Too Much Cute

Community

This is Aidan, the youngest of a family that has lived in my community for 7 generations...or is it 8? Must be 8 because I've known 5 of those generations, and I'm not THAT old.

Aidan had his first birthday party in the picnic area behind the corn stand this weekend. It was so much fun to see people I've grown up with watching their grandkids play together.

Here are a few things that impressed me.

The men of Bob's generation who are now dads are really incredible. I have such a hard time calling them "men" but that's certainly what they are. Even with a cruddy economy and having to work so hard just to find and keep jobs, they are very involved and very loving fathers. They are not the generation that stayed home because they didn't want to be at a little kid's party, nor the generation that sat with the other guys and drank beer while their wives did the work. I really, really like these guys.

Even though the party was pretty much in my back yard, I wasn't looking forward to putting on good clothes and socializing. Dana, who lived across the street when she was growing up, said she had felt the same way but was also glad she came anyway. You know what? It's different when you're around people in your community who grew up together. They don't care about your clothes or your hairdo or what you're driving. They KNOW you, and those things don't matter. You don't feel the need to try to impress them because you can't.

It's so different getting together with people who live in the gated community up the road. I like them, but it's so hard to just be yourself, they're fixated on the trappings of success.

Finally, I am aways impressed by how our little farming community makes multiculturism work. Aidan's party had a jump house AND a piñata. Half the kids were very blonde and half were toasty brown. Half the parents spoke Spanish and the other half of us didn't, but it didn't make a bit of difference. You can't force these things on people. If you have a good community, it just happens that way.

Baby Report

There's not much difference between bottle feeding a kitten and taking care of a human baby. You have to feed them every 2-3 hours, day and night for a while. You have to keep them clean and make sure they have a warm, snug place to sleep. You have to remind them they're loved so they have a good reason to want to live.

The baby is three weeks old now. I am only getting up once at night to feed him, which makes life easier. This hasn't been an easy task. For the first week, the baby was constipated. He would eat, but no amount of massaging his tummy would make him feel better. It finally took a trip to the vet to make sure there wasn't a plumbing problem. There wasn't. The vet did nothing except proclaim the baby was undersized, confirm that it's a boy, and take it's temperature. I guess my $60 contribution to the Vet God did the trick, though. When I got him back home, the baby immediately started pooping. Since then he's had diarrhea on and off. It's a bit like working with a colicky baby, except a human baby doesn't have claws that he can use to grab your clothes, squirm around, and climb up to your neck when it's agitated.

I had been keeping the baby in a small plastic box, but he needed to walk around between naps. So I bought this storage box, cut out a hole in the top of it and replaced it with screen. I did a dandy job. I can use this for chicks when the kitten outgrows it.

Not all of that black mass is kitten. Some of it is a soft skunk toy that he snuggles under. Here he is in his little nest with his skunk toy.

Sometimes he just sleeps on top of the covers.

Even with his tummy troubles, the baby is growing. It appears he'll be a little floofy, with tiger stripes.

He has a very cute face. An extremely cute face. That serves him well at 3:00 a.m. when the tired old lady is trying to feed him and he's clawing and complaining. And once in a while, when his tummy is settled and he's full as a tick, he rubs that little face on my chin and curls up and purrs there.

I've learned a few tricks with this baby. I put a towel on the floor and as soon as he spits out the nipple, I put him down on it. He walks around and around, until his tummy feels better. Then when he settles down I can pick him up and clean him. He has tried to use the kitty litter already, but that's a big difficult because of the loose (and uncontrollable) stools.

Bob has mostly been trying to ignore the kitten, because we're determined not to keep him and he doesn't want to become attached. But one afternoon he decided to see if Velcro would babysit, as long as she was just lying around.

You couldn't pay her enough to do that. Not even whipped cream from a can. Velcro treats the kitten the same way she handles having chicks in the house, she totally ignores them. They. Do. Not. Exist.

Gollie is a total freak. She checked the baby out once, then ran away. Her feed bowl is just 3 feet away from the towel on the floor, but she won't come back in the room unless the kitten is in his box. And not making noises.

Gollie doesn't like anything new. When she's on my lap, she sniffs my clothes, and she doesn't like it when she finds the kitten's scent. Gollie is the reason we need to find a new home for the baby when he's old enough. When she's upset, angry, confused, afraid...when anything annoys her...she lets you know by pooping anywhere but in the cat box. She pees in the cat box, but she leaves little poop statements on the couch, in my favorite chair, in other places where even a near-sighted human like me can find them. No amount of Feliway will soothe her, she just does not want anything to rock her boat. Lucky for me, chicks don't bother her.

