National Poetry Month 2020: April 23 — COVID KITTENS!

 

Everyone needs cute kittens to keep them company during Covid-19.

Who wants to help bottle feed these four week old foundlings every five hours?

We’ve fostered kittens before and put the word out months ago that we were available again. On Tuesday, April 21, we were asked by the Foundling Kitten Society if we could take on three kittens that had just turned four weeks old. They were small, malnourished, and sick with an upper respiratory infection.

In short, a handful.

But my teen promised to help, and my husband was amenable as long they stayed FOSTERS and so we off went to pick them up and get a refresher course on bottle feeding and dealing with the infection. We’d had kittens before that we thought we might have to bottle feed but they took to the food we offered– they were hungry!

Bottle feeding three kittens sounds fun and reasonable until you’re the one staying up until 2am or waking up at 3 or 4 or 5am to find them; it takes almost an hour to prepare the food and feed all three, and clean their faces too.

I’m happy to say that these three are thriving so far. Their eyes are clearing up, they’re putting on weight, an the vet yesterday said they were doing great with normal temperatures. Dr Sisk gave us some more tips and tried to recruit us for the Ojai Valley Humane Society’s brand new kitten foster program; check it out here. They had it all set to start when everything was shut down due to Covid-19. They as well as Ventura County Animal Services can’t do adoptions and groups like the non-profit Foundling Kitten Society are stepping in to the fill the gap.

How you can help NOW: if you have any experience fostering kittens, especially bottle feeding them, now’s the time to step forward. If you can provide a safe harbor for an adult kitty, fosters are needed for those as well.

MAKE A DONATION! Taking care of these kitties takes a lot of time energy, and money.

How you can help later: Sign up to learn how to foster!

NOTE: April is National Poetry Month so every day I’m writing one ore more American Sentences about life in the time of corona. American poet Allen Ginsberg came up with the idea as an American version of a haiku. Like a haiku an American sentence is 17 syllables. I learned about American Sentences from Paul E. Nelson who I met at the Taos Poetry Circus in 2000. According to Paul, the key to writing a good American Sentence comes from Ginsberg’s notion that poets are people who notice what they notice. He has been writing one a day since January 1, 2001.

Learn more about American Sentences and how to write good ones from Paul here.