Kittens, Flurry doing better

Flurry is finally doing better. I'm not sure if she's out of the woods yet but she's far more comfortable, growing and keeping down 80-90% of her meals. We tried several kitten foods but only one seems to work for her and I'm not intending to switch now and fine out if any others work! Wellness grain free canned kitten food seems to work for her. Also feeding her little bits at a time, watering it down and feeding her separately from Felix all help. This way she eats more slowly and we can monitor how much she eats. Flurry is now up to 14.6 ounces (415 grams) and has had steady growth for the past week. She goes back to the vet again next week. Hopeful that we'll get a good report. It would be great if her problems are something she will simply outgrow. She didn't seem to have the best start in life, maybe with continued care she will eventually be just like a normal cat. She is happier, plays longer and even purrs sometimes.

 

the trouble with kittens...

The trouble with kittens is that they're so cute you want to spend time with them rather than working. The trouble with the tiny kitten, Flurry, is that she still isn't doing well. She has good times but she still has a lot of hard times too. I've called the vet in a panic more than once since this began. We've tried all the things there are to try that are non-invasive and she's so small, putting her through something invasive could kill her. Trying, so hard, to figure out why she can't seem to keep down her food and what we can do to fix what hurts her. It's so hard and I've spent sleepless nights worrying about how to fix this. She seems particularly sick in the late afternoons and can cry so pitifully, it's upsetting. I've ordered some grain free kitten food to see if that helps at all.

 

Flurry loves sitting on the power adapter (or whatever it's called) for the laptop. it is warm! We have a heating pad for her too.

Playing in the sun.

Flurry

Felix

Flurry sleeping in the way that seems to help her feel better after a meal.

Freeze checks out the kennel that the kittens sleep in at night. We need a safe spot for them when they're unattended until Flurry grows more.

VBS

We helped at the vacation bible school in Goffstown this week. I didn't get many pictures because I was too busy shepherding 5th and 6th graders! Hayley helped in the crafts department and Tristan helped shepherd 1st and 2nd graders. The theme was international spy academy. It was a fun week and all the children seemed to have a good time and hopefully learned some things. I know those catchy tunes will stay in my head for a good long while!

 

 

 

Kittens vet visit and update

The kittens now have names. The larger one is Felix and the smaller, Flurry. They had their first visit to the veterinarian today. Felix got his first shots and a clean bill of health. Flurry on the other hand did not gets shots because she is too small. The vet also has concerns for her size. He thinks that the people we bought the kittens from might have exaggerated their ages a bit and also that Flurry was developmentally delayed to only 4-5 weeks. We'd already figured some of this out and had a few scares with Flurry already. She seems to have digestive problems and feels so uncomfortable sometimes. We've been giving her baby kitten silk replacer and very watered down canned kitten food. Nothing seems to agree with her though. Sometimes Flurry is well enough to play but then later she may go downhill fast. It's a mystery and we hope we can find out what's wrong so she can grow and thrive.

Environmental Science merit badge

I ran an environmental science workshop for boy scouts in our troop. I planned to do this ins a few shorter sessions over multiple days. It was hard to find a date that all interested scouts could do so I finally settled on doing it in a long one day workshop. I found some ideas online for how to do this. I made sure to have everything very organized and ready, all experiment items in labeled bags, all timeline materials cut out, a schedule that needed to be followed and 3 pre-requisites the boys needed to bring on the day. I wasn't sure how well this would work but it went great! With a few minor exceptions the boys stayed on task and all earned the merit badge by the end of the day! I was very pleased, the day went much better than I had anticipated.

Kittens

It happened in now way anything like how I thought it might happen IF we got kittens...but get kittens we did. Two of them, one a good size and one a very small kitten. They're littermates, the person we bought them from said the little one is just a runt and is doing all the same things as the bigger kittens. There were 5 to choose from. We chose the two that we did because they were regular kittens, some of the others were a breed called munchkins (meaning short legs). Also it seemed like the larger one was the most friendly and the tiny one just needed us! No names yet but here they are!

Cooking merit badge

Tristan did all the cooking today. He made three meals and a dessert with his JetBoil backpacking stove. This is part of the cooking merit badge. I was glad to have a day off from cooking! He made oatmeal with fruits and nuts for breakfast, Asian vegetable and tofu soup for lunch and a mac n cheese/ ravioli combo with spinach and corn for dinner. The dessert was choice of two different flavors of pudding. All the meals for this requirement had to be made from lightweight, portable, non-perishable ingredients.