Much to  my dismay this morning, when I went into the bedroom to check on everybody, I discovered four big piles of emesis, courtesy of Mattie. I decided not to feed her and because she has been vomiting since the beginning of her time here (just little bits not like her offerings this morning) I placed a call to the vet and was told to bring her in. I took her babies with me and off we went.

She has a motility problem so she got a shot, we de-wormed her and they gave me a shot to go in case her stomach upheaves again. The anti-emetic we gave her was said to be safe for lactating and nursing moms but I am still keeping a sharp eye on her kittens for any warning signs that it has emoted through her milk.

I was so proud of her though. She was so easy to handle, she is almost 8 pounds now and one of the vets (I think) flipped for Mack Dabby and wants him badly. She has to talk to her husband, because they already have five cats. I think the selling point came when she lifted him up and held him to her face and he lightly bit her nose. LOL  He has such purrsonality for one so young. She agrees Mattie is around 5 months old and the kittens barely over three weeks.

Mattie is on a special diet now IE canned from Royal Canin with a bit of cooked white rice thrown in. They did not find anything majorly wrong with her other than she is way too thin. We will see how it goes- but everyone is  home now and safe.

We need a major miracle to occur on this vet bill that is  swallowing us whole right now.. Adding to the already over-the-top bill was the fact they had to sedate Pita because he was such a handful (so scared and terrified) they couldn’t even handle him. He has new bling now out the side of his face- a drain that is supposed to stay in place for five days.

I am supposed to keep him quiet, but he is rushing around the house right now like a whirling dervish. I wonder if it is just the release from the stress of being in a cage, or a reaction to the reversal shot? He also got outside- scooted out underneath the wheelchair but I managed to coax him back in within the hour. Silly, scared boy.

Wish I could report a calm weekend, but it didn’t happen. Saturday morning, I took our tractor out to the field to pick up a pile of limbs that came down in a recent storm. As the bucket started to lift the massive pile, all these yellow jackets come roiling out of the ground under the limbs. Holy smokes, tiny and aggressive! Kota was with me and he stepped into the whirlwind and got stung as I ran the heck away from them as fast as my leg would let me. (I am allergic to these insects.) Kota got stung enough times he headed to the creek and jumped in. Smart dog!

When I got back a few hours later- all was quiet. Kota had been called to the house and given some Benedryl just in case before I pulled the stingers out of his tail. I ended up piling hay and straw all over the piled wood, dousing it in gas and torching it. I hope I destroyed all the yellow jackets (wouldn’t have done it if they were honeybees).

Then when I get into the house to rest, PITA jumps on me and his face is so swollen on the left side. I thought at first he had gotten stung, but when I took out the clippers to shave his hair, I saw he had gotten into a fight and a nasty abcess was forming. He was running a high fever and unwilling or unable to eat. I took him to the vet first thing this morning, because treating him for anything, even though he is a lap cat is next to impossible. Especially when he doesn’t feel well.

The vet just called and they had to sedate PITA, lance the wound and put a drain in it. I have to take Mike back to the hospital in a few, so I will be picking PITA up later today to bring him home. I did tell the vet that PITA is terrified of being in a cage, so the sooner they can put him back into his carrier, the calmer he will become. Vet said PITA was scared to death. Poor Kitty- as for me, no rest for the weary I guess. LOL

When the kittens first arrived, they were barely moving. Now, they can’t sit still. Over the course of the day in between catching up on sleep and doing chores, I will try and get decent pictures of the lil’ darlins-

Not easy to do when all they want is to explore. But this is Flash.

It’s like Fort Knox now, trying to get into the bedroom to be with the new family! Although there are three latches on the screened door, we have had to be a bit more inventive and there are now two heavy boxes of litter on sentry guard! (That’s how hard she hits the screen!) They are braced against the door to protect if from her body slams.

Mattie came in here weighing just under 5 pds. She would growl at us anytime we were near her of the babies. I was touched that she allowed me to remove all those mats off her while growling the entire time. She never once struck out at me or tried to bite me.

She is now 7pds14.7 ozs. Also, her milk is coming back slowly. She only two viable nipples, now there are three!

*Smokey Joe, the smallest boy came here under 3 ounces. He now weighs…      wait for  it…….    15.4 ounces!
*Flash is now 10.9 ozs
*Mack Dabby is 12.3 ozs  and
*Foggy is 13 ozs.

Yay Team! And go goats milk/baby food and nutrical which is what the babies are getting..

Here is Solo now

And here is NAO

Here is Mattie, with her four little ones and YES! My emails have been resurrected from the dead! So I can finally show you the family. Pigeon decided that this family needed further investigation and went up the screen door on our bedroom (cat proof screen) and crept over the wooden barrier and Mattie hit that door so hard, Pidgeon flew over the top of the barrier and scattered down the hall!   I was in the room at the time and told Mattie that she may not be able to produce much milk for her babies, but she sure can produce the love and protection. I thought she was going to fly right through the screen itself.

Mattie’s two boys are Mack Dabby, and Smokey Joe, they are both mackeral tabbies. Her females are Siamese mixes Flash and Foggy. The babies are quickly gaining weight, and Mattie’s coat is less oily then it was on arrival and she has gained one pound. We are feeding her five times a day a variety of different foods because she is way undernourished and so young to be having to deal with the babies. But she is a fierce mama!

On a much sadder note, Tripp died this morning.  he was under the couch and didn’t move when I did my food call. I thought he was just asleep, so I let him be- but than Kota started whining and scratching right where Tripp was laying. I put Kota in his cage and laid down on the floor, reached under the couch and pulled Tripp out. He was warm- but he was gone. I have no clue what happened. I had the difficult task of having to tell Mike that Tripp was gone and then I went and laid Tripp back in the forest and covered him with ferns and fronds.

