11-14-24 Thursday

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This is your weekly reminder that the 2025 Love & Hisses calendars are available for purchase at Zazzle!

Check ’em out right here.

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A Day in the Life.

Someone asked recently (well, relatively recently. In the last month or so?) what a day in my life looks like, and so here you go – a random day in the life of this foster mom (with way too many pictures and words.)

I wake up most days between 5:30 and 6. Today it’s 5:43.

I roll outta bed, hop in the shower, get dressed and go downstairs to scoop litter boxes, refill food and water bowls, and set up the dining room for the kittens. I go into the foster room and…

Put the kittens in a carrier. Bring them downstairs, separate them out into two carriers, and put the carriers in the back of my car.

(Sorry about the terrible picture.) With less than two weeks away until their spay/neuter, it’s time to get them used to car rides. They’re a little uncertain about what’s going on, and every now and then someone raises a complaint, but for the most part they settle down and are quiet after a few minutes. (I’ll do this for another couple of days, and then do it randomly every few days.)

Home again, I immediately give them breakfast.

And follow that up with their daily probiotics. I mix their probiotics into some canned goat milk and feed it to them from a syringe. The benefits of doing it this way are (1) they see me coming with a syringe and they don’t cringe (poet! knowit!), and (2) I can be sure they each get their probiotics.

Probiotic time ranks right up there with Churu time as far as these guys are concerned.

I wave a syringe in their direction, announce “time for the good stuff!” and they gather around.

Jeff’s all “I’ll take that!”

I leave the kittens playing in the dining room, and go upstairs to the foster room, where Tina greets me at the door.

“Where ya been?!”

I give her some canned food (which she ignores today), refill the food bowl, check the water, scoop the litter boxes.

We have a little snuggle (she’s on my lap here, not that you can tell.)

Then I hook up one of her favorite toys, the mouse-on-a-bungee (affiliate link!).

She loves it!

It’s a great toy, but I would never let a cat play with it unsupervised.

She loves to carry it to her pie plate and gnaw on the mouse then let it go so that it snaps back to the doorway. She plays with it for about 10 minutes before she slows down. Whereupon I take it down and stick it in a drawer. (I’m serious about not letting a cat play with it unsupervised.)

I go back downstairs and let the kittens out of the dining room. They’ve been allowed out into the downstairs for a few days now, and they’re getting used to it.

That Chewy box is full of paper and I thought they’d love it, but they’re very “meh” about it. Ingrates.

With the kittens busy playing, I go back upstairs and…

Get the “school room” (or nursery or my office, or whatever you want to call it – the little room off of my bedroom) ready to be cleaned.

And do the same in the foster room. Like her kittens, Tina loves it when I pile everything on the couch.

“What we doin’ now, lady?” First I carry all the rugs downstairs so I can wash them, and then…

Time to vacuum! Tina isn’t scared of the vacuum, but she’s not a big fan, either. She keeps her distance.

I vacuum the foster room and “school room”, then mop both rooms. Tina snoopervises everything I do in the foster room, then sits up in the window seat while I mop. The floor dries quickly, and then I put down clean rugs and put all the toys and beds back on the floor.

Much better! (Probably looks the same to you, but I can tell it’s been cleaned!)

Also much better.

(I do not do this kind of cleaning every day, I do it once a week – more often if it needs it, but these days once a week is okay. I sweep and spot-clean on the other days.)

Tina climbs into the carrier, which is my indication that she’d like to go to the “school room.” So I take her over, and she watches the birds.

While she does that, I go to vacuum the downstairs. This is the first time the kittens have seen the vacuum up close (until now they’ve only heard it from the other side of a closed door), and while they aren’t crazy about it, they’re okay once they realize they can go up on the cat tree and keep a wary eye on it.

Once the vacuuming is done, I go back up to check on Tina, who is very happy on this cat tree.

And back downstairs to check on the kittens, who think I should mind my own business.

Carmy checks out the table.

Jeff says “I dusted under the couch for you. With my FACE!”

It’s time to make lunch for the humans. Chicken and dumplings, spinach and mushroom salad – and I didn’t take pictures because no one ever took a good picture of chicken and dumplings and honestly I just forgot. (Since Fred works from home, we eat our big meal at lunch – I don’t cook every day; we eat leftovers a lot.) After lunch I go upstairs and check on Tina, who climbs back into the carrier and says “Back to the foster room, Jeeves.”

She plays with a spring toy.

She really likes spring toys.

She gets a drink of water. (Side note: that is the PETLIBRO stainless steel water fountain. (Affiliate link!) I’ve tried 4 or 5 water fountains this year, and this one is the keeper. The problem with water fountains is that a lot of them make the MOST annoying humming noise and I cannot stand it. Doesn’t bother the cats, but it drives me NUTS. This one doesn’t hum at all, and you only hear a dripping-water sound if the water isn’t filled to the maximum line. (I keep it filled to the maximum line.) Also, it’s easy to clean.)

Then she has a Churu and settles down for a nap.

