Baby Boswick - Days 2-9

 Now then, where were we? Ah yes, trying to figure out a future home for a kitten who is eating at least his own weight every two hours. His very very small weight and who is awfully scrawny.*

So we checked with my mom -- she and Sibling the Elder lost the latter's cat last June, a lovely grouchy half Siamese who had been acquired by riding between two library locations in the undercarriage of my mom's car some two decades ago. We have a history with finding kittens who need a home, clearly. So we called and checked with her and while she was definitely interested in hearing about the potential new grandcat, she's not quite ready for a new one at her house. 

(Day 2 -- SO tired)

And by this point it was pretty clear that the Philosopher was going to try and keep him. We had a serious talk about it -- what if there were major health issues when we got him to our vet, what if he was aggressive towards the ladies. Widge and Pye were here first and I wasn't going to have either of them bullied by what looked like would be a good sized male cat.  Especially one on his like... 5th can of cat food in 36 hours.  (For reference, the ladies split one can between them per day and have dry food access all the time.)

I called my veterinarian again, this time to stay yes, yes we figured we'd keep him. And they did miracles, shoving open a half hour on Dr. Swiatkovsky's calendar the following Wednesday (a week and two days) so I could bring him by for a well kitten check. We just had to get through til then. 

(This is a week after we found him)

It was a long week. We balanced between keeping him in one bathroom or the other, trying to give him a bit of space to run but also keeping him isolated from the two very concerned adult ladies who wanted to know why there was so much squeaking coming from behind the door. We didn't want to share any parasites or fleas or or or.... 

And he hated being alone at night. Also hates being hungry. Loudly hates both of those things, as I learned at 3 a.m. most mornings.  We started a 3rd meal at midnight so we could at least get 4-ish hours of sleep before the sadness began. 

Oh, and we named him Boswick. He's our little black panther, complete with ridiculous tail. And while the Philosopher refused T'challa or any other in universe name, we went with this tribute to an amazing actor.  

Well-kitten visit was a big success -- Boswick got his ears cleaned, and we checked for fleas, ringworm, and parasites. In addition to being sad, he'd also managed to scrape the fur off his nose trying to get under the bathroom door.  Medicated and vaccinated, we scheduled his neutering for as early as they could (December) and headed home. 

We needed to wait a couple more days for the meds to kick in, and -- to be on the safe side all the cats got a couple of doses of Advantage just to prevent any visitors. And then we started trying to do some very slow introductions. Big cats were allowed one at a time into the larger bathroom for very short supervised visits. Everyone had already had a full week of door smells and meowing at each other through the wall. 

And we let him into the bedroom at night while we slept (which yes, meant the ladies were shut out -- it was a rough few weeks for everyone).  Amazingly the need for company was the much bigger issue. He'd sleep through the night if he was allowed to sleep IN BETWEEN US did I mention he was something like 5 pounds and very long?  But yes... third meal at 12 and warm humans to snooze on and he was very happy to be a snuggly tired boy.  

*Especially after he pooped finally -- he'd been seriously all empty through his whole system and it had taken a bit. He got a smidge bloated before it started being normal again.