(Sorry this is going up late – I thought I’d scheduled it to go up at 6 am, buuuuuuuuut apparently not!)
I have a question for you as well – have you ever had a cat that doesn’t clean their bottom very well? One of my cats seems to have started letting this slide lately and she HATES it when we clean it (just with a makeup pad soaked in warm water) – she even growls and hisses at us which she never does, ever. I am hoping that either you or maybe one of your readers has had this issue and came up with a solution? The vet has checked her out and there doesn’t seem to be any physical reason for it (except maybe losing a bit of mobility in her old age – she’s 11).
We do have this issue on occasion, especially with Elwood, who has some problem reaching his back end. Every now and then Fred will clean Elwood’s back end with an unscented baby wipe. Usually Fred starts out by petting Elwood (who is really a big lovebug), and once he’s happy and purring (Elwood, that is. Fred doesn’t purr.), Fred makes a few swipes with the baby wipe, and is done before Elwood knows what’s going on.
How about the rest of y’all, anyone got any suggestions for Jess?
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Adorable pics and wonderful captions as well! Maybe Gracie is the go-between getting the Noms to eat real food since she’s physic and all.
“Psst, Newbery I heard that Robyn thinks you don’t eat real food yet”
“Whaaat? I’m a big boy. I’ll show her!”
“Psst Darwin, Razzie and Newbery are all into eating the food. Robyn says you just eat litter.”
“I do not! I am not a baby!”
“Shhhhhh. Don’t be telling my secrets. I’m going to train those kittens to bring me snacks!”
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What do you do with all those eggs? And the duck eggs? Do you sell at a local market or something? Nothing beats a fresh egg. Nothing. We have no idea what an egg really is supposed to be like.
The noms are getting SO BIG. Will they go to new homes soon or will you keep them??
Whatever eggs we don’t eat ourselves (and we eat plenty of eggs!), we sell to friends or Fred’s coworkers or the regular customers we’ve come to have over the past few years. On the rare occasion we have a large number built up, we have a sign that we put out at the end of the driveway (we sell the eggs for $2 a dozen), and usually sell them all within a day or two. We don’t have to put the sign out very often these days, luckily.
The Noms and Emmy will be separated from each other around the middle of May – we’ll move the babies down to the guest bedroom – when they’ll be around 10 weeks old. We’ll take Emmy off to be spayed, and put her back in the foster room to recover, and then when the Noms are about three months old, we’ll take them to be spayed and neutered as well. Once the babies are spayed and neutered and up to date on their vaccinations, they’ll go off to Petsmart, where they’ll hopefully be adopted quickly. Emmy will stay here for at least a little while longer while we work with her and determine what her personality is like when she’s not worrying about her babies!
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How long will Emmy tolerate nursing the kittens? Will she eventually shut down the milk bar, or will the kittens just get tired of it?
Emmy’s been showing more willingness to walk away from the babies while they’re nursing, but I suspect that she’s like Maggie was last year – as long as the babies want to nurse, she’ll probably let them, right up until the point we separate them from her!
When Maggie and her babies went to Petsmart last Summer, the babies were just over four months old, and they were still nursing. I put her in one cage and her babies in another, with a note on their cages saying that they could be out together, but not to let them nurse. Lisa reported that she let Maggie and the babies out, and in an INSTANT one of the babies had Maggie down and was nursing.
Babies need a mama with a firm hand who’ll cut them OFF, and neither Maggie nor Kara (who was our first pregnant mama) were inclined to do that.
In fact, here’s a video of Maggie’s babies (and the Spice Girls), taking her down as she tried to walk across the kitchen:
And here’s Kara and her babies, who were 16 weeks old at the time:
And while I was looking for those, I found this. A lot of you might not know about the Siamese-mix litter I had back in… 2009? I think? I named them after cookies (TimTam, Hydrox, Keebler, Milano, Lorna Doone) and called them (of course) The Cookies. Laurie’s current bunch – the Lamms – remind me of them. They were bottle babies, and I got some video of them at three weeks old.
UGH, they were SO FREAKIN’ CUUUUUUUTE!
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I saw this video the other day and thought immediately of you!
We SO need to teach our ducks to fetch, don’t we? I think maybe we waited ’til they were too old, though, we should have started when they were babies!
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There is actually a book on crafting with cat hair (apparently there’s a blog too) I actually halfway considered with the 18 kitties in the house.
I’ve heard of that book! I don’t imagine that I’d be very good at doing anything too complicated with cat hair, though. Rolling it into balls so it’ll stay together is about the extent of my crafty skillset, I think.
My only suggestion would be to save up a lot of cat hair and do it all at once, rather than doing it my way, which is why I have three small cat hair blobs that the kittens love to play with, instead of one big one that they fight over. Um. Not that I’m wishing they’d fight over it, of course. (That’s a lie. They’re way too cute and funny when they fight over toys.)
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By the way – any ideas you or readers might have for this situation: I caught my last outside kitty – big orange male – I actually have his brother and sisters inside but it took me more than a year to catch him. Like the dolt that I am, I didn’t take him to vet right away – instead I let him into the quarantine room out of the live trap. I highly doubt I’ll get him in the trap again, but well, he’s not happy. He cries most of night – and he hisses at me – tries to pop me if I get too close. I don’t try to touch him and I just kneel down so he can see me and talk to him. Sometimes i let one of the older cats in and he talks to them, but never comes out to say hi. I’m just at a loss of how to get him calm enough – I need to get him checked out and dewormed and neutered. never had one this stubborn.
