Sick Baby :(

Arista is currently very sick. She has lost over 8 oz. since she came to be with us. That is 25% of her body weight. She no longer wants to eat. All she wants to do is drink water and curl up next to me to sleep. I am very concerned about her. I was up all night with her just watching her and trying every few hours to get her to eat anything with no luck. She looks very weak and so skinny. I am bringing her back into the shelter at noon today and they are going to keep her for a while and force feed her to try and get her stabilized so that she can eventually come back here to us.

I am also bringing her to the shelter today be cause I am heading down to visit my sister-in-law and her newborn twins for the day. While that makes me very happy, I did not feel right about leaving Arista alone all day because she is too sick. Thankfully, the shelter understands that and will keep her until she either is stable or until after I visit my niece and nephew and can be with Arista all day long to force feed her, which ever comes last.

They do not know what is wrong with Arista, just that she is not eating and that is a bad thing for a kitten. The good thing is that since she is over 8 weeks old, she has a better chance of surviving than if she were younger. I will update when I have more information.

For now, I am going to drop her off at the shelter into good hands and then try to put the situation out of my mind while I go be a happy new aunt and spoil my new niece and nephew, Shannon Grace and Liam Grant.

And the winner is . . .

With 50% of the votes, my gray, partly feral kitten is now officially named Griffin. And just in time too. He will soon be going into the shelter to be fixed and if he handles that OK, he will go up for adoption. There is always a chance that he will revert to his anti-social behavior once he gets into a new environment and if that is the case, he will come back here for more socialization.

And the Sisters Make Eight

As of tonight, my current feline occupancy count is at eight. I think that this might be the limit. LOL. How did I get to eight you ask? Well here is the run down:

First we have our two adult cats, Fidget and Sadie. They are our cats and we have had Sadie for a few years and Fidget for all her life. Next we have Doyle, my foster turned forever kitten that I adopted a few weeks ago. Doyle is almost 12 weeks old.

After that came "nameless cat" who is the gray kitty I am running a poll to name. He is about 8 weeks old and needs socialization. Following him are two more kittens who need socialization. They are 5 weeks old and little tiny bundles of orange fur. There is one boy and one girl. We have named the girl Darcy and the boy Julius. These kittens really need my help, but are not much fun for either my niece Paige or Doyle to play with but we were dealing with it.

I got a call from the shelter this morning to ask me if I had room for two more kittens. These kittens are also 8 weeks old and are very playful and social but they were smaller than their litter mates and do not weigh enough to be adopted out yet. They need a few days or a week, tops, to grow some more. Normally, outside of kittens season, they would just stay at the shelter for the few days they needed to grow with a note that they could not be sent home until they were the right weight. But since kitten season is fully upon us, they are quickly running out of room. When I went to get them today I could see that every single cage on the adoption floor AND in the holding area out back was full. What that means is that if they could not find someone to take these guys home for a few days, then they would have to make some tough decisions when they next got a cat that might be hard to adopt out, usually due to age.

So, although eight cats is a bit much, if taking these two home for a few days gives an older, less "kitten cute" cat a chance to find a new home, then it is worth it. Our temporary visitors are both little girls and we have named them Lulu and Arista. For those of you who read in my previous post that we were going to name one of the little orange ones Arista, we have changed our minds. Since Paige was the one who wanted to name a kitten Arista, we decided to give the name to one of the social kittens that would actually play with her. So the new arrival will be Arista and the little orange female kitten has been renamed Darcy.

And since our newest additions are not scared, I was able to get some photos right away. Here are Lulu and Arista:

"The only thing to fear is fear itself."

This famous quote from FDR really seems to fit my new foster group. I picked up two more kittens that need to be socialized because they had been found outside. They are younger than my current nameless kitty, only 4 weeks or so old and pretty scared.

They are two adorable little orange fluff balls. Pictures will follow in a few days after they have a chance to settle in. I have one girl and one boy. I have let my niece name the girl Arista since that is what she was dying to call the gray guy that I am running a name poll for right now. It is hard to explain to a 4 year old that a boy cat might not like the name Arista.

Arista, for those of you who are not aware, is one of Ariel's sisters in the Little Mermaid. Paige is a little mermaid freak. We have yet to name the boy, although my roommate has suggested Julius after Orange Julius.

The reason I say that the quote fits this kind of foster is because they are so terrified, but you can see in their eyes that they really want to not be afraid and be with us. They are such social creatures. All they have to do is overcome their instinctive fear and realize we mean them no harm.

Nameless kitty spent the night in my bedroom last night, much to the dismay of my own cats who had to be banished from the room for the night. He calmed down really quickly once I brought him in the room and actually was playing with a cat toy, chasing it on my bed for a while. I wanted to bring him into my room for a night because it would give him a longer period of time to be exposed to me rather than the 45 minutes twice a day he has been getting so far. I set up his bed on the far side of my room from my bed near a corner so he would have a place that he felt safe to sleep and also figured he could curl up under my childhood rocking chair like our cats do. He did that for a while when I was awake. I curled up in my bed and he curled up there and I turned out the lights.

