It was almost three years ago when I made the 10 Reasons You Should Foster a Cat video.
At that point in my foster-parent-to-kittens life things were relatively easy going. But these last few years have taught me that fostering is full of ups but is also full of just as many downs. While it's fun and exciting to play with cute little kitties all day, it's also work. And this bunch of babies are work.I left off last week's post with some new terminology - foster home biosecurity. With Dewey having come down with ringworm, foster home biosecurity had to kick into high gear. Anything and everything now is about treatment and a decontaminated environment. Which really means kitties being isolated in the bathroom. Gloves. Multiple changes of my clothes day and night. Constant laundry. Pill popping. (For the kitties, not me.) And bleach. Lots of bleach. We need to cure the kitties, keep them from getting reinfected, and keep the adults from catching it and the only way to do it takes work. Making sure there is no cross-contamination while feeding bottle baby kittens day and night is hard.
How serious and contagious is this ringworm business? While the kitties will be just fine in the long run, they will have to remain in the bathroom the whole time they are here and I won't be able to have any more kitties coming in the house until a month after these kiddos are gone and a subsequent deep cleaning of my home happens.
Despite the work and exhaustion (did I mention fostering ringworm kittens is hard?) we had so many exciting things happening with them this week. I have to keep my phone out of the isolation room but I made an exception for one day so I could grab some photos. I had to thoroughly disinfect the phone afterwards but it was worth it.
Litter box users? YES!
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| They always use the litter box at the exact same time! |
Climbers and jumpers? YES! They almost can get out of the tub on their own.
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| Paws over the side. He's oh-so-close! |
Kitties who are excited to tell us how proud they are about weaning off their milk and are happy to show off their gruel eating faces? YES! (Gruel is how we transition them to more solid foods and is a mixture of kitty formula, canned baby food, and canned cat food.)
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| Huey is ready for his closeup. |
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| Dewey wants you to know the harder you chew, the more that comes out. And he wants you to see his baby teeth. |
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| Louie wants you to know a gruel face, a pink nose, and baby blue eyes are a great color combination. |
With these kinds of pictures the ups outweigh the downs, don't ya think?