Crazy Cat Lady Starter Kit
Kitten arrived in the summer of 2015 when Bad Kitty was six years old. He was extremely Not Happy about it, but Kitten was a tiny, sassy girl and she didn’t care about his feelings. All she cared about was stealing his food.
When Kitten first showed up, she was so small and so thin that I thought she was a kitten, but soon I realized she had had kittens. We kept hoping she would bring her babies to us or that we could follow her to them, but no luck. We didn’t take her in to get spayed immediately because we didn’t know how older her babies were or what state they might be in, so we didn’t want to take her away from them. We never saw her first litter of kittens. Weeks passed and Kitten started hanging around the house more and more. She didn’t leave to go nurse, so we had to assume that something had happened to her babies.
By then, we also realized she was already pregnant again. When my mom and I took her to the vet, we found out she was likely quite far along, and we didn’t know what to do. At the time, we didn’t intended to take on multiple cats (HA! How little did we know!). Fortunately, there was a woman there in the waiting room that overheard our conversation. She owned a grooming salon, but also helped foster dogs and cats. She offered to take Kitten in and find homes for her babies. We were super grateful and agreed. After about two weeks at the groomers, Kitten had her 2nd litter: 2 boys and 2 girls.
We had been looking for a home for Kitten as well and had found a lady in North Carolina that was wanted to take her as well as one of her kittens. We sent pictures of all the kittens, and she picked out the boy with swirly stripes. When the kittens were old enough, we brought Kitten and the swirly boy (Skunk) home from the groomers, so we could take them to the lady in North Carolina. In the meantime, my mom and I had convinced my step-dad to let us keep the little black and white girl, so she came home with us, too. That first night my step-dad saw how cute the black and white kitten (Minx) was all snuggled up with her brother that he told my mom to go back the next day to get the other little tabby girl (Molly), so the original girl we were keeping wouldn’t be lonely when her mom and brother were gone.
That decision sealed our fate.
Mom brough back the little tabby girl to be with the rest of her family (the final brother had already been adopted by someone who had visited the groomers). A few days later, we realized that Molly had ringworm on her face. Her siblings seemed unaffected, so we separated her and hoped for the best, but it was too late. All the kittens and their mama were infected.
Thus began near-weekly trips to the vet. The kittens were so young that they had to be weighed weekly and then every other week in order to adjust the dosage of the medicine they were on to kill off the ringworm. Fortunately, they had the kind of ringworm that glows under UV light, so once their fur started growing back in some, it was easy to tell if the fungus was still there or not. I also had a blacklight at home that I used to check them with between vet visits.
Let me tell you, that ringworm was persistent. It lasted from roughly the beginning of August to near the end of November. Four cats, two doses per cat per day. It was an ordeal, particularly for Minx who kept throwing up her medication and ended up having to be treated the longest (turns out, she’s allergic to chicken and the medication had chicken flavoring added to it, hence the throwing up).
We kept the 3 kittens and Kitten for the whole treatment. The lady who was going to take Kitten and Skunk was a nurse, so we wanted to make sure the cats were healthy before we took them to her. She was very understanding about it and we sent her several pictures as updates. The day the kittens were finally declared free of ringworm, my mom called her, but didn’t immediately get an answer. The woman called back later that day to say she’d been in the hospital because her sister had died. Her sister had a cat already, so she was going to take care of her sister’s cat, instead.
By that point, we were all so attached to the kittens and their mama that we didn’t really want to give them up, anyway (even my step-dad who had grown attached to Skunk in particular). So, instead of trying to find new homes for them, we ended up keeping them all together.
And that’s how one cat suddenly became five cats. It would be a few more years before that total rose to six.
Kitten is sweet and sassy. She’s a good mama who doesn’t take any nonsense from her children. Or from Bad Kitty, either, for that matter. While Kitten isn’t his favorite, he mostly got over his bad attitude and has been surprisingly tolerant of all the kittens. Bad Kitty has become their grumpy uncle, or Grumple, as I like to call him. Even though Molly, Minx, and Skunk are nearly 10 years old, now, we still call them “the Kittens.” Kitten is nearly 11 years old now, and still gives her children a good mothering if she thinks they’re misbehaving. She and Molly are particularly close and often snuggle together on cold or rainy days.
