Um, Marble.. please do not go swimming without a flotation device

Yes, she was rescued.. Yes, I moved the water bowl. Hopefully to a location that this won't happen again.

Kitten Glamour shots

I try to take pretty photos of the kittens each weekend. Sometimes it is easier than others. This time Hedy kept getting all up in my camera because she wanted attention, but I must say I didn't do too bad.

Hedy's legs and Slate 

Midnight 

Slate 

Sunsweet (Slate in the background)

Marble 

Agate 

Hedy and Agate 

A Giraffe in Socks

Sunsweet has decided I'm a little weird

This might be the most ridiculous thing I have ever done - and that is saying a lot. As I told you on Monday we have some diarrhea going on with the kittens and I was worried about them getting poop all over Raffe since they were hanging out underneath him and that seemed to be the center of the poop storm.  I wrongly assumed that Hedy picked that corner for the heater and the fact that it was under Raffe was secondary. I moved Raffe to another corner and set them up with several heat sources and went to bed.

When I went down in the morning I found Hedy and all of the kittens under Raffe anyway.

So, it became pretty apparent that I needed to put Raffe back, but how to protect him from being contaminated.

My goal was to protect his feet. Using socks wouldn't necessarily do that as liquid diarrhea would be absorbed by the socks and then absorbed by the fur. I thought about using sandwich bags instead, but I wasn't thrilled with the idea of putting kittens so closed to a thin plastic bag, so I thought I would put the socks over the bag. When I went to the drawer where the bags are stored, I found these.

Goodie bags that I've had for years and two pairs of old socks I've had since high school (yes, I know.. shush, they have come in handy twice this month alone!)

And so that became...

And this is as good of a time as any to introduce you to Raffe 2.0

The original was abused pretty badly (as you can see) by years of kittens so I went online to find a used one that needed a new home and found one not too far away. He has been the one watching over Hedy, but for one last bit of precaution I brought out the original

Hedy wasn't too sure of this new Raffe at first

I can poop on this!

And on top of that, I cleaned the room. It took me nearly two hours to do a good scrub down as the kittens were pooping under the couch and I had kittens running everywhere. At one point I went to leave to get the socks and Marble scrambled after me (it was so freakin cute!). Hedy followed behind to see where she was going. I asked Hedy to put Marble back, and she looked at me, looked at Marble and then picked her up and carried her back to Raffe.

Teeny Tiny Teef Tuesday

I tried taking photos of all of the kittens, but they were too busy. These were the only two that came out clearly.  This is Agate and Slate respectively but they all have wee little bitty teeth. It is just so darn cute!

Kitten's first vet visit

I didn't photoshop Agate into this photo. 

If you are following my page on facebook, you'll know that Hedy has a way of looking at me that blames me for EVERYTHING.. The kittens started leaving the nest this weekend and she looks at me like it is my fault. They climb all over her nursing, she looks at me like it is my fault. She sits on the couch next to me and the kittens scream, and she looks at me like it is my fault.

As you know, Hedy has been battling fur loss since she got here. Stress and hormones do that, so she looks pretty sparse. She's also been losing weight on and off. She was under seven pounds when she arrived, dropped after she gave birth (obviously) and I got her up over seven pounds but diarrhea came and claimed those hard earned gains. It doesn't help that she is super picky about food and will only eat shredded foods. I tried probiotics and I tried digestive enzymes and things got a little better but not much. We ran a fecal and it turned out to be negative but it looked a lot like coccidia by that time since the kittens were starting with diarrhea as well, so we treated her for it.

Things got much better for everyone. More weight gain, no stool all over kitten behinds, the litter box for Hedy was better. But then we stopped gaining and Marble and Sunsweet both started feeling thin and a bit dehydrated. I was supplementing them with milk and it helped, but as time passed it was pretty obvious that more needed to be done. I reached out to the rescue to see if they wanted to treat for coccidia again but they decided a vet visit was in order. Once that decision was made it became very apparent the kittens had diarrhea again.  This is what they gave me overnight.

I called the vet and brought them in. Being a Monday they squeezed me in and it took almost two hours to get everything taken care of. they tested the stool and still don't see coccidia so that is seeming less like the culprit (but I don't consider the really negative until I have three negative tests, because I've had it pop up on the third test before)

The stool test showed that there was a bacterial imbalance so we were given some probiotics and some medication to try to balance that out. Is that the cause of this? It certainly could be. I really hope that this takes care of it because.. sick kittens.

As you can see in the first photo, she blamed me for the vet visit, I totally take that responsibility Hedy, this one is completely on me.

I'm also giving the littlest kittens fluids and I am ready to give Hedy some too.