I came back to the house and Pigeon (his brother) jumped on my lap and wrapped his paws around my neck, I told him about Tripp’s passing as well. Right after I stopped crying into his fur, he stepped off my lap and laid down on the armrest. People tell me all the time, that cat’s don’t feel emotion. I totally disagree- this is a sad kitty, mourning the passing of his brother.

This morning, there wasn’t good news on the kitten front. Mom had only three kittens in with her and “Mack Dabby”, this gorgeous boy with gray and white striped paws was off in the corner all by himself. 🙁 The good news is, we had prepared for that possibility and I had put out several blankets with heating pads under them. Thankfully, he was stretched out on one of them. I wish they were eating better though. Pulling out all our tricks to make that happen.

Mom is sweet and I finally got to really look at her. She has one nipple that might be producing, I notice a tug of war going on with the babies when they get close to her belly over that one spot. But she has nothing left in her except love. Normally, we would take her away from the babies to build her back up nutritionally, but in this case, that’s not the plan. She loves these babies and has given her all to them. She has places she can get to away from them in the area, and she panics when we take one into the other room to feed them. She’s so young too, this just breaks my heart that she has had to deal with being a mom. Will try to remove her mats today- there are so many especially under her legs. She’s a long-hair tuxedo girl.

Will try to keep you updated, but right now, our battle is in keeping the family healthy and getting the babies to take in more food.

Update: the second male is now home after his neuter. We decided to name him NAO- stands for “Not Another One!” LOL The golden, mellow sweet boy is named Solo in honor of another orange ginger who passed last year.

This morning in the space of 20  minutes, we received frantic phone calls about an abandoned car filled with cats and kittens at a local park. Apparently the car had been seen there consecutive days and the callers were quite concerned, so I grabbed my stuff and flew out there.

The windows of the car were down and inside were four kittens and a mom who if she is 8 months old, I would be surprised. She’s in rough shape. Also inside the car were two young males, one neutered, one not. Well “Not” is spending the night at the vet and will be neutered in the morning. The orange boy is out in the main enclosure all by himself and mom and the kittens are in the bedroom. None of them are doing great- they are super skinny, full of parasites and fleas. Mom is matted to beat heck. She has no milk- zippo and hasn’t had in quite awhile. The mom and babies have the calici virus- each baby only has one functioning eye right now. We are soaking the eyes and applying ointment when the eye even shows a slight hole. The kittens’ eyes are still blue and when I got them out of the car it was 87 degrees outside!  They are not eating like I had hoped they would- they took a little bit- each weighs just under 7 ounces.  I can’t post pictures because my emails are still hosed up- but I will ask for prayers for these 7 kitties and also if you have a few dollars lying around- they would help on the vet bill I am still trying to whittle down. I wasn’t about to leave them there, they were not in a good place at the time.

After over eight years of chasing open ulcers on Mike’s remaining leg, he has finally been discharged from wound care and home health! His leg will never be “normal” but the discoloration on it currently no longer shows the angry red and purple color that had so many concerned for years. It is still red but his swelling is under control and his new skin is coming in over old wounds! He does still bleed when he takes a shower. Even using the gentle button on the shower massager can cause his leg to bleed, but it is old, dry skin that is peeling off and underneath, there is new skin showing.

They are working on making him a new prosthetic. medicare requires one to jump through multiple hoops and paperwork to get this process going once again- plus we encountered the company working with us building this leg, undergoing their own personal upheavals, finally selling out and being taken over by another company who then bowed out and re-sold the whole thing- so who knows when his leg will be ready. But for now, his leg is doing well and I am sure if he could, he would be doing a happy dance!

On a private note something in my computer has caused all my emails to vanish so if you are privately sending me messages, forgive me if I do not answer. I am in the process of trying to get this fixed.

This morning, when I went to feed outside, I noticed one of the skunks acting funny in front of the hay barn. She was low to the ground and digging but not in the way they normally do (they eat a lot of insects that they find underground) This was a frantic digging in the grass, not the dirt.

Then she would lay on top of whatever she dug up, wrap her paws around the whole bundle and scooting backward, disappear under the hay barn! I’m thinking “What in the world?”

So I got closer and stopped when she came back out and went further into the grass and started digging for several minutes then scooting backward, under the barn she went. Duh! She’s building a nest! The little stinker is pregnant.

Makes sense now, for the past few weeks, I have been hearing the skunks fighting under the house. If you have never heard a skunk being angry, bless your stars, because one thing they do when they are pissed off at whatever- is they stink bomb the area. Unfortunately these fights were under our living room floor. Thank God for Vicks VapoRub keeps the stink at bay. They weren’t fighting, they were mating. I wondered, because the chittering and chattering were unlike any I have heard before. More intense and angry and well, just different in the sounds. Maybe I should of put on some Frank Sinatra to set the mood? LOL

So now we are going to have baby skunks again and ticked off neighbors that I won’t trap them and get them out of here. Been there, done that, all I did was trap my outdoor clowder. The neighbors want me to also stop feeding the cats at night, which I won’t do as well. We have a dozen cats wandering the place at night, most I never see until well after midnight. I am not going to stop feeding them just to appease the neighbors. What I am going to do is stock up on Vapo-Rub!

Speaking of feeding, we are down on our canned food if someone is in the giving spirit today and wants to help. After I post this, I am going to update our wishlist.