When I brought little Meg home with me last Thursday I thought we had a couple of weeks for her to settle into the nursery before she had her kits. So I focused on just getting her settled and getting used to me, and didn’t think too much about the kittens. She was hiding under my desk most of the time, but had got confident enough to occasionally sit on top of the desk, or come out to talk to me and even have a wander around on the landing.
meg – a rare moment on top of the desk
However when I went in to feed her this morning she was back under the desk, there was a patch of blood on the carpet and a lot of purring going on. She’d clearly just given birth to her second kitten.
When Smudge had her kittens it was clear she wanted me around and was happy with me being there. Less clear with Meg. She was meowing to me but we both kept our distance from each other. So I stayed around but at a distance while she had numbers 3 and 4.
Unlike my previous pregnant ladies she didn’t opt to have her babies in a box or a bed, so they were just crawling around on the floor under the desk. I was quite anxious about them. Kitten 3 didn’t get fully cleaned up, and kitten 4 was on the way. She cleaned K4, picked him/her up and took him/her off into the corner. She started feeding that one and ignoring the others who were tumbling over each other in a mewling heap trying to work out what to do next. Hard to know whether to intervene or not. Had horrors of a) my doing nothing and them all crawling off in different directions across the study, getting hurt or trapped, or simply cold and unfed, or b) my gathering them all together into a box and Meg then rejecting them. We compromised by rolling up a nice big towel that had come as part of Meg’s dowry, gently nudging the kittens towards her in the corner, and then cordoning that area off with the towel so hopefully they can’t wander too far. Paws crossed, that seems to have worked ok for today at least. Food and water bowls just outside of the towel fence.
8 Lives: Sheffield 8 Cat Rescue 