New kittens being born

The feral mama cat that had adopted our crawl space previously for a batch of kittens had gone away and come back every so often for food, and then started in the last several weeks to come around more and more with increasing time as time wore on, and was looking fatter and fatter and fatter. The past week I really thought she looked full to capacity and would give birth soon. She’s very 1/2 wild, won’t really let us near her, but has accepted us looking at her at least, when before she’d scat as soon as we made eye contact.

I was working on putting the desktop computer together this morning in the basement and heard distinctive mewing. So I got my eldest son to get a screwdriver and take off the panel to the crawlspace from the basement. (the cats get into the crawlspace from the side vents that the covers fell off of and we just let them stay in there …) I couldn’t see really well into the space, with it being rather dark the further away from the little light bulb by the access space I looked, but I did spy a dark blob far to the other side of the crawlspace. The mama cat is a black cat, green eyes, and longish fur, some sort of mix. I got my glasses, which I need for astigmatism correction and distance, and it was an animal for sure, by shape, and I moved some loose extra pipes around there for a little noise and the thing lifted it’s head and looked, and for sure it’s the mama cat as the full furry face with light green eyes was staring at me.

I hope this mama will tame down and that we’ll get to handle the kittens before they get too old and become hard to tame as well. I’d like to see what they are like and keep one if it’s a black girl, I love black cats, truly miss having one in my inside crew since my Samantha died in 2005. We’ll have to do something with the kittens, and the mama too, as she and they will only populate more and more.

We’ve adopted and rescued several cats over the years, currently have 7 indoors. Adding another to the mix is too much, it seems. I don’t really think so, just some others in my household have that opinion.

The biggest problem about having so many cats is flea control, when one of the cats we have was adopted as a young kitten we were assured she was treated for fleas and had none, and within a couple of weeks we started having flea problems in the house on the other cats and the new kitten when we’d not had any and hadn’t had to treat anything for fleas ever. It’s been a problem up and down ever since. Maddening. We have to treat the cats and do it every month and it’s something I need help doing and since DH is hard to motivate in the area of helping with my loved animals, be it cats or hens … they haven’t been treated regularly in months and months and the fleas and their eggs and dirt are just awful. So we keep the cats in one room and I want to let them out to roam the house, but can’t. I actually like to have 3 or 4 out, rotate who’s out so they all get to enjoy each other differently with us, without everyone mixing constantly. That is the way I think adding a new kitten would work well. 🙂