With Miming gone (I never really found out what happened to her) and the 2 other kittens dead from that attack mentioned in the previous post, I have decided that I would take care of the remaining kitten. I have decided to name him/her Kitkat and I did the first thing that came into my mind just then. I asked for help.
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| Kitkat looking like a small ball of fur |
I haven't owned a cat before this much less a few day old kitten demanding attention. Was it missing Miming? Was it hungry? What does it eat? These questions were running through my mind. I tried enticing the meowing kitten with a bowl of milk (this was before I knew that you cannot give kittens cow's milk) but either she didn't know how to lap up the milk or he/she was just not hungry.
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| Feeding time! |
Luckily, with the help of a few friends, message boards, and YouTube tutorials I managed to have a rough idea what to do. I bought some kitten formula in the nearby pet store, bought a little kitten bottle, a whole tub of sanitary wet wipes and some cotton squares.
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| Ah remember that time when you can fit in my palm? |
I was fascinated to learn that kittens cannot poo and pee on their own and I needed to simulate a mother cat's tongue with a damp cotton to encourage the kitten to pee and poo. Also bottle feeding introduces a lot of excess air into their small tummies that it is necessary to burp them by patting them gently on the back (with a hand-towel to protect me in case there is some vomiting involved. For a couple of weeks I went home during lunch break to feed what I would jokingly call "my baby" at home which elicited a few strange looks from my colleagues (since I have set the feeding schedule every 6 hours: midnight, before I go to work, noon-time, when I get home in the afternoon).
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| Look at those small paws |
In the bookshelf where Kitkat was born, I just placed a shoebox with one of the sides removed and filled it with microfiber cloth (I always seem to have a lot of those things - it is one of those compulsive purchases whenever I go to a hardware store but I digress). Each time I enter the room Kitkat would somehow know that somebody is there and he/she would walk aimlessly around the room mewing loudly - demanding to be noticed.
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| Such big eyes you have! |
Ok just to be clear, Kitkat is a male cat. It's just that at this particular point in time I had no idea how to sex a cat. All the resources online were so confusing and the first vet that we visited told me to not worry about it and we will know eventually. He did offhandedly told me that he thinks that Kitkat is female but he can't be sure at that age. So from this point on, I will just refer to his actual sex.
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