in education, but they're willing to use brute force and they beat any human in the cuteness factor! (Note that we got two several-minute-long videos of other kittens fighting COVID, but there were inconvenient human bodies in the frame so I leave you with a short one of Inness.)
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. ;)
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:
It's Saturday, and that means kittens will be four weeks old in a few hours! Don't let little Izzy up there fool you; their fifth week of life looks to be shaping up to be a troublesome one. We've taken down the pen beause my partner thought the kittens needed more space and when I went to fix myself breakfast this morning I could hear extremely loud mewing coming from the foster room. Inness had managed to box himself in between the folded up pet stairs, the humidifier, and the futon and couldn't figure out how to get himself out again Thus began my morning.
Inness also managed to pee in his mom's food bowl last night. He seems to have figured out "I scratch in stuff and then I pee," but he didn't realize that mom's food was not the appropriate place to go. I caught him in the act, cleaned up the entire mess (bowl, floor, puppy pads, towel, the works) and then my partner proceeded to toilet every single kitten over the litter box. Not that it worked because I found pee on the floor again this morning, but once I moved the litter box to where they keep going and I scratched his paws in it, Ira went in the box! It was very exciting as a foster parent. So far he's the only one, but hopefully he'll teach the others! (Like Inness, perhaps?)
Oh, Inness. Growing up and getting into trouble. But how can we be mad at you when you curl up in my elbow and sleep so peacefully?
So life is exciting. Further excitement last night involved the clipping of the claws for the first time. Remember how I said they claws aren't retracting yet? Oh, they're retracting. They retracted very well when the kittens didn't want my partner clipping them. However, my partner is amazing and managed to clip everyone's claws, including mom's. The kittens are no longer breaking our skin with their claws and they're so much more pleasant to socialize.
So what's in store for this next week, besides litter box training and socializing?
Izzy is actually already eating some of mom's wet food to supplement her diet of mother's milk. She's managed to push mom out of the way a couple times when she's wanted food, which I'm taking as a good sign. Izzy is the smallest, so we want her to get as much food as she can.
In other news, getting video of kittens playing is hard. I learned this with Kismet, but it's even harder when there are five kittens and you can't decide who to focus on! In lieu of a video, I present to you "Ira on a log," a story in five stills.
The kittens are now three weeks and five days old! What's been happening this week?
All the curiosity. Wow, are these kittens curious. They want to get into everything! Weighing this morning was exciting because everyone was getting in the way, including Lassi! The kittens aren't giving mom an easier time, either. I'm not entirely sure how she's managing to eat right now, given the kitten antics seen below.
With the kittens being so active, we changed their pen so that they have all the space from one side of the futon to the other. This makes it easier for us to walk (as long as the kittens aren't swarming our feet) and it gives the kittens more space to move around. Last night we added a scratching post and a cat tunnel to the pen to give the kittens more to interact with. The scratching post was a must because Inness and Inara had taken to trying to climb my partner's leg and no matter what PetMD says, the kittens are not yet retracting those claws and they have sharp little murder mittens.
Alas, I don't have a good video of the kittens playing because it's been too entertaining to just watch and usually involves kittens all over the place, but I can attest to the fact that life is not always insane with them. My partner shot this last video last night and is proof that yes, even three-and-a-half-week-old kittens still tire out.
The lack of posts is because Lassicat managed to tear several keys off my keyboard that we could not reattach and my PC had to be sent in to repair. It's really hard to work with semi-functioning p, comma, and x keys! I spent the last week or so working on my partner's Mac and it was so uncomfortable that I didn't want to spend any time on it if I didn't have to. It's the middle of week four already, but this post will be a storied and visual recap of week two and I'll write about week three tomorrow.
As seen above, the kittens acquired a pen. They actually acquired this pen right after my last post. Remember how I said the kittens were going to start to walk? They started to walk. And they started to walk right off their blankets and right under our feet. After one near-kitten-squash, it was time to set up a pen. There are now no more kittens under the futon and we can worry less about where they are, even as they get more active.
And they got more active. These first two videos were shot last Tuesday.
It was slow mobility at first. Those kittens really reminded me of human babies, especially when my partner was playing waving games with Inara. They got more mobile by the end of the week. This last video was Friday, and I'm going to leave it there.
It's Saturday night and that means the kittens are a few hours hours into their third week of life! Inara and Izzy have officially tripled in weight, and their siblings aren't far behind! Here's what we can expect in the next week:
Some of our kittens are early learners; Inara purred for Katrina earlier, and at least one kitten's claws are retracting!
Okay, maybe this post has an exclamation-point problem, but I'm excited about all the growing.
Tonight my partner realized that the kittens are exactly the right size to fit into a mug. We're not torturing the kittens like this on a regular basis, but I thought it might be a cute way to introduce everyone.
Izzy was born last, so it's only fitting that she come first in our photo series. She's the smallest, but she's gentle and inquisitive. She was named after Izzy from Grey's Anatomy.
Inara currently wins the contest for "loudest kitten." She definitely has a set of lungs on her! She was named after Inara from Firefly.
Inness is usually sweet and calm but he didn't like being in a mug one bit and was very hard to photograph! He was the first to open his eyes and might be my favorite little stripey. Inness was named after a character from the Protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce.
Ira is our little manspreader. If you noticed the kitten with the arms stretched out in the photo in a previous post, that's him. He was named after Ira Glass from "This American Life."
Iggy, our firstborn, loves being pet! He's the most compliant kitten and doesn't mind being on his back. He was named after (Z)Iggy Stardust.
