Week 26, Day 1 (Six months in a leaky boat!)

Bubs news: same old same old. He's growing fast, my bits ache, sleeping sickness has returned, and I'm four days completely smoke-free (including nicotine patch free). Nothing too startling or terribly exciting!

Let's break it up a bit with some more animal stories. Hmmm.. I see we can more easily add pictures to the blog, so let's start there. What have I got on file for the Gremlin P? (searches the hard drive...)

Only this one so far. I'm sure I have many others, but I did a major back-up last week and took 95% of my many gigabytes of pictures and stored them away safely. This is 'The Dreadful Grem'.

She is one of those cats that believes everything is hers (and that goes double for things belonging to the dogs, ie Tamsin's bed). Grem refused to get out of Tam's bed, and I insisted Tam get IN her bed... and this was the result. Very nervous dog, very disgruntled cat (who eventually moved, much to the dog's relief).

In the following picture you can see our other five cats, from top and going clockwise:
Greebo (Gremlin's twin brother)
Adder (the incorrigible)
Badger (firstborn of Grem)
Mako (eldest son of Grem)
Bumpkuss (snottiest child of Grem)

They are hovering on the back door mat waiting for the spotty horror (Mako) to have first munch. If you think that bit of carpet is in bad condition, blame it on the cats who never wipe their feet when coming in the cat door (just above Greebo's head).

So those are the brat cats that own us. Badger is the one who went aviary-dancing, Bumpy is the one who belly-surfs at 3am, and Mako ... well Mako's driving ambition is to be the best lounge lizard money can hire.

So on with Gremlin's story...

Coming up five years next New Year's, we lost Boots (he who taught the Wobble to always fear cats) to cancer. That was a very sad holiday season, as Boots was very much the Bosscat of the neighbourhood.

One night about a week later, we were just thinking of turning off the TV and heading off to bed (around 11pm) when we realised we could both hear faint mewing sounds.

Wayne raced outside (in the nuddy.. he's nearly always nekkid on summer nights.. remind me to tell you about the eel sometime). I saw some flashes of movement, a few hissyspits, and then Wayne appeared with two tiny kittens in his hands.

"Look hon," he crowed. "A miniature Boots and Adder!"

The kittens were barely at the eye-opening stage, thin and sickly, and riddled with fleas. Wayne had found them in the barrel outside the front door. We'll never know if someone dropped them off to our very isolated farm in the middle of the night (many miles from a main road), or if they were feral kittens who got separated from the mother cat.

Given their fear the first night, the second option is the most likely... but then that fear went away very quickly once we got some warm milk into them and coaxed some softened catfood down their gullets. A wild cat is not so easily won over (just ask a friend of ours whose adoptee decimated his entire house and person for weeks until it finally smashed its way out of the house and escaped in relief).

The schmittens were so small I could fit both of them in the palm of my hand at once. I've got some grainy stills taken off the video camera somewhere.. must dig them out. Too cute for words.

The kittens grew up and were called Greebo (the grey male) and Gremlin (the black female). Greeb got his name from Terry Pratchett's excellent stories, and it fits him well.

He is almost a dead-ringer for Boots, so there's not a lot of doubt who's his daddy! This also lends weight to the 'lost wildchild' theory.

When the schmittens were around five months old, I rang the vet to book Grem in for desexing. "Too young", they admonished. "Bring her back in a month or so."

We duly did.. except by that point my tiny female had been a very busy girl indeed, and had a belly of kittens well on the way!!

Gremlin is a very small cat by stature, and before she lost her girlish figure looked extremely Burmese (but shorter). By the time the kittens arrived she was wider than she was high, and was not the slightest bit happy about being a beached whale.

This might have been why (on the day she later gave birth) she chased and beat up The Wobble when she felt he was annoying me (well he was... but it was worth it to see a small rotund furrball giving chase and chastisement to a dog many times her size and weight). Apart from throwing her weight around, the only thing she enjoyed throughout the pregnancy was sitting on my knee, demanding that I rub her ears for hours on end.

At 9pm (ish) on Beltane Night (October 31st, 'Halloween' or Samhain in the Northern Territory), Grem went into labour.

Just before 10am the first kitten started to appear (I have the whole thing on video..), but there was a problem.

