Glamour Clouds

After the Ohana litter left, I spent a day re-sanitizing my kitten room to make room for Mama Audrey and her two glamour girls, Meryl and Marilyn.  Audrey was a young mother, about 6 months old and still a kitten, but she was hyper vigilant in her kittens care.  She kept them clean and watched over them constantly.  Too constantly!! She never relaxed.  Though she was very sweet and trusted me quickly, she was also always pacing around her babies.  Usually friendly moms make friendly babies, but these two littles were very shy and hid while Audrey demanded pets. 

Protective Audrey did not like other cats as much as she liked people and would attack any cat who dared to approach the gate.  But even she found Nimbus and his unthreatening floopiness irresistable.  

Shortly after I got them, we had kitten wellness clinic and discovered the glamour girls were actually both boys!!  Because they were both pretty fluffy as kittens and they were about the same age as Nimbus and his main playmates, they became glamour clouds.  Marilyn was Stratus and Meryl became Cirrus.  

Stratus had never quite known how to grow.  Their previous foster, Paula, had them since they were days old and had to tube feed him often to keep him growing.  

The babies nursed for a long time and nursed often, but it didn't seem like Audrey was making much milk.  Luckily, I got them both interested in food.  They had a day or two when they seemed to do well.  

Then things just fell apart! Stratus liked food well enough, but didn't seem to really know how to eat.  No matter how small a bite he took nor how smooth the food/treat was that we gave him, he chewed his food so awkwardly that none of it seemed to go into his stomach.  He nearly always turned his head to the side, chewing so vigorously that any food he did manage to pick up ended up falling out of his mouth.  We tried elevated dishes and kitten step stools to get him to the proper height, hand feeding, spoon feeding, syringe feeding... they all had the same basic results.. he'd chew the food out of his mouth. More than once, he expended so much energy chewing that he LOST weight while eating.  

Eating took so much effort that he could only eat small bits at a time and needed to be offered food multiple times a day.    Aunty Sarah to the rescue- she spent her work from home days at my place, offering food every few hours.  Stratus lost weight almost daily- a very dangerous trend for kittens.  Cirrus also slowed his weight gain and had a few days of loss or platueau.  

Possibly because Audrey also became very ill and had blood in her urine and also stopped eating.  In her state, she probably produced little to no milk.   An emergency trip to the vet (who were charmed by her sweetness) yielded no conclusive results and gave us medications to treat her symptoms.  When this didn't help much, our medical team felt it would be best if she could go to a foster that could monitor her more carefully during the day and to separate her from her babies.  She returned to Paula and recovered almost immediately.  Relieved from the stresses of being a young mother, she relaxed for the first time and blossomed.  

During the brief time I had Audrey while sick,, we opened up every variety of kitten food I could find and offered them to her as a kitten buffet, to try to tempt her.  She refused it but I discovered that Cirrus was quite partial to Authority Kitten.  We ordered a bunch of it and he finally began to put on weight.  It was also smoother and easier for Stratus to try to eat.  Pink Weruva, a high quality/high calorie/high cost kitten food was part of the buffet that neither kitten would touch.  Syringe feeding was the only way we could get any food into him, but at least 30% of the food ended up on him- so Stratus got frequent baths.  He loved post-bath purrito time, but  when Stratus continued to decline, I got a crash course in how to tube feed a kitten with teeth.  It seems torturous to them, as is almost like gagging them with a towel, but it worked.  Over the weekend, Stratus finally started making a recovery.  I tried to teach Aunty Sarah to tube feed him, but she did not have experience tube feeding a toothless kitten and the torturous towel gagging a kitten with a mouth full of wickedly sharp teeth while trying to simultaneously push a tube into down their throats was not an easy task.  With her in office days looming and Stratus on the mend but still very underweight, we sought out some help from another foster who could watch them for a few days.  

The day before Stephanie picked them up, Stratus finally began to eat more successfully.  The selfish part of me thought about keeping them, but I knew they'd be better with someone who could watch them more carefully than my workday allowed.  It was only for 2 full days and Stephanie was awesome sending me updates frequently.  Stratus decided that Pink Weruva was fantastic during their short stay and refused to eat anything else when he returned home.  This excited Cirrus so much, that he also switched over the Pink Weruva- an expensive canned kitten food that is definitely NOT the kibble that they're supposed to be eating when they go for adoption.  The rescue tries to get all kittens onto kibble, to make it easier for them to get adopted, as not all families can afford or choose to offer canned food.  

YIKES! I got interrupted and had medical issues the past few weeks which have prevented me from finishing this... to summarize, it took a lot of effort, but Stratus and Cirrus both transitioned to dry food.  Stratus became a food hound, gobbling up any treats eagerly!!  They're both heading to adoption in a few hours! Yikes! Worst blog.... ever.