My "bed" right now is just a mattress on the floor since my bed frame did not survive our recent move. (Actually when we went to take it apart to move it, I realized that the frame was broken and and only thing that was holding it up was the many under bed storage containers full of books I had under it so I tossed it - and kept most of the books.) I am perfectly happy with just the mattress until I find a new bed I like so I am not in a rush. Because it is just pushed up against the molding on the floor, their is often a small space in between the head of the mattress and the wall.

When I woke up in the morning and did not see him in any of the places I expected him to be, I went looking for him. I realized that although he was not brave enough to actually sleep on the bed, he did want to be closer to me and had left his hiding spot near the rocking chair for the space in between my bed and the wall. He spent all night and day there until I moved him back to the foster room to meet his new roommates.

The ironic thing is that the kitten that wants nothing to do with people suddenly became quite jealous of these new kittens being fed and touch and held by "his" person (me). He hissed at them and growled a bit and for the first time let me pet him on the back without having to scruff and swaddle him first. He was definitely staking out his territory. Oh well, I will use what ever works. The new kittens, being much younger, completely ignored him in favor of trying to figure out how to eat solid food without it going up their noses. :o)

My First Poll

Even though he is coming along, my new foster is still so scared that his personality is still unclear. This is making it hard for me to decide on a name for him. I have gone through quite a few names in the one short week that I have had him.

Since I am not getting anywhere, I have decided to reach out to the blogging community for help. This also gives me a chance to try the poll feature on blogger. Please help me out by taking a minute to look at his picture and cast your vote for a name.

If you have an alternate suggestion, please feel free to leave a comment with it. I will tell you that I have always tended to chose names for my pets and my fosters that are also people names rather than things like spot or shadow or fluffy.

I will post in a week to let everyone know what name was chosen. Thanks in advance for your help.

Getting to Know You

My new foster kitty is coming along. This is the kitten that I have been fostering for socialization rather than age or size. He has never been around people before and is terrified of us. He has been here since last Friday and we are making some progress. He no longer starts hissing as soon as I come in the room. I have to get too close to him too quickly for him to start that now.

I have managed to pick him up and cuddle him a few times now. In order to do so though, I have to pick him up by the scruff and wrap him in a blanket. He does not really like hands on him. Doyle has been helping out by playing and running and eating off my finger while the kitten looks on from his cage. The kitten seems braver when Doyle is around. Kind of the "if he can do it" mentality. He has started to purr when I hold him and pet his head and back gently.

Just yesterday, I cuddled him in my arms for a while and then slowly lowered him to my lap and let go. It was the first time that he did not immediately bolt back into his cage as soon as I was no longer physically restraining him. Then a little later in the day, I did the same thing again and he went back into his cage, but then turned around and came out again on his own to explore the room. When I was ready to go back upstairs, I locked him back in the cage so he would not freak once I left the room.

Today he came out and wandered around after I opened the cage, so I decided to just let him be for a few hours. When I went back down later he had not gone back in his cage. Instead, he had curled up on a pillow and blanket that was left over from another foster and was resting. Since he seemed to be doing well, I decided to leave him out of the cage tonight. He is still confined to the foster room, but at least he has more room to move. The cage is still set up and open so that if something scares him, he can go back to his "safe" place. Since he was a little more relaxed today, I took a chance and took a few pictures of him. So here he is, our latest visitor who we have named Griffin for the time being.





Doyle, showing Griffin that it is safe to eat in front of me.


Griffin giving eating in front of me a shot. This is the cage that he stays in most of the time. Although it seems kinda mean, he is in it because he feels safer in a smaller confined area. For this first few days, I had a blanket covering most of it so the only part you could see in or out was the front where the door is. You can also see from this picture that our foster room is also an extra toy room for the many many toys that my niece Paige has received from various family members. There is no way they would all fit in her room.


I think things will continue to go well, although I am prepared to go down there one day and see that we have had a setback because that's just the way these things go. I just think of it as one step forward at a time. Or would that be one paw forward?

Fun With Doyle

I know Doyle is no longer a foster kitty - he is mine forever now. But, I thought that I would post a few photos so that those of you who have been following him since he came to me at three days old could see how he was growing. Here he is now:



This is a photo collage I made of him "playing" Chutes & Ladders with Paige.



This is Fidget, my roommate's 13 year old cat. Doyle fell in love with her when he was still just a few weeks old and has been following her around ever since. She wanted nothing to do with him at first. She generally does not want much to do with the foster kittens and avoids them. He would not give up though and eventually won her over. She started to clean him and follow him around to take care of him. Now, they sleep together and play together (until she gets annoyed and swats him) and when Doyle gets himself trapped in the bathroom (it happens often) she comes and meows at me to get him out.



