OUR NEW FOSTER KITTENS!

Thursday Mom brought home our two new foster kitties.  One of them is a little black boy with just a tiny, short stub of a tail.  His name is Ingram.  The other kitten is a girl who is a grey tabby with cute white markings.  Her name is Ivy.  Mom picked out a bunch of names that started with "I" because she thought maybe she could find more Interesting names that way.  Then she told Aunt Tania some of the names, and Aunt Tania said which names she liked best, so that's how the kittens got named.

Ingram and Ivy started their lives at a truck stop.  The man who runs the truck stop found them, and he also found a litter of newborn kittens, plus he found a mama cat who got killed -- like maybe she was hit by a car or something.  Anyway, we don't know which litter of kittens the dead mama cat belonged to.  Probably, there was another mama cat out there who came back to feed her kittens, and her kittens were gone, and she couldn't find them anyplace.

The litter of newborn kittens is being fostered by somebody else.  They have to be fed with a bottle, but our kittens are big enough that they have just learned to eat canned food.  They are very messy kittens.  Sometimes they stand right in the middle of the food dish while they eat the food.  And they have very soft poop which they don't cover up very well, so they walk in it, and Ivy gets her tail in it.  A long time ago, when we first got Hallie, Hazel, and Hamlet, they were messy like that, too.  Ivy and Ingram are about the same age, so I guess they are all just going through the messy phase of their lives.

Right now Mom is not letting the two kittens come out of their cage because they have not been tested for FIV and Feline Leukemia yet.  Also they have not had any vaccinations or deworming.  Aunt Tania wants to wait until next week to do these things because then Dr. Regan will be back from vacation.  But Ivy really thinks she should come out, so she keeps climbing the door of the crate just when Mom is trying to open it.  Or else she runs out when the door is open.  Ingram thinks he might like to go out and go exploring, too, but he is not quite as bold as Ivy is.  We think that Ivy is going to be a lot like Hallie was, and that she will go everywhere and get into everything, even if she is not supposed to!

These kittens are really different from Jilly, Janey, and Jeeves, just because these new ones have lots more energy, and they are always playing and wrestling with each other.  The "J" kitties were here for several weeks before they started to feel like playing.  Anyway, we hope this means that Ivy and Ingram are nice, healthy kittens, and that they will be ready for adoption as soon as they get big enough to get fixed.  Which will probably be about the first part of June, but they will have to weigh at least 2 pounds before they can have surgery.