Cinco de Kitten-o

Cinco kittens on Cinco de Mayo! Graycie and her babies are doing fine this morning, after Tracy and I were up all night helping her give birth to them. She had them behind the wheels of our bicycles in the sun room, a safe place she has employed since the day we brought her in from the cold. After the first couple were born, we moved the bikes and put her in the Grand Birthing Box that yours truly built for her, but which she had never set foot in. The last three were born there on the same gray blanket she liked to lie on behind the bike wheels.

It was a five-hour adventure for both Graycie and us. When new ones were born and still in their amniotic sacs, we had to continually move kittens out of the way so she could reach the newborn to lick off the sac and get them up and breathing. She was so tired after giving birth to the last of them, I had to sterilize (well, wash well in soap and water) a pair of little scissors so Tracy could snip off the umbilical cord because the placenta was still stuck in the birth canal preventing the kitten from moving up the mountain of Graycie’s belly to find a teat. Eventually, the final placenta was expelled and all was well.

It was long past dawn when Tracy and I finally left Graycie and her kittens to their own natural devices and went to bed. The other Members of the Menagerie, Ruby and Tazzy, were of course very interested in what was going on behind the closed door of the sun room, and once or twice they slipped through the door when I opened it and had a look. Much meowing from Tazzy and plaintive whining from Ruby until we all went upstairs to bed and they took up their places on the bed and atop a pillow on a bedroom chair.

Whew! Need I say there will be light posting today, if any at all, as we all settle into Cinco de Mayo with our cinco kittens at the Harris-Truscott Manse?