HCA: Hermit Crab Association

The faces of innocence.

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Are these sweeties your new foster kitties?

I am going to move this to chit chat. Very adorable.

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Super cute!

They are the kittens that one of our rescues became pregnant with before we could get her spayed. Learned from Wode that they have 2 different fathers as the torties had to have been fathered by a black cat!

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Such a scandal!

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<melting... > Baby cats are so awesome.

Not necessarily a black cat, it just had to be one that wasn't orange. It was late and I probably wasn't making much sense at the time.

Female cats can give birth to litters where every kitten has a different father, though usually it's a couple from one, and a the rest from another. It can make for some really wacked out families where you'll get a bunch of normal looking brown and orange tabbies, and then a colorpoint Siamese thrown in just for fun! (It's also really common for Siamese mothers to give birth to all black or tuxedo kittens, but I digress.)

Although since I'm digressing, the best litter we ever had through the shelter was a group of 8 kittens from the same female. A set of black, a set of grey, a set of orange and a set of torties - all medium hairs, and each color pair was one male and one female except the torties, and those were one dilute and one normal. They named them 1 through 8 in Swahili so we could keep the litter straight. Biggest litter I'd ever seen, too.

Incidentally SG, you're making me crave kittens again. It was two years ago in June that baby Grace came home. I miss kittens!!

LOL I would drive to Ohio and bring you one. KidSquiddo wants to keep three of them which would put us at 5 lol.

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I've got 30, but the majority of them are old grumpy men. We won't be getting more kittens anytime soon (maybe never), at least not until our numbers start to dwindle by a lot from them getting older. My heavens though kittens are SO NICE to be around sometimes. It's all: "I love you. You're fun. Lets play!" all the time. Not: "Ugh. It's that you person. I'm not moving. Just skip over this step I'm sleeping on and if you kill yourself so be it." Or: "I'm going through a phase. Don't touch me. Don't get near me. DON'T EVEN LOOK AT ME I'M HIDEOUS!!" Or my personal pet peeve: "I take you completely for granted, Mom." I'll take complete disdain and psychoneuroses over being treated like a doormat any day. :roll: It's like living in a house full of toddlers and teens nonstop.

Okay, I say that and then they look at me like this and I don't care so much about how they treat me the rest of the time.

Pretty Pretty Princess Summer d'Winter, aka Winnebago.


Gracie


I just miss these days a whole heck of a lot! (This is Gracie two weeks after bringing her home.)

Omg she was a tiny baby!!! So do you have advice on how to avoid your furniture, etc. being sprayed? Professor Tater Tot has ruined some clothes [PENSIVE FACE] and the kittens just love to poop in the laundry baskets.

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Kittens are so much fun. I had forgotten (or maybe blocked it out as I hadn't planned on getting another kitten again) until we brought Akiko home. She's so cute and occasionally cuddly, and sooo playful. She does this cute little shake of her bum before pouncing. Reminds me of the leopard gecko hunting for crickets.
I have two older cats too. Spiderman likes to talk with me a lot but occasionally she gets mad at me (sometimes for reasons I don't know) and will ignore me for days. Chico loves attention but only when he says so. All other times beware.

Very interesting on the father thing! Wode, those kitties are soo pretty!

We think she was 7 days old when this couple who was on the way to a brothers funeral out of state found her in their flower bed as they were pulling out the driveway. They thought it was a dead squirrel, and then realized it was a bloody, messy baby kitten with it's eyes still shut but already infected. I had just lost my cat who was my constant companion a week before (on my hubby's birthday) and just agreed to foster Winter since the shelter was going to put her down for 'being feral' (she was just terrified), and my husband called me an hour before he was supposed to come home with the kitten and asked if I could take a bottle baby. To say I lost it would be an understatement. But, since there was no one else, I agreed to tag team with him. I stayed up nights with her, and he took her to work so I could sleep. She was the best bottle baby ever. Never fussed, never cried. Medical issues.... She came with lice and fleas, she pooped all of four times during the time it had to be done manually and the vets kept saying it was normal (it should have been once to twice a day so I was freaking out), the day after we got her at work a bunch of maggots crawled out of her ear and landed kn my husband's shirt, three weeks in the crust I thought was from formula turned out to be ringworm over half her body, me and a bunch of our other cats got it as well. She also has a birth defect that causes bloodvessels to grow in her eyes which causes ulcerations and clouding. But, she's my baby and my shadow and my husband calls her my daughter. (And I am not one of those kinds of pet people. Usually.) I'm still in touch with the people who found her,too.

As far as spraying, that should end as soon as he's fixed. Unneutered males do it to mark territory. Unneutered females will also leave pee spots to attract males. It can take a couple of months for the hormones to dissipate. It can become a learned behaviour, in which case medication like Prozac might be needed. I've got this jerkface of a cat with an unknown history who could not find a home elsewhere, and we keep him drugged every few months or else he sprays. He did it at the shelter, too, and when he was adopted as an only cat and then returned. We're thinking he was 4 or so when he was fixed and he's so high strung that he's never calmed down enough to stop. On meds he's wonderful. Off meds he's good for a while and then starts to cause trouble again.

Having more litterboxes is usually the cure for them not going where you want them to. Ideally it's one box per cat in the house, plus an extra, and cleaned twice a day. We have a litterbox farm in the basement. I use the flatter rubbermaid bins, or the roughneck totes with a U cut into a short side for entry. Bigger and less easier for them to kick out litter. With kittens they can get confused with anything that seems like a box with things to dig into, so try to hide those things as best you can for now or they can learn that it's okay to do. Sometimes they can get turned off by the scent or feel of the litter, but when babies are born into it they don't normally fuss unless there's a sudden change in the litter they'd been used to.

As far as cleaning up the messes, I like Chlorox 2 Free. It will pull the smell out of anything, and it generally doesn't ruin clothes or fabrics. My allergies to scented cleaning products is so bad that I use it to clean the house now. A 1/4 cup in a spray bottle with a drop of lemon dish soap and I can tackle anything they do.

I love kittens! I haven't had one in way too long.

It's fascinating that kittens from the same litter can have different fathers. My oldest cat, Autumn, was a stray and had 4 kittens in her last litter before we took her in and got her fixed. My in-laws kept her 3 sons and we have her and her daughter. She's a tortoiseshell/tabby and her daughter is solid black. The 3 boys and gray and white, orange and white, and a regular tabby. It's pretty crazy.

They're so adorable! I miss having cats and kittens soooo much! I had my favorite cat, Sassy, from the time I was 12 until she passed when I was 28. She was a month shy of her 19th birthday. I had to rehome my last 4 cats in 2011. They were a brother/sister pair a year old and 2 sisters whose mom and sibling were attacked and killed by coyotes in my moms back yard. They were about 2-3 weeks old when we found them. They were bottle fed for a while. I cried so hard when I had to give them all up. Luckily each pair were adopted together. Sometimes I find white fur on clothing in the back of my closet and it makes me miss them.