Week 4 Let the Weaning Begin...

Hello Cat Corner-ians,

The Easter Candy Kittens are now a month old!!  Also little Cadbury's Eye looks AMAZING!  Take a peak below

​After a month of growing and learning, it's finally time to take the next step of being independent kittens!  Unfortunately it is my LEAST favorite thing in terms of fostering.  Kittening can be a messy ordeal and for someone who likes things clean this always can be a bit of a shock, but nothing is as messy as teaching kittens to eat real food! 

Cadbury's Working Eyes

The process of getting off Mother's milk and onto real food is called weaning and similar to human babies you can't just go from milk to solids there is the fun mush phase...which is MESSY!  As a foster I'm much more familiar with weaning in terms of motherless kittens and bottle babies, having a Mom in the mix is ruining my weaning flow so far.  When you are bottle feeding, you are completely in control of nutrition so you can wait with the bottle until they nibble on the wet food a bit and put some in their mouth so they have hungry bellies when wet food appears.  With a Momma Cat the babies look at the wet food and go umm excuse me the milk bar is open I don't want that!  We've definitely tried wet food though it's only day 4 of weaning.

Cadbury is fine to taste the food if I make him...but will ignore it if on his own.

​Peep actually seems interested in the food and will eat it if I put her right in front of it to show her I put it down, but won't seek it on her own.

Paas will lick food off a spoon, but will not eat it off the plate, she's still too fancy for that.

Russ was breaking my heart, would spit out everything I put in his mouth and walk directly to the milk bar.  I went to go clean in the foster room and saw him with a mouth full of kibble...that little sneak has been weaning himself on solids not wet food mush!  He prefers the nursing Momma/baby kitten food I guess but at least he is doing the process some how.

Weaning can take up to 20 days to complete so 4 days in and this kind of progress is great. 

In Momma news Easter was trusting enough to take a short nap with me in the foster room the other day, she was still in her little favorite corner of the room in the crate.  I know she moves and does plenty while I'm not there but whenever I'm in the room corner it is.  Hissing and clawing has been a little less and the nap was a huge step letting me know she trusts me enough to relax. 

I tried to play with her with a feather toy today and she was not interested at all.  I'm hoping maybe after she is fixed maybe it'll be easier to work with her.