Posting as Kathy Cassel
Many pets were abandoned during Hurricane Michael. One of our neighbors left behind four cats, three one-year-old cats and their mom. Mom was pregnant again. We started feeding all of them plus another abandoned cat. Then the mom cat and one of the one-year-olds disappeared.
We named the two remaining cats from that home Abbi and Rosie.
Then one day Rosie showed up at the door with a very young tortoise shell kitten. We thought it must belong to her mom and went out on a search, but to no avail.
I got formula and a bottle and began feeding the kitten. She seemed to be happy and doing well, but she was smelling worse and worse and then died suddenly. That was heartbreaking.
Several weeks passed, and Rosie showed up at the door with another kitten. By size, we knew it had to be from the same litter as the first kitten who had died. It was quite cold out (Florida cold, so 45F maybe), so we figured she'd brought the kitten in to get it warm.
Unknown to us, she went back out through the window, came back, meowed at the door, and we opened it. She came back in. I put her with the kitten to see what she would do, and she began to nurse it! So the first kitten that died must have been hers, although she paid no attention to that kitten. Maybe she knew something was wrong with it.
We heard one of the dogs going crazy outside. When Rosie had gone out through the window, she'd brought back another kitten. But she'd left the kitten at the bottom of the steps. It was a tortoise shell.
Then the next morning, Rick found another tortoise shell at the bottom of the steps! We were waiting to see if there were more, but this was it. The one that died, and three healthy ones. Probably 6-8 weeks old.
Rosie was very attached to these. Since we were planning to go to our son Adam's for Christmas and didn't want our young pet sitter to have to care for all these kitties, a friend of Jessica's watched them. One of her friends wanted the two tortoise shells. So one went to Jessica and two to this young lady. They are all happily settled in now. Best we can tell, they were born about November 7.
So December was filled with kittens.
And that's our tail of four kittens.
Below is Abbi, the light tortoise shell, the dark tiger is Rosie, litter mate to Abbi and the mom to the two kittens I'm holding and the one that had just gone with Jessica to see how it would work out there.
