First day in the lives of four kittens
Update: first day in the lives of four #kittens. The were born yesterday evening, on #Caturday no less, but this will be their first entire day in this world.
Last night
Last night I had to tie off and cut no less than three umbilical cords, thereby having to break the strong advice not to handle the youngsters during the first 24 hours. Priorities... Mother #Melian didn't seem to care at all, thankfully.
I threw away two placentas, the first one had already gone into the bin earlier: mom had bitten off her first born's cord almost immediately. Couldn't find the last one, but I figured I'd search for it in the morning. When I checked on them later that night, everything seemed just fine.
This morning
This morning nothing had changed: four moving, drinking and occasionally squeaking kittens and a happily purring mom. Couldn't find the last placenta, so I she'd probably eaten it.
Apparently mom was still hungry (her last meal had been shortly before she went into labour), and as soon as I opened the cupboard where I keep her food, she left her box and joined me in the kitchen. Cat owners will recognise their pets' urge to be on the exact spot where you want to place your foot when you're handling their food...
But when I didn't place the bowl on the normal spot, but walked towards her #nursery, she immediately went back into her box. When I put the bowl right in front of it, she stuck out her head, gobbled up everything there was, and lay down again.
When I did the same thing an hour later, she took a short moment outside the box to eat, but kept a close eye on her offspring while doing so:
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After her second breakfast (as Tolkien fan I do know about second breakfast 😏) she went back to work, and the little ones knew what to do:
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Later today
This evening I'm going to weigh all four of them. I have to keep track of that in the first few weeks to make sure they're gaining weight. Three out of four are plain black, so I'm going to give those a small colour code on the tip of their tails. Only way to keep track of who's who. The other one is black-and-white and doesn't need extra colour coding 😉
With the weighing I'm going to change the nursery box. Not only does it look and smell foul, it's also rapidly becoming a biohazard with all those dried up fluids.
I've prepared an identical box for her. Bottom layer is a kind of diaper that the #vet gave me (she gave me two, thankfully). Perfect size for this type of box: fits like a glove:
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On top of that there's a towel and three cotton T-shirts. Cotton was what the vet recommended, because kittens could get their tiny, razor-sharp nails entangled in stuff like fleece. Doctor know best. So this box is where they'll be sleeping after today, snug as a bug in a rug:
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Video footage
I've made several videos already, and I'm sure many more will follow. No editing has been done so far, so I can only offer the raw (big) videos. I've uploaded them to my cloud:
https://owncloud.woefdram.nl/index.php/s/gRxLejGA8SsrYR2
Concluding...
Everything seems to be going like a charm, let's hope it will keep going like that. I'll post regular updates here, and for those who can't see the Category tags in my posts (cat-agory, get it..?), here's the direct link:
https://social.woefdram.nl/channel/hans?f=&cat=cats
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