Farmwell Feline Fosters

26/05/2022

Look at our sweet Gumdrop (now Hazelnut) who got adopted by our amazing vet at Pinnacle back in December. She has the most beautiful colors! And her brother is very handsome too!

Ripken has officially shown Hazelnut how to cat and now she’s a professional! The cutest sibling duo🥹💕😻

12/05/2022

Baseball is one of the ”big kids” now! Shortly, our box babies will also be migrating downstairs and then he’ll have friends his own size! Cats learn so much from other cats. The value of that from a social perspective cannot be overstated. Baseball will grow into a much more well-rounded kitty with the help of these interactions and relationships!! The dog world spends a lot of time focusing on socialization. The same care and intention poured into cats is just as valuable!

09/05/2022

With humans parents, the saying goes, “the days are long but the years are short.” With kittens, the hours are long but the weeks are short! These babies are wormed, officially using a litter box (hallelujah), and 6 of the 9 have a full set of teeth, which means they’ve (excitedly) started weaning to wet food! I will not miss the 45 minute 4am feedings. But it’s all worth it for these babies!! Happy and healthy and growing, as they should be!!

05/05/2022

Baseball spam. Our mighty survivor boy is 4.5 weeks old!! He’s on par, weight wise (😅) but definitely has some minor delays in his physical development due to his recovery! He’s making up ground quickly though and he doesn’t know any differently! We adore him. He’s flawless.

04/05/2022

Our little Fireball has been special from the beginning. When I picked the babies up, I noticed him immediately because he looked a lot like Theodore, our keeper from the candy litter. Once I got the box of kittens into the car, he was the one who immediately set about plotting his escape. He’s the most active kitten in this batch! But as you can see from the video, he’s not ”normal”. This is totally fine with us! But he needs a specialist to determine the “why” so we can make sure he lives his best life. We started a fundraiser which I’ll link in the comments! Please consider donating or sharing! We are a very small organization so every little bit helps!

02/05/2022

The milk bar is still open for business a couple times a day around here! These guys are all getting fixed on Thursday and then they’ll be up for adoption through Nova Pets Alive! Treble (the solid grey) and Coda (orange) are hopefully going to the same home together but if you’re interested in a kitten (or in mama!) let us know! 🙂

02/05/2022

Cosmo

02/05/2022

28/04/2022

So, uh, remember how we were on a break? Well. We were tentatively seeking a couple of bottle babies because, once Baseball gets a little older, having some siblings will be hugely helpful for his development and socialization. Singleton kittens are known for developing problem behaviors as they age. But life laughed, as it usually does, and we ended up with more than a couple of extra babies.

A rescuer down in Southern VA took an emergency placement of 22 (no, that’s not a typo) neonatal kittens. So we all jumped into action figuring out how to care for these babies. I made the drive down to Charlottesville and met a very dedicated ACO who brought me a box of 9 tiny babies. So here they are, our “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” litter…because the little grey and white one immediately earned the name “Fireball”. So, in no particular order because telling them apart to get good pictures of everyone is hard 😅 Fireball, Cosmo, Julep, Bacardi, Mojito, Rosé, Bellini, Captain, and Morgan.

They arrived on Tuesday and are doing amazingly well!! All gained an absurd amount of weight (we had three put on 50 grams in 24 hours…the average is 10 😮😮😮). Everyone is being treated for yucky eyes (already vastly improved) and mild URIs, but otherwise they are thriving!

Huge thanks to Finish Line Farm Cat Rescue for taking care of 22 babies while finding them all safe places to land! No small feat.

24/04/2022

I think we are officially out of the woods, as far as panleuk goes. There are dozens more things that could pop up at anytime, but the older this bean gets, the more likely he is to stay alive. Three weeks old today! At this age (and his relative size, which is small for his age), we look for 10 grams of weight gain daily. Since Easter, we’ve been lucky to see 2-3 grams a day. Until Thursday when this dude’s appetite finally returned. But the last two days, holy moly. He’s doing 20+ grams a day with no signs of slowing down. Which means his digestive tract is healing and he’s able to process more nutrients! This also means his tiny poops aren’t grass green anymore. All good things! Baseball has certainly been through the ringer but he’s still got some sass in him and we love it!

22/04/2022

It's been quiet over here for a reason. I promise this post ends on a positive note :) But the beginning is...not so much. Unfortunately, Monday before Easter, our babies started crashing. We're no strangers to kittens fading and we did everything we could and still, within 24 hours, 6 of our 7 babies had passed. It was so sudden and we were left questioning...everything. Our remaining survivor was still here though, and doing well, so we pulled him from mama just to keep an extra close eye on him (we have never lost a bottle-raised, hand-raised kitten, and Willow was perfectly okay with not having the responsibility of feeding and caring for her baby anymore). He was doing well, gaining weight and eating, until Easter night when he started declining. It wasn't anything overly concerning but after everything else, we opted to visit the vet.

