Helicopter Mom - Days 5 to 7

I had had big plans for the weekend.  I was going to be able to nap during the day and sort out my life and be prepared for taking care of the kitten amidst the upcoming work week.  While I did get some prep stuff out of the way, napping ended up low on the priority list.  Instead, I fully embraced being a Helicopter Mom for the weekend.

Stressful Weekend

Needless to say, I was a bit stressed going into my weekend.  I spent Saturday morning in bed sitting next to the kitten.  I took the opportunity to read a chapter of my book... but I spent a chunk of my time googling what I could think of.  Here's a screenshot of an example of my Saturday.

To be honest though, little kitten had a crazy appetite at this point.  In fact, we were more worried about him eating too much and going into another crash.  My stress peaked to the point where I needed to find someone to talk to and ask questions of.  I would have called the vet, but they are closed on weekends.  So after some googling, I came across an internet website called 'justanswer'.  It's basically a website where you can ask a website of an expert (in my case a cat veterinarian), and get an answer.  And they had a one week trial for $1.  Perfect, ask a question and get an answer in minutes!  Of course, my first question came back with a "this is taking longer to answer than normal", but all in all, after about 45-60 minutes I had an answer back.  The takeaway?  Keep doing what we're doing.  Consider adding metamucil to two feedings per day, but otherwise just keep taking care of him.

But I was still stressed out and worried. Was I being paranoid?  Was I overreacting?  You be the judge, but when I look at this video, I can't help but feel his back legs just are NOT working the way they were before from this blog post - Growing Strong and Failing Fast.

All that aside, I did find a chance to improve my photo taking skills.  All things considered, he looked pretty healthy!

And like that, Saturday night was upon us.  For whatever reason, I have myself convinced that if he's gonna go, it will happen overnight.  Not because I read an article, found a stat, or anything.  It just seems like night-time is when this kind of thing would happen.  And so the night started, and at 4:46am I sent another question through justanswer; his kitten poop was just a little too soft for me (I'll spare you the pictures... for now).  So thus started another conversation in the early hours of the morning.  Go figure, yet again, everything was ok, and we should just keep doing what we're doing!

And at 9:15am we weighed our little kitten and found out he weighed a whopping 102g!  At 9:30pm the night before, he was 93g.  That was almost a 10g gain in 12 hours!  That was how much we were hoping he would gain in a day.   This was super encouraging, and so things started looking up on Sunday.

It was Sunday that I finally placed some orders for materials we would need only if little kitten was going to continue to make it.  This included some more syringes (this time the right size), some improved fleece blankets, and a fake heartbeat!  I also bought a new toy for Asher (who had decided on Day 3 that he wasn't angry at me anymore).

Things were looking up and by the end of the evening he was up to 111g.  That's almost 20g in one day, and it was definitely encouraging.  He clearly was eating VERY well, but why don't you take a look for yourself?

Back to Work

Monday came around again, and I was dreading it a bit.  Being in meetings most of the day while having a kitten that needs to eat every 2-3 hours can have its challenges.  Add in the not so wonderful sleep, and it makes Monday less exciting.  I'm so fortunate to work with such a great team and understanding individuals!  Little kitten has found a number of opportunities to show off his fantastic lungs in my meetings as well.  And he has a crazy appetite, sometimes resulting in him trying to eat things that aren't food (including the stuffed cow, my fingers, his towel, and his own leg):

 

All things considered, there's not a chance Nguyen and I could have done this had we not been working from home.  This constant attention and care would have been impossible with our prior schedules.  But this works out pretty well.  The only time that is the most awkward is in the morning.  Nguyen is in meetings from 8:30am to 11am each week day.  That means there's almost always a feeding scheduled in there somewhere, often falling between 9-10am.  So that's usually the one that I take care of, and Nguyen often times gets a lot of the feedings that fall between 2pm-5pm.  We're making it work, and it's definitely been a good tag team experience.  Well, I think so.  Poor Nguyen has to deal with helicopter mom... so he might have a different take on all this. 😆

Hello Phoenix!

It was also Monday that Nguyen and I officially announced little kitten's name to celebrate making it to 1 week old! Moving forward, he'll be known as Phoenix (hopefully the blog name makes even more sense now!).  Credit for the name goes to my boss, who technically put the name in my head the Wednesday prior!  It had stuck, and I honestly spent no other time thinking of other names.  Well, I did consider "White", and if you saw how I named all my horses in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you'd come to realize how horribly uncreative I am.  I also used to have a fish named Fish.  So I'm thankful for the Phoenix suggestion.  Nguyen apparently had been thinking Tiger or Tigre ("Tea - gray"), but I wasn't quite a fan.

To be fair, I always think a part of me will call this guy little kitten.  I sometimes even think of him as LK.  But Phoenix is such a good name considering the circumstances.  There was literal ash all around the day after we found him, fires were blazing all over, and he had many things stacked against him.  I also like the fact that our other cat's name is Asher - the names pair nicely in an awkward kind of way.  And who knows, Phoenix may develop some coloration as he gets older.  If he happened to come from some of the cats I've seen in the neighborhood, he might develop some orange spots to him!

Things have been looking up, and there's definitely hope.  Phoenix is now part of the family (turns out you can't add him to a pet insurance plan until he's 8 weeks), and like all doting parents, we can't help but show off this new addition to our family!

Closing Photos and Videos

I was hoping to catch us up to "today" by my next post, but seems like I need one more to cover my adventure to the vet (not as exciting as that sounds).

In lieu of catching up to today, I figured I'd close out this post with a number of pictures that I personally enjoy!

Nap Time!

Found him sleeping like this 😂

Searching for food

Waking him up to get ready to eat

He recently started yawning when you wake him up to eat!