My First Blog!

Kylie when I asked if I could hold one of her kittens.

Please bear with me in my first attempt at blogging. My life revolves around husband, cats and quilts. I'm a cat foster mom with Heartland Humane Society based in O'Fallon, Missouri. For 2 1/2 years I've had the most wonderful experiences with my foster cats. I've bottle fed many orphaned kittens for weeks and enjoyed every minute. A month ago I took in my first pregnant cat. Kylie delivered six kittens three days later. This picture is post-delivery. She is very friendly (more than the photo shows) and allows visitors to hold her kittens. My dog and other foster cats, however, are another story. I have to use a window screen as a shield when entering and leaving the bedroom or she will charge them hissing and clawing. Hope it's just a maternal thing and she'll be fine once the kittens are older and adopted. The kittens will be 4 weeks old Friday and are so much fun to watch. The first one climbed out of the birthing box today.

Here's Kyilie nursing her babies. This is the first time I've had a mom for the kittens and have to say it's VERY nice. There are five black and one gray. When I have litters of identical, or even similar, kittens, I use colored velcro for collars to tell them apart. All are males except one black is a female.

The kittens in their birthing box. This being my first birth, I didn't realize how important it was to have an actual box with a hole cut 7" above the floor until the kittens started moving around. A heating pad under the towel keeps them nice and warm. A towel covers the top to help keep the heat in, too.

The little gray boy looks like he's wearing a tophat, but it's another kitten or two behind him.














One of the kittens. Isn't he just adorable!

















Sadly, one of our most experienced foster moms is moving to Boston soon and is not taking in new cats. Since I've now been through a birth, I was asked to take another pregnant cat last week. I picked her up Wednesday at the vets. According to an xray, it was estimated she was about 45 days. Full term is around 63 days, so I had time to find another box. Imagine my surprise when I went in two days later on Friday morning to check on her and found three black kittens in her bed! She had two more in the next hour. Five more babies! Four more black and one gray. They're four days old today and I think they've doubled in size. I only got to weigh one before mom took it out of the bowl and back to the bed. I got a box that night and when I took it in the room, a baby had crawled out of the bed about 8" away. Amy, named after my hairdresser who's also pregnant, is much more protective of her babies than Kylie, but she was okay today when I held a couple.

I will be posting my other foster cats very soon.