Katrina's Kittens

By August 19th, I was feeling well enough after the birth of Emily to do stuff around the house again. Actually, I was dying to get out and do something after being cooped up for days, as I recall. The first thing I wanted to do was clean the garage. I was nesting, afterall. Dave was busy sweeping and I was trying to reorganize tools while our puppy, Judge, ran around under our feet and the boys swatted at us with plastic light sabres. Yvonne was in her playpen near the open back door with Emily in the bassinet just behind her. It wasn't exactly quiet but over it all I managed to hear a tiny mewing sound. "Wow that sounds like a kitten," I told Dave. He said the stray cat that had shown up a couple days before looking for food was in the backyard. I went out to verify this and found her stretched out on our patio table cleaning herself.

Back to sweeping - I heard the mewing again... No adult kitty was making that sound.

I found them in the fern near the back door to the garage. Four of them - just born and piled in a tiny heap. "We have kittens," I told Dave. "Nooooo kittens," he said as he removed the puppy's teeth from his shoelaces. Then he helped me assemble the pet crate and gather some old towels and shirts to make a bed. One by one we moved the kittens out of the fern and into the crate - careful to let the mother cat sniff each one thoroughly as we made the exchange. Once they were all safe and sound, Mama Cat immediately crawled into the crate with them and started to clean and nurse. So easy!!

Five minutes later the kittens were in the fern again.

I told the mother cat that I thought she did a fantastic job finding a safe place for her kitties and all of that, but I just thought that maybe they would all be a bit more comfortable out of the rain and away from the curious teeth and paws of our puppy. She didn't listen. For days it became part of my routine to go out and search through the fern for kittens and move them one by one into the crate in the garage each and every time it was time to let Judge out for his outdoor break... (This of course included those 2 am outdoor breaks that young puppies take -- especially if it's raining.)

The kitties on August 22, 2005.

It was our plan to take care of the kitty family until they were ready to find new homes. We were both more than willing to give Mama Cat a permanent home and made arrangements with our vet to have her spayed as soon as the kittens were weaned and talked to them about helping us find a low cost spay/neuter for the kittens when they were old enough... then we would set about finding families to adopt them. It didn't take long for Mom to claim two of them for herself.

On the morning of August 28th, as we worked through the ritual of preparing our house for the impending hurricane - I went out to gather up mother and kittens to get them to a safe place. It was no surprise that I didn't find the kittens in the crate where I had left them last... but I fell into a full-blown panic when I could not find them in their usual place in the fern either. She moved them. She knew. Dave finally found them under a compost bin in the far back corner of the yard. I still love him for that.

We prepared food and water for the mother cat and locked the whole family in the crate as I apologized to Mama Cat for her incarceration. It was Dave who told me he didn't want to leave them in the garage during the storm. He said he was afraid because the garage was so low that water would come in and the kittens (who didn't have their eyes open yet) would drown.

The morning of August 29th we brought the kitten crate into the pantry of our kitchen. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't be safe there.

Later that morning when we made the mad dash up the stairs with kids and babies and provisions -- I didn't even have to remind Dave about the kittens in the pantry. They rode out the storm up there with the rest of us... and I felt for them too in the scariest moments - knowing that even if the rest of us managed to find something to cling to if the house collapsed they wouldn't stand a chance. I emptied out a large plastic bin nearby -- thinking I could at least get them into something that floated if it came to that.

But it didn't come to that and the storm ended .. and the water subsided. During the aftermath, I let the mother cat out of the crate to come and go as she pleased... but with no operational exterior doors on the house... I could not risk her taking the kittens off and hiding them when things were so dangerous. Sooo I kept the kittens locked in the crate and would let the mother cat in whenever she returned. All night long every night I got up to make baby bottles for Emily and to let the yowling mother cat in or out of her crate.

It was on one of those long and miserable nights when I dragged myself back to our damp mattress and told Dave we weren't giving the kittens away. He agreed.

I suppose I don't actually need to tell anyone what we named the mother cat. Name or no name though - Katrina remained standoffish with us. It was hard to remember that she had come to us as a feral after all we had gone through together... But as the kittens got older and stronger - Katrina became less and less receptive to our attempts at domestication. This was especially difficult at a time when the damage to our house meant there was no way to keep the cats strictly indoors. I was always afraid the unspayed Katrina would find herself 'in trouble' again.

The first cat tragedy struck on October 9th - when two unidentified men in a BMW took it upon themselves to enter our backyard and swipe our fluffiest kitten. I will always believe that the two men were somehow associated with the crew from Operation Blue Roof that had been at our house the day before. They had been in the backyard when the kittens were outside... one had even commented on the number of kittens and - most importantly - on this particular large and fluffy kitten. No one else would have been aware that we even had kittens to come steal...

Life with cats went on for a while then as usual... until one day our Katrina did not return home -- exactly what I was afraid of. I would have felt better about the whole thing if at the very least we had been able to have the poor feral kitty spayed before her disappearance... but she was gone long before the first veterinary clinic reopened.

In the meantime, the last three kitties have become an important part of our family. We have been unable to locate any low cost spay/neuter clinics since the storm struck the coast... So we have had to resort to paying full price for shots & procedures -- spacing it all out one cat at a time... and boy! can these three cats eat a lot of cat food. It's totally worth it though. There are the boys: Sunny & Sahara - and our little girl, Jo. I can't help but think as they all pile onto my lap on sunny afternoons about how lucky we all were that they ended up in our fern that morning. I love my kitties.

Pretty little Jo.

Sahara - the big softie.

And Sunny -- our clown.