The kitten was breech, and it was a monster. Grem got it mostly out then decided "stuff this for a game of soldiers!!!" and headed off down the hallway to get a feed. I chased her on my hands and knees calling "Come back Grem!! You're still giving birth!"

We got her back in the box, but she just couldn't get that kitten to budge. There was nothing for it but for her humans to intervene, and quickly.

With my heart in my mouth, I gently but firmly took hold of the slimly little body, and pulled. Gently enough not to pull the kitten's head off or rupture the mother (I hoped!) but firmly enough to aid delivery.

To our relief it worked, and soon we had a squirming, mewling baby for Grem to inspect and clean. Wayne's comment comes through loud and clear on the video tape:
"Congratulations Grem, it's a rat!"

(This is the rat in question, Badger. As you can see from this pic, don't pause when folding the washing or a sneaky seat thief will move in and get comfy. That perpetual grin on her face makes it very hard to get tough with Princess Badger.. and doesn't she know it!)

Badg was followed by two grey tabbies (Holly and Mako), and then by two long haired kittens (Bumpkuss and Sweetheart). After more than two hours had passed and Grem had settled down to feed five clean and healthy kittens, we assumed she was all done for the night, and went off to bed.

At around 5am I got up to check on her, and did a head count.
One, two, three, four, five, six.

HUH????

One, two, three, four, five.. yep, six.

After midnight (ie November 1st) Grem had decided to squeeze out another kitten, a tiny wee runt we later called Buddy. He was markedly smaller than his siblings (especially that monster first kitten), but seemed healthy enough.

Grem was a good mum that night, but the next day she announced (in cat language) "Been there, done that, I'm OVER motherhood!!!"

And she was. She refused to feed the kittens ever again (although she would sometimes wash their bottoms, thank the Gods! My tongue was sooo not going there!). After one hellish night of trying to convince her to reconsider, we gave in and took her to the vet to be speyed and get her (now) mastitis sorted out.

Of course if she hadn't stopped feeding them, she wouldn't have developed mastitis.. but you tell her that.

It fell to us to raise those kittens by hand (or syringe, as the case may be). Badger and Holly were the most pushy of the kittens, expecting four times the feeds that anyone else got, and they were experts at climbing your legs with their tiny sharp claws when it was someone else's turn at the feeder. If you think that sounds annoying, remember that many feeds were at times of day or night when you weren't wearing jeans (or anything else). Yep. They scaled bare legs just as easily as if you were wearing corduroy.

Yeowsa.

So we employed a box to help restrain them, and the first kitten to learn how to get out of the box was Mako (initially called Marco as in Marco Polo, the adventurer, for just that reason).

One cool night we locked Grem up in the laundry with them to keep them warm as we had Wayne's 40th birthday under way and didn't want the kittens getting squished by party goers.

The next morning we discovered this was a bad idea.

Grem had decided some culling was in order, and had evicted all the males out of the box, sleeping with (and FEEDING!!!) the females.

Talk about bigotry.

Sweetheart was dead and cold, and we couldn't revive him. We nearly couldn't revive Mako or Buddy either, and it took everything we had to get them breathing and warming up again. Buddy was especially touch-and-go, as he'd always been a very difficult kitten to raise. As far as he was concerned, he had one mummy and she was fat, black and furry. I was just the reason his life was shit, as far as he was concerned.

And he holds that grudge to this day. (More on him another day - he's a character, this one)

Mum took Buddy, and a friend took Holly. We kept the remaining three and have never regretted the instant doubling of our cat numbers.

Prior to having the kittens, Grem and I had been very close. However after the birth she decided to reclaim her kittenhood and went very feral for a while, stealing from counters, pissing on potplants, staring coldly at humans who wanted to snuggle with her.

She's finally returning to the cat we used to know and love, but still slips back to bad habits now and again. In the interim, however, the role of my familiar has been taken by her firstborn, the one whose life I saved when I delivered her.

Badger is my special girl, and if it is possible for a cat to love, I'd say she perhaps loves me. Certainly I'm her favourite cushion, and she seems to enjoy getting kicked in the head when the baby moves underneath her.

If you've ever read Anne McCaffrey's Doona series, you'll understand when I describe her as 'a cat of a superior stripe'.

Although mostly she's a cat of a superior slobber. That's the one birthright Grem did pass down to her children.. the ambidriblous gene.

Yech ;-)