Back downstairs to check on the kittens. It’s time…

To head back upstairs! They spend the afternoon in the “school room” with the door between that and my bedroom open.

They immediately get a Churu.

Then while I work on my blog post (this one!) for the next day and sort through pictures for a couple of hours, they settle down.

Eventually, seeing them so sleepy makes ME sleepy and it’s time for a nap.

We have a tragic melted-kitten situation, but we persevere.

After about 45 minutes I get up ’cause I have things to do (with the auction going on, I need to be at my desktop to help with mid-afternoon high bid posts) and fortunately I have a snooperviser to tell me what I’m doing wrong.

I eventually head back downstairs to have dinner (a bowl of Cheerios with almond milk if you MUST know. I have avoided almond milk until very recently because I was sure it must taste like paste, but whattaya know? It tastes exactly like skim milk… which probably tastes like paste to those of you who drink whole milk!)

After dinner I go back upstairs and it’s time for the kittens to rejoin Tina. Her long, luxurious day of being a single, carefree girl with no rambunctious kittens around is coming to an end for the night.

Is it Churu time? You know it is!

I play with the kittens and Tina for a while, then scoop the permanent residents’ litter boxes, and at 7 pm ON THE DOT (Fred likes a routine) we watch TV for a while. We’re working our way through season 4 (I think) of Bosch and season 3 (I think) of Life in Pieces. (We watch movies on the weekend, because we are WILD like that.)

Once TV time is over, I head back upstairs to scoop the litter boxes one last time and give the kittens and Tina their dinner.

Tina waits until the kittens are done eating and then might pick at their leftovers, but she’s not really a big canned food fan.

I hang out in the foster room and play with everyone for a while, and then Fred comes in and plays with them for a while, and then we head to bed around 9. (Haha, that’s a lie. We’re almost always in bed by 8:30.) We talk for a while, and then he goes downstairs.

Fun fact: we sleep in separate rooms and have for most of our 26 year marriage. Hat tip to the (newlywed) person who once informed me “I could neverrrrr sleep away from my truuuuuue loooooove.” (She was serious, and are they divorced now? You betcha.) I move around in my sleep a LOT – so much that the cats won’t sleep with me, though sometimes Charlie will for a night because he forgets how annoying I am – and Fred snores, and both of us sleep so much better apart than we do together. And honestly – it works for us, so why not?

So Fred goes downstairs and is probably asleep by 9. I stay up and watch TV (the latest episode of Sister Wives because I like dumb reality shows, and Somebody Somewhere because I like good shows). After that I finish this blog post, read for a while and am very likely asleep shortly before midnight.

And that is an exciting day in my life! (It looks different when I have fosters who need to be bottle fed or to be medicated often or if I need to spend a substantial part of my day standing over them and staring at them and willing them to feel better. With the current bunch, it’s little like a vacation because they’re doing so well… knock on wood!)

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Posted on social media (Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Tumblr) yesterday.

Richie, Jeff and Sydney are 12 weeks old (and Carmy is 12 1/2 weeks old) and here they are now. All grown up, going for their spay/neuters in 2 weeks (from yesterday), and doing great! Weights are below.

Carmy (at 12 weeks old, last Friday) – 3.75 lb/1.69 KG
Richie: 3.38 lb/1.52 KG
Jeff: 3.41 lb/1.53 KG
Sydney: 3 lb/1.35 KG

Note: if you’re curious how this bunch stacks up, weight-wise, to previous litters, you can visit their weight spreadsheet here.

At the bottom of the spreadsheet are tabs, and the one on the far right is their weights compared to a bunch of previous litters.

Here he comes to save the day! Super Richie’s on the way! (Not the best picture, but I’m amazed I caught it, he took me by total surprise.)

YouTube link
Okay, last slow motion video for a few days, I promise. Carmy and Sydney leaping in slow motion!

My personal assistant (Sydney) would like me to know it’s time for a break.

YouTube link
I thought I had the camera on my phone set to “slow motion” but it was set to “time lapse” and I have no idea why this makes me laugh every time I watch it, but it does.

Good night innernets. (Richie)

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Previously
2023: She loves to watch the big kittens.
2022: Francesca’s all “I could redesign your site, but you can’t afford my fee.”
2021: No entry.
2020: No entry.
2019: Frankie and Jake were watching a squirrel, Luc slipped in between them for a better view, and got a smack for his troubles.
2018: Did I mention that there are a lot of kittens right now?
2017: I love how all you can see of her is her head and her stripey leg.
2016: Which is when I realized that Jake and Alice had been chasing after a flying squirrel.
2015: No entry.
2014: We got out Da Bird, and Dennis got involved.
2013: The Loonicorn!
2012: VERY pleased with herself, our Polly.
2011: Not a single Pepper was adopted over the weekend, are you BLIND?
2010: No entry.
2009: No entry.
2008: Kittens in tiny hats.
2007: “What do YOU want? Go away. You have COOTIES.”
2006: Newt lurrrrrves his Momma.
2005: The Downfall of Senator Stanley J. Boogerton.

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