Juggling multiple house cats is a fine art that I haven't mastered.
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I was thinking this morning, as I picked up cat poo left right in front of the door - something that hasn't happened for a few months - that this is really an effective way to express an opinion. Does your housemate do something that bothers or offends you? Forget about talking it out, or writing a note, just poop on their territory. That pretty much says it all. I'm thinking this might even be more effective for other things. Instead of spending days doing research and writing intelligent comments to an EIR that will be summarily ignored, send a poop package instead. No more letters to the editor, carefully refined to fit within the limited space allowed. Send a small, tidy poop package. I think Gollie is onto something.

An updated report on the feral cats: Out in the wood shed it appears two of the cats have disappeared. I haven't seen the boys, Slink and Chester, in a month. They disappeared about the time the corn maze patch was plowed, which dug up a lot of mice and gophers and attracted them. There is no cover in an open field, though, no way to get away from coyotes or barn owls. I fear they are gone.

So the present outside cat population is Carla (the original mama) and her daughters Mollie, Rosie and Angela, and Bootsie and his sister (Baby's mama). And somewhere out there might still be Baby's two siblings.

Smug as a pigeon with a place to call its own

108° F

A few days ago it was 108° F. What do you do on the hottest day of the year (so far)?

Give the old cat a much-needed bath, then spend a few hours brushing her dry in the sunshine.

Happy as a pigeon playing in a sprinkler

Child Protective Services

Now that backyard chickens have become a trend, there are lots of folks who got to participate in the hatching experience this spring. I know a lot of them discovered it's not always a pleasant experience, because I've been reading their posts on Facebook. Take my word - bad parenting is not limited to human beings.

Last year several of my mutt hens got together and raised 6 babies together. This year, 4 hens sat on 3 nests and hatched 10 babies. They have been fighting worse than a bunch of soccer parents.

One hen was sitting on 8 eggs. I had to pull two babies out of her nest. One afternoon I heard frantic peeping and saw a newly hatched chick laying on its back a few inches away from the hen. It was the first one hatched and she was pecking it like it was an intruder, trying to keep it away from her precious eggs. I rescued it and brought it into the house thinking it might not make it. But it did. 

Four days later the hen had 4 other chicks. She left 3 unhatched eggs in the nest. I fished them out, thinking I'd candle them to see if they had chicks inside. Two were infertile, but the third had a chick that was already partially out of the egg. He had obviously been left in the open by himself all night and was just about dead. The shell was stuck to him, so I peeled it off carefully. The chick's neck was crooked and weak from pushing against the shell. It couldn't stand very well, nor could it keep its head up, but it seemed interested in living. No problem. I wound Kleenex around it to hold it in an upright position and made it a nest of paper towels in a strawberry basket, then put it in the hatcher for a couple of days. I gave it electrolytes and liquid food with a watercolor brush until it was ready to stand and feed itself. It still doesn't look exactly right, but it's incredibly determined. My show birds, especially the white Old English, are scarcely ever this strong. If their little worlds aren't perfect, they often just give up. I can sometimes convince them life is worth living by giving them some live mealworms.

The two mutt chicks in the house are fortunate, I think. Their siblings have to live with a mama who covers them in dirt when she tries to scratch in their food. She's constantly running over them to chase other babies away from them.

The best parent in the mutt pen is Alan, the little rooster. He's very patient and kind. When the hens are squabbling, all the babies can take shelter under him.

I don't usually have show birds raise their own babies, but this year after I'd hatched enough white Old English eggs in the incubator, four little hens showed an interest in hatching their own. One pair hatched 5 babies and did a good job with them. The other pair of hens hatched 8 babies. I had to rescue one (the scalped baby) the first day. After a week of observing the babies huddling together in a corner as their mamas sat high on the perch away from them, and hearing their mournful little cheeps in the chilly morning, I finally brought the whole batch in and put them in a brooder under a light. They are infinitely more happy, I can tell because they're cheeping happy songs.

Mother hens, when they do a good job, are fun to watch with their cute little ones. Not every hen makes a good mother.

It's not just hens who are sometimes bad parents. The new feral cat mama has proved to be a flake, too. Before I could trap her she moved the kittens. I took the trap away because there's no way I wanted to catch the mama without knowing where the kittens were. For a couple of days I saw the mama sitting here or there, but she had hidden the babies well.