Is he hiding under a piece of furniture, is that where he won’t come out of? Because I’m thinking that if you could get a big carrier into the room and then remove whatever furniture he’s hiding under, he may opt to start staying in the carrier – which you could then shut and carry to the vet? Is that a possibility at all?
Readers? Suggestions? Spill ’em!
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I just noticed the link for the thermal cat beds (the blinding beauty of Miz Poo distracted me!) Norman travels from sun spot to sun spot. I’m sure he would love one. Just wondering if any of the humans at Crooked Acres have given them a try? After a roller blading accident several years ago, I’d sleep with a heating pad nightly if I weren’t worried about the danger. I don’t need it for pain anymore, just addicted to the warmth.
I was going to say that I haven’t tried the thermal bed myself, but actually – when I lay on the couch in the evenings while we’re watching TV, I put my feet on the thermal bed, and they get pretty toasty! Basically there’s something inside the bed (so it does make a crinkly kind of noise – it doesn’t bother me or the cats) that reflects your body heat back at you. Now I’m wondering if something like that would work better on my bed in the winter!
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Is it just me, or does “Fred Furminated Emmy” sound like an old-fashioned swear? Imagine stubbing your toe in front of your grandmother – you start with the “fffff” sound and then quickly shift from the Very Bad Word you were going to use, and instead holler at the top of your lungs, “ffffred Furminated EMMY!”
Just me, then? Okay…
It TOTALLY does!
Also, someone who lives in this house (who, ME? I’d never!) might have recently taken to telling the other adult in the house to go Furminate himself (I can’t help it, I’m a dork who is far too amused by herself).
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And finally have figured out that Corbett from last year, (or 2009) is Corbie!?! Right? And he IS a beautiful boy… my kitty colors to be sure! Thanks for the posts… you stop me every AM before I can go out, with kitten love and begin my day!
Corbie is indeed Corbett from The Bookworms, who were our fosters back in 2010. In fact, here’s Corbie from March 2010:
Gorgeous then, gorgeous now!
But this reminds me that not everyone has been reading for years and years, so I think that starting next week, at the end of each post I’ll put up a picture of a permanent resident and how they came to be part of our family – starting with the oldest and working my way down to Alice Mo. That’ll be fun, right?
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Did Emmy see you leave with Logie, or was her attention elsewhere?
Emmy was busy eating her snack – and Fred was sitting between Emmy and the door – so she didn’t see me pick up Logie and walk out with her. I don’t know that she would have been too worried if she’d seen Logie go with me, because as long as the babies aren’t screaming, I can do whatever I want to with them, and she doesn’t bat an eyelash. She was just all “I WILL KILL YOU” because Logie was clearly distressed and screaming about it.
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I love the current header, just as I loved the old header. I suspect I’ll love any new header Robyn makes. I have to admit my all time favorite photo is the one with the kitten wearing a ‘crown’. Don’t remember which kitten it was…
That was Maddy! She was my very first bottle baby and for the first few weeks I had her, I thought for sure I was going to mess up and she was going to up and die on me. I was lucky, though – she was a fighter (still is!) She was our foster right after we bought this house, and we’d bring her here with us while we were working on the house. That picture up there was actually taken in the foster room, before we pulled the carpet up! And that yellow “crown” she’s wearing may very well be the same toy that Darwin was playing with in the pictures I posted on Wednesday.
This is what Maddy looks like now:
Or rather, what she looked like in 2008, when I went to visit Nance in Pennsylvania!
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Remember this picture of Emmy from before she had her babies?
Same idea, almost two months later:
I love this picture both for Emmy’s closed eyes (“God give me strength…) and Newbery in the background, all “What’s going on over THERE?!”
“This just does not seem to be working out for me… Logie! Come over here and let me stand on your head!”
“Newbery, you are not coming up here. There’s no room for you.”
“You can’t tell me what to do!”
“GET OFF MY CAT TREE!” (Please note the big ol’ back foot, hooked over the side of the condo. Cracks me UP.)
The interloper vanquished, Razzie heads back up into her tower.
I love Razzie’s little curved partial tail so very much.
“This bed isn’t very comfortable. Also, it smells like food.”
All four monkeys in their tree. Left to right: Darwin, Newbery (back), Logie, Razzie.
Nap time for Newbery (left) and Darwin.
“What?” I love the kitten action in the background.
Darwin (I think) in the box. I actually had to remove this from the foster room because they were spending a lot of time hiding out in it, and I wanted them out in the room where I could reach them and where they could be social.
Everybody loves a LogieSnuggle.
“What you doin’ over there?”
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“Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!”
“Can’t a man get a little privacy?”
Corbie likes to help Sheriff Mama keep an eye on things.
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Previously
2011: “My paw smells funny.”
2010: “They’re gonna take a sample of what from my where, now?”
2009: “Hey, Mister, you sure smell purty!”
2008: No entry.
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.