Panleukopenia positive. If you're not familiar with panleuk, it's the parvo of the cat world. Highly contagious, and HIGHLY fatal. Like, 90% fatal. It came in with Willow and Iris, and was the reason Iris' babies aborted. It's also the reason Willow's babies all passed so suddenly. So now we had a fight ahead of us for our survivor (who had a different name but was renamed "Baseball" because of his very round belly). That was Monday. While the stats on panleuk are stark, 95% of kittens who hit the 5 day mark, survive!

Today, we are at 5 days and over the last 24 hours, our boy's appetite has finally rebounded. He's eating voraciously, he has his spunky little personality back. He is really the sweetest little munchkin with the LOUDEST purrs for being so little (he JUST passed 200 grams yesterday). He loves snuggles, comfort suckling on fingers, and being sung to. Obviously, things still can go wrong. His immune system is weak, he's still anemic, and his GI tract is still recovering, but we're optimistic about our little man.

Every single loss is devastating for us. We always consider if this is too much, if we should throw in the towel, and we are taking a long break after this (obviously we still have Iris and Willow here, along with our older music litter who will be getting spayed/neutered in the next week or two and go up for adoption thereafter) because rescue trauma is REAL. But we'll be back (and in the meantime, you'll get more Baseball updates!). Because every kitten is worth fighting for.

11/04/2022

I know I had sort of promised pictures yesterday. They’re coming but we decided, for a number of reasons, to wait until later this week. We have an adorable photoshoot planned! But right now we are working hard to keep the babies growing and healthy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, two weeks is really the “sweet spot”.

But I thought I’d share this ridiculous picture of what I found the other morning. Iris, the stripey short haired girl, came from the same shelter at the same time as Willow. But they hadn’t met and didn’t know each other prior to coming here. Sadly, being just a baby herself, Iris miscarried her babies shortly after arriving. She showed no signs of upset about it and was just happy to be able to eat comfortably! But once Willow’s babies were here, Iris was very interested! We were keeping everyone separate, but one morning, I came into the cat room to find this. Willow had escaped her tent and moved all the babies to the corner with Iris. Iris has no milk but she still cleans the babies and lets them suckle. We have separated them a million different ways but they insist on finding ways to be together. So we have in and made a corner nest for everyone and everyone is happy!

This week, please send good vibes our way, that these babies keep growing and keep fighting. We are working around the clock to give them every possible chance. Kittens generally have about a 70% chance of survival. We can do everything right and things still go wrong. It’s devastating. But the bottom line is, without us, none would survive. So we’re counting down one more week. Stick with us. I’ll post some pictures of the big, fuzzy music babies to hold you over. 🥰 They’ll be available for adoption soon!

05/04/2022

Twinsies! We are slowly getting to know all of Willow’s babies. They are all gaining weight, are all still incredibly strong and active, and are already purring! We really hold our breath until the two week mark. Especially with such tiny babies (average newborn kittens are between 80 and 170 grams. These guys were between 62 and 85…but as of an hour ago, our smallest is 80 grams and our biggest is just over 100!!). But we are cautiously optimistic…and actively working our butts off with round the clock care!

04/04/2022

My life pre-kitten fostering involved a LOT of dog fostering. Like, quadruple digits. For over a decade, that's what I did. And I didn't really take puppies, either (save for the one time I took a puppy from Georgia that the shelter told me was 10 months old and already neutered, when in fact he was 3 months old and not...that was a fun time). I would tell people (and I still do!) that fostering dogs is easy. I did it with multiple other dogs, cats, and children in my home. I did it working a full time job (albeit a dog one, but that was mostly irrelevant. I was still gone 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week), and I had a "big issue" come up less than 5 times over those ten + years.

Neonatal kittens are an entirely separate beast. There's a point where it gets easy, for sure (our Music litter is there right now, actually!), the babies are healthy and stable, they maintain their body temperature, they potty on their own, they eat solid food. But getting there? Well, it looks a lot like 12+ hours yesterday spent in and out of the cat room, first doing labor, then doing clean up from labor, then checking on each kitten, then taking weights, then doing supplemental feeding. It means setting an alarm for every 2 hours to make sure everyone is maintaining temperature and weight. It means STILL waking up in the morning to find that mama isn't aware she needs to potty her babies so now everyone is covered in poop...and you still have to get the kid to school (did I mention, today is the day they're ripping up the parking lot and the added noise is RIGHT OUTSIDE the kitten room?), feed and walk your own dogs/cats, and maybe take care of yourself (for the record, it's noon and I have not done anything but eat two crackers so I could take pain meds for my back)?

Of course we love what we do. We wouldn't keep saying yes otherwise. And this is the kind of morning I'd pick a million times over the "rushing to the emergency vet because one of the babies is dying" kind of morning. But it's hard work, man.

04/04/2022

01/04/2022

Our candy litter baby, Gumdrop (now Hazel) was adopted by our amazing vet! Look at her now!! As a side note, if you’re in Nova, we cannot recommend Pinnacle enough!! We love them and their staff and they take such good care of our babies!

30/03/2022

Our first litter from fall 2021! Mama Marble Rye and the babies, Butter, Toast, Sourdough, and Pumpernickel! They came to us from another foster home already 7 weeks old and were here long enough to be fixed and posted for adoption!