Shock Sets In

My first night at home with The Fosters. It was a Sunday. I managed the first feed at around 4pm and de-pooped them okay, though it was really stressful with three babies squeaking for their food while I was feeding the first. And the whole process took an hour and a half! After the feed they went into a different nest while I cleaned up the first one, moved them back and did the clean-up, then prepped everything for the next feed, which was 7pm. This one was tricker. Little Leyte started gurgling during the feed, which I had read could happen when the formula gets into their lungs, and could be dangerous. The babies had been dumped on the street and while they seemed healthy, we had no idea what their mama’s health had been like, what they had been exposed to and how long they had been floundering on the street. Their little lives were fragile.

After the 7pm feed I put Leyte in a box with a container of boiling water nearby and covered the lot with a towel, to help her breathing. It didn’t seem very effective and I felt like I was making it up as I was going along. At 10pm I fed them again, and became very concerned about Leyte, whose every breath was just made up of crackles and gurgles. I texted my driver, who had assured me I could call if there were any problems with the babies, but I felt terrible getting him out of his home so late in the evening. He came to the rescue and we dashed to the vet at 11:30pm with the babies in a cardboard box.

Leyte

At the vet, I was amazed – it was packed! Because the Philippines is the call centre for Planet Earth, it really is a 24/7 society, and shift workers need to do all the regular things at unusual hours. The vet waiting room at midnight on a Sunday was full of people with their pets (mostly dogs) for check-ups, vaccinations,  concerns etc., and there was no priority system for a distraught foreigner with a cardboard box full of squeaky things. By 12:30am I was very tetchy – the babies were due for their next feed in 30 mins! I had yet another chat to the receptionist and finally got to see the vet, who gave all the kitties a quick check-up and put little Leyte on a nebuliser for a few minutes to clear her lungs. My home-made steam setup was okay according to the vet, so we headed back home at 1am in time for the next feed.

Arrrrggghhh!!! I couldn’t believe what I had gotten myself into! Not only was I exhausted, but it was one of the hottest months of the year and I couldn’t run the air conditioning in the guest bedroom while I was feeding the kittens so I was uncomfortably hot! Now you might expect that I am accustomed to being hot, living in a tropical country, but I live a privileged life between my air conditioned home, my air conditioned car, and air conditioned malls/restaurants so this was a fresh horror. I had a temperature display in the guest room and it ranged from 32 to 36 degrees (that’s 90-97 F) and was just awful. Such a princess.

The 1am feed finished at 2:30am, then after 15 mins prepping for the next feed, I hopped in to bed only to set the alarm for 4:00am – that’s only an hour-and-a-bit for sleep! Oh no. Ohhh nooooo…..

Lulu at dawn.

The 4am and 7am feeds passed in a blur, and when I got up at 9:45 Monday for the 10am feed, Lyn had arrived and asked if she could see the babies. It was my foolish intention when I embarked on this project that I would go it alone, not bother Lyn or interfere with her work, but she asked if she could help me feed them and I said YES! Things got easier after that. The wonderful Lyn asked me to show her how to sterilise the bottles and make the formula, and after I did, she did it every week day. This meant I could sleep in between as many feeds as I needed, and the 90 minute feeding process dropped with the two of us and some extra efficiencies to 30 minutes during the daytime. The night time feeds were still mine alone, but at least I could get some rest during the day.

It was a nice time for Lyn and I. She had started working for me in between Asha and Kai which was a few months prior, but we hadn’t spent a lot of time just sitting and chatting. Now we sat, many times each day,  in the uncomfortably hot guest room, feeding two babies each, de-pooping them and arranging their beds. We learned together how to deal with the little mishaps along the way, and we chatted about the common touch points in our widely disparate backgrounds; our childhoods, our children, our families.

Munro

Lyn adored Lulu, and always wanted to feed and cuddle her. Lulu was the runt of the litter – very very small with her eyes still closed until toward the end of our first week, when she was two weeks old. I was quite taken with Munro – I had never encountered a tuxie before! Munro was the biggest kitten – robust and with a confident little developing personality. Leyte was a very quiet, placid little girl. And then there was Kabo, the black kitten. Firstly, Kabo looked like ET. He had enormous eyes bulging out of his little head, and skinny little limbs, but the most notable thing about Kabo was his voice! He wailed for food! He and Munro wailed so loudly that Lyn and I would often feed them first which we realised might not be the right thing to do for Lulu and Leyte, the smallest babies, so we would try to alternate but Kabo drove us crazy with his crying.

Kabo the little alien

I had been nervous about bathing the babies. In all my years of cat ownership, never had I bathed one. I knew it would be necessary for these little sweethearts, but I was worried about them getting a chill (even in the sauna that they lived in). We finally worked up the courage to bathe them and then continued to do so twice each week but we really didn’t do a good job of it. I look back at the photos now and the kitties were grubby all the time! We just didn’t have the confidence for a full immersion bath and the very wet sponge baths we gave them just didn’t clean them up properly. I don’t think they had a decent wash until they learned to do it themselves.

Once the babies were toddling around a little bit, they were upgraded from the box as their nest, to a crate on the floor and Lyn would spend some time each morning (while I was napping) playing with them and cuddling them. We made it through the three-hour feeding schedule then it slipped to four hours, five hours, and before I knew it, they were sleeping through the night and were upgraded from the bathroom to the guest bedroom. Oh and I finally bought a camera.

Leyte

Lulu

Kabo

Munro