This is my cat - Sadie. She is also 13 years old and has no use for Doyle at all. She swats at him if he gets too close to her, but she is getting more tolerant of him the longer he is around. Of course, part of her annoyance with him could be the fact that she does not like to share me. He also likes to sleep in her spot on the bed and I have to keep moving him out of the way. When ever she gets too annoyed with him I just tell her "with out him, the kitten food goes away." She really likes the kitten food.



And a thanks to my roommate for this latest set of pictures. She has been taking many photos lately because she is trying to take a photo a day through out the summer. If you want to see some of the photos, including some great ones of her daughter Paige (who I refer to on this blog as my niece), just visit my roommate's blog, Seeking Imperfection, using the link below
http://seekingimperfection.blogspot.com/

Kitten Crack

I was looking online for ways to help my new foster become less afraid of humans. Right now he hisses and cowers in fear if you even go into the room with him. He cannot be handled unless it is really necessary because he will likely bite out of fear. He is this 2lb bundle of fear and fear based hissing. I feel so bad for him.

I knew that the easiest way to get an animal to start to trust you is by using food. I learned this with the many stray dogs I used to play with as a kid. Food and play is the way to gain their trust. But this kitten did not seem interested in his food, even the wet food. This morning I realized that he did eat the wet food, he was just to afraid to eat while I was in the room.

So I did some research online and came across some really good sites and videos on the best way to help socialize stray or feral kittens. In one video, the gentleman talked about what he called kitten crack. Which, in case you are wondering, is Gerber stage 2 chicken and chicken gravy baby food.

His video said that they just can't resist it. So I went to the store today and picked some up to try it. I was skeptical because so far even getting anywhere near the cage caused him to hide or freeze and hiss so I did not see him eating baby food off a spoon for me. But I opened the jar and just sat near the cage and read a book for a while so that he could smell the food. After about 5 minutes, I put some on a spoon and slid the spoon in the cage. It took him a minute or so, but he ate the food. After that, I was able to hold the spoon with my hand outside the cage and the spoon inside and he ate off the spoon. Then Doyle (my kitten) wandered in and practically jumped into the jar of baby food so I fed him some right near the cage. Then I fed Doyle some off my finger. The kitten relaxed even more once he saw Doyle interacting with me without any fear. Eventually I was actually able to get the kitten to take some of the baby food off of my finger. He prefers to eat it off the spoon, but getting him to lick my finger even once is progress.

Hopefully, we will continue to progress. I do not have a picture of him yet, because I do not want to scare him any more than his is. I will give him a day or two before I whip out the camera. So instead, here is a picture of his new favorite thing in the world:

Kitten Crack
(a.k.a. Gerber Chicken and Chicken Gravy)

On Their Way and A New Arrival

Dora and Nirvana went back to the shelter to find their forever homes today. I am happy to see them move on. The two of them combined were getting to be a handful and they were more than ready to go from being confined in one room (my foster room) for most of the day. They need to be in their own homes where they will have the run of the house for most of the day.

Normally, I would let them have the run of the place, but they were both dealing with upper respiratory infections (URI) and were on medications. They had real mild cases, but the shelter wanted me to keep them separated from Doyle just in case because a URI is what he had as a very young kitten that made him so sick and they did not think it was a good idea for him to get exposed again so soon after his symptoms finally went away. Although Doyle did miss playing with his friends. I am sure that both Dora and Nirvana will be adopted right away. They are both really cute.

I also picked up my next foster today because they happened to be looking for a foster home for this kitten when I came in to drop off my crew. This will be a different type of foster for me. This kitten is heavy enough and old enough to be adopted out, but he was found as a stray and needs socialization before he can be suitable to be placed up for adoption. I just got him settled in the foster room and am going to leave him alone for the rest of the day so he can settle in. I will post more about him as I get to know him.

UPDATE: Dora and Nirvana were both adopted the day after I dropped them off so they were in the shelter less than 24 hours before they were on their way to a forever home. I do not know if they went to the same house or not because I have not had a chance to check, but I am happy they are in their new homes.

Domino Goes Home!

For those of you who have been following this blog, here is an update on Domino. Domino is the brother of Doyle, the kitten I adopted. They both came to me when they were three days old, with their mother, Muffin. They were both really sick with the kitty version of the flu. Domino got so sick that he had to become completely bottle fed and eventually, I had to return him to the shelter for even more medical treatment. He actually had to be tube fed for a while. We were not sure if he was going to make it or not.

The good news is that he made it! He is now a healthy happy 10 week old kitten and has just recently gone to his forever home. He was never able to come back to us since we all felt it would be best if he was with an experienced bottle fed family. But the shelter nicely kept us updated and has even sent us some pictures of him all grown up that I can now share with you. Here he is all grown up and healthy. Isn't he a cutie?