Mamarati

Jacob made this video Sunday during the birthing.

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Well, we suspected that the stray orange thing we’ve been feeding might be pregnant for a while now. She is just so small, though and I don’t think that we got a good enough look at her while she was still skinny (we started taking care of her in earnest probably right as she went into heat if all the noise outside and strange cats hanging around was any indication).

At any rate, she came inside the other night (Thursday) after I put food on the porch and was acting crazy. Would not leave my side and was my new best friend. She came and laid on the couch between me and my boyfriend (odd!) and we had all the lights out watching LOST. I looked down because she was licking so much and there was a dead little kitten. If she hadn’t been licking like that I would never have known!

For the next three days, she was glued to my side, didn’t eat, didn’t want to go outside, meowing at me a lot… and then Sunday, she had two more. These two were bigger than the first one (which was so small, probably didn’t weigh an ounce) but one was smaller than the other. It’s the one in this movie (she hadn’t birthed the third one yet) and it died last night after much effort to get him warmed up enough to eat. The third one is much stronger and eating well now so maybe he’ll make it. I guess both cats are going to be ours now.

I wish I had taken her to the SPCA, but there are so many cats around here and I never know who belongs where. Nobody tags their cats in my neighborhood. Plus, I have taken a few cats there and they always give me the guilt trip and make me feel like crap that I can’t take care of the 8 bajillion cats around here in my 900 square foot house.

Our “real” cat, of course, never goes outside and is fixed… but in this neighborhood I think that people look at that as weird and unnatural for cats. It aggravates me because this particular cat, not fixed, not flea treated, worms all over her leg fur, showed up at our house and was sleeping on the railing of our chain link fence to get away from the fleas and she had hardly any hair — she was pulling it all out and had scabs all over every inch of her. We went and got some flea stuff but didn’t want to get too involved because we weren’t sure where she belonged.

Anyway, this has been another sad chapter in cat history on our street. Not so sad for my son, however, since he’s been wanting to call Orange Thing ours for a while now and of course he’s wanted a kitten since the dawn of time. I was just hoping we would get to rescue a kitten from Petsmart some Caturday down the road instead of it happening like this. At any rate… cats. They teach you about life, love, death, good times and bad times, don’t they?