Orphans

On Saturday my mother called me about noon with the news that Socks, the mother of the kittens, had passed away. We are unsure exactly how but we have several possibilities. Sometime last week she moved her kittens up to the warehouse, but instead of putting them in the kennel or in the feed bags, she put them under the dock leveler.

For those of you who don't know, a dock leveler (If you click on both underlined words you can see two different pictures) is a platform that raises up and then there is a little flap on the end. When you lower it down that flap goes into the back of a semi trailer, giving you a flat surface to run a fork lift or hand truck across.

Anyhow, we think she was either crushed when the leveler came down, or was trapped in there and died of heat exhaustion. Either way, it was a very sad event and it left four kittens without a mom. We are lucky, however, that she had all four kittens with her or we probably would have never found them. We are also lucky that they all survived as it appeared that she had been gone for several days before we found them.

So, on Saturday I went to Wal-mart and invested in Just Born kitten milk and bottles. (If you ever have an orphan, this is the stuff to use) They all took to the bottle really well and have continued to thrive. I keep them at my house in the evenings and on weekends and I take them to my mom's house during the day.

Once they are big enough to eat out of a dish they will probably stay with her full time. We will miss having them at our house, although we can not say the same for Lex, Sylvester, & Pixie. They will be throwing a kitty party as soon as we close the door!!

Here are some pictures I took this weekend. They don't sit still very well so it's hard to get good pictures. Hopefully when they start walking around a little more I can get a few more good ones.