Yesterday morning I took a small bowl of cat food out to the hay pile, hoping it might give her an easy source of food. I have never seen her in the woodshed eating with the other cats, I don't think she goes there. When I got halfway to the hay pile, I could see a kitten lying in the bare dirt of the road, in the full sun. I thought it was dead. I picked it up with the corner of my T-shirt and discovered it was alive. It seemed to be fed. Maybe the mama was just moving it again and dropped it? So I put it back by the hay pile, out of the sun and the road. But last night by 7:30 the baby was back in the road. This time it was frantic, cold, and hungry.

So now I have another mouth to feed.

Kittens this young have to be fed every two hours. It was a long night. At first it wanted nothing to do with the bottle, and it was miserable and unhappy. There's something about a crying baby of any kind that just grates on my nerves. You want to help it and do the right thing, but it seems impossible.

By this morning the baby was eating pretty well, though. It's in a carrier that's sitting half on a heating pad, so it stays comfortable between meals. I found that it would latch onto the nipple better if I kept pulling it away a little. I called SPCA to see if there was a rehabber who was bottle feeding other babies this age who could take him. No, but they offered to send me other babies to feed to keep him company. I'm not inclined to do that.

By this evening things have calmed considerably. The chicks are doing well, the kitten is full and sleeping peacefully, and I'm sure I'll sleep sounder in my two hour segments, too.

Here are some recent pictures from the yard.

Some sunflowers popped up in the flower bed and are standing sentinel duty at the gate. I'm pretty sure their flowers will pull them over, but for now they're interesting.

Here are a couple of hydrangea blossoms that have poked their heads through the railing to greet visitors with their happy faces.

My favorite lilies, the red ones. I still have to finish the painting of them I started last year. Or was it the year before?

It's hard to get the color right, they're almost fluorescent. Leenie, any suggestions?

This picture is for Beverly, who fights with her mulberry tree every spring. Mulberries are nasty little purple fruit that will stain your carpet if you track them in the house. Beverly spends a lot of time cleaning up the berries in her yard when they fall. This picture is the ground under my own mulberry tree.

Please note...scarcely any berries there. The ground was covered when the berries first started falling, but the robins and jays packed them all off. I didn't have to rake at all. I consider myself fortunate to have a neighborhood full of fat little bird pigs.

This photo is for Linda, who is trying to get great pictures of her hummingbirds in Colorado.

It's hard, I couldn't do it. Even though the birds come right to the feeder, less than a foot from the camera, it's hard for the automatic camera to focus on the little busybodies. When I finally got a picture that isn't as blurred, you can see all the dirt and cobwebs on my window sills. I think a better hummer picture could be taken with a zoom. Have you found that, Linda? My problem is I have a really hard time focusing when I'm using the zoom. It's not like my old film camera with manual settings. I'll keep trying. I only have one feeder and 5 birds, all the same kind. Linda runs a cafeteria for hummers. It's also hard to capture the colors in a photo. In the picture the bird looks brown. In real life it reflects lots of gorgeous color.

I'm off to bed now. Just fed the baby, he ate so much I might even get three hours sleep before the next feeding. It's not like I can't take a nap tomorrow, anyway.

The Last Cat

If you recall, and how can you forget...I talk about the cats constantly...last year there were 8 feral cats to catch and have neutered. I got 7 of them taken care of. There was another at the corn stand that I only saw when it was a kitten, it was Bootsie's sibling. But, not having seen it for months, I assumed it was dead.

Until this past week, when I realized that the black cat that was staring at me just outside the yard, the one whose belly was almost dragging on the ground, was NOT the svelte and lovely Angela. It must be Bootsie's long lost sibling, obviously a sister.

The proof? You want the proof?

I saw her leave the hay stack this morning, looking back over her shoulder several times. These 3 were in a hole between two bales, not very well hidden.

I have set a trap. I hope I can catch the mama this time, before she moves the kittens. I really don't want to have to go through the wild cat routine again. I think I can put the mama in a big chicken pen with her babies, then when they're old enough I can take them all in one trip to have them neutered and vaccinated, then turn the mama loose and find homes for the babies. The babies will be tame and cuddly by then, but I won't be attached to them. (The only time I'm not pessimistic is when I'm making a plan. Or having a dream.)

But first, mama needs to just waltz right into the trap, hopefully this afternoon, because I can't leave it set all night or it will attract predators. My plan does not call for dealing with a mad skunk in a cat trap.