Mom Minnie, our three remaining Moochers, and their step-brother Clinton all headed home on an action-packed weekend at 50K. Minnie and Lincoln's adoptive family came to get them on Saturday afternoon. When we mentioned that TJ's adoption had fallen through on Friday night, they decided to take TJ home as well.

The family has four children and a good-natured male collie, so there will be plenty of attention for the new feline members. So far we hear that Lincoln and TJ are exploring fearlessly and interacting well with everyone. Minnie is still a bit reclusive as she acclimates, but we're hopeful she'll relax and that her true personality will emerge during the days ahead.

Two hours after we said goodbye to our villa Moochers, another adopter arrived for our upstairs inmates Clinton and Jackie-O. They're heading to a quieter and smaller home where they're likely to be in the middle of all the action… greeting visitors, inspecting groceries, etc. We're really thrilled that they went home together and are pretty sure they'll be best friends for life.

We went out Saturday night, then spent most of Sunday cleaning our exercise room and the villa. Three new fosterlings were delivered to us by a Homeward Trails volunteer on Sunday night.

Samantha came from a rural North Carolina shelter, where she had four kittens just over a month ago. Two died, and we'd heard from our HT coordinator that the two surviving kittens were not eating well. So we were prepared for some rough sledding.

But when Samantha arrived she seemed healthy. And her lookalike gray boys seemed clean and almost pudgy. We fed everyone, and Samantha quickly finished her wet food. And her second helping. Then a third. Within 24 hours she'd eaten at least twice as much as we were feeding Minnie each day. And she's gorgeous and relatively friendly.

Her boys weren't too interested in the bottles we offered, but we concluded that was probably because Samantha was nursing them successfully again. Maybe she'd just been underfed and wasn't producing enough milk. When the boys gained weight overnight without being fed, we realized that they didn't need bottle-feeding.

We still haven't seen them nursing (Samantha generally leaves them alone in the nest while she naps under the futon) or getting much attention from Mom, but we now think that they're on the right track. No vomiting, no sign of sloppy poop.

The smaller and longer-haired kitten does seem congested, and having seen asymptomatic URIs progress to lethal pneumonia with Spike and the Hellions last year, we nebulized the boys yesterday, gave them a cc of Viralys, and started them on Azithromycin.

We also changed the names they'd been given by their HT coordinator, thinking they sounded too feminine. So in tribute to the reggae rhythm-section legends, Sable is now Sly and Satin is now Robbie.

ReggaeRats, play on!

filed by: TS