Saturday, July 9, 2011

Oh, Summer

It's eaten my face right off.

The beginning of kitten season was a rough one this year. I keep hoping that the longer I do this the less time it'll take to get my 'kitten-legs' back. Didn't happen this time, but even the boss lady agreed that our first set of fosters was a hell of an introduction to the season.

Here's Parsnip (now adopted and probably renamed) from this year's first litter:


We currently have three other fosters driving me batty. Here's Sally, whose siblings have already been adopted, cuddling with Junior:


Then there's the other two.

It started with a call from our very awesome vet, asking if we had room for two bottle babies. We did so off we went.

Instead of collecting just the kittens though we ended up with their mom too. The woman whose balcony they were all living on informed us that while she wasn't terribly friendly the mama cat was manageable, even going so far as allowing herself to be picked up.

This was not entirely true. While the mama cat did have a pretty good relationship with that woman that was pretty much the extent of her people friendliness. So, we ended up with a feral cat in our bathroom.

I wasn't aware, but apparently if you put a freaked out feral cat into a bathroom she'll do her very best impersonation of a hissing, spitting tornado. Walls were climbed, great clouds of fur were released, several things were broken... We decided to go ahead and leave them for a while despite the fact that the kittens had a pretty bad upper respiratory infection, complete with eyes so gummy they couldn't open them.

For the first day or so we managed a pretty awesome co-parenting gig with her. She took care of the feeding and regular bathing duties, we stole them when she was at her most settled to clean up their eyes and medicate them.

And then the Boyfriend broke it. You see, kittens don't like it when you mess with their eyes (who can blame them) and protest the cleaning and medicating quite loudly and insistently. And rather than ferry them off out of earshot he attempted to mess with one there in front of feral mama cat.

She was less than impressed.

After that attempting to steal her babies resulted in growls, hisses and quite a few slaps. We managed to get them only through some luck, a handy towel and a brush handle. There was quite a bit of terror involved, especially as the kittens immediately began squawking about it, risking setting off the feral tornado again.

It ended happily enough though, we have the kittens (who seem to just be a sickly sort as they now have tummy troubles) the mama was fixed and released back into her feral colony and no one is peeing all willy nilly in my bathroom anymore.

Now, they just need names but as sickly as they've been it seems like tempting fate to give them real names at this point.

Tiny brown tabby
Tiny lynx point Siamese.

The downstairs redo turned out pretty great, if more involved than we initially though.  It was a little shaming when a team of industious contractors were able to lay a tile floor in three days while it took the Boyfriend and I a month to paint the walls, but hey. That's why they're professionals, right?

Unfortunately, the glass top to our coffee table was an unintended casualty, so a new coffee table was in order. Add to that, the Boyfriend had bought himself an obscenely large television and the ~ten year old Ikea entertainment center just wasn't going to handle it. After eight and a half million trips to various furniture stores, we ended up with a new sofa as well. It actually looks like adults live here now, something that's not so secretly foreign to both of us.


I'm quite pleased with everything even if I did have to break in a new butt dent. Of course, the cats did their part, immediately covering it hair and chewed off burrs. Also, the fosters with tummy troubles? Totally pooped on it. Buying a white sofa was clearly the best of ideas.

2 comments:

  1. You are saints for handling these kitten/cat issues with such calm and grace.

    I like the new look! It's like mine only newer, cleaner, and much nicer. I, however, DO have a long-established butt dent, so this old sofa isn't going anywhere.

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  2. Oh, I promise for the most part there's actually very little grace. I just have the advantage of having few witnesses so that when I tell the stories no one can call me on making myself look good.

    Thank you! Giving up the butt dent was pretty hard, but not having all the stuffing leaking out of the arms definitely makes up for it?

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