Mistakes and Learnings - Day 13

Another night down and not much is new.  Phoenix is doing well, has gone up his 10g in a day, and continues to poop pumpkins (the pumpkin has turned his poop orange).  Though admittedly, the poop does seem to be getting more solid, but it's a bit "curdled".

On another note, he ate 7.5mL of food in one sitting today!  This is his largest feeding yet.  The charts say his stomach has a 7mL capacity based off of his weight now, so it's a little over, but we should be fine for hitting our daily target.  Fun fact: An estimate on the daily target is to take the weight in oz and multiply by 8.  This gives us the number of mL we aim for in a 24 hour period, and so far we've been on track!

Parenting Fails

We overslept today.  An alarm went off at 6am (3 hours after Phoenix's last feeding), and apparently both of us went back to bed.  I may need to reconsider the ease of being able to say, "Alexa, stop".  I don't even remember saying it, but Nguyen said he heard me say it, and apparently Alexa didn't.  So he followed up with his own "Alexa, stop".  I don't remember any of this.  Ultimately, I woke up around 7:15am instead.  A full 4.25 hours after Phoenix's last feeding.  I definitely panicked, but the little guy was crawling around looking for food per usual.  All seemed well in the world of Phoenix; I was clearly more frazzled than he was.

Later in the day, I had decided to go ahead and try bottle feeding instead of syringe feeding.  I went ahead and cut the first nipple on one of my new bottles and tested out the flow of milk on my wrist.  Too fast.  One nipple gone, 8 attempts left.  I was much more conservative on the next cut.  I cut so little that there was no opening.  Thankfully, that left room to try again.  I cut a bit more off and ended up with a pretty good cut!  So come time for the next feeding, I gave the bottle a shot.  Whether it was me or if it was Phoenix, the result was the same.  Complete failure, milk on the blanket, and a hungry kitten.  Back to the syringe I went.

Continual Learning

I attended a free webinar on kitten care today.  In general, most of the information is stuff I've read or watched in other places.  I did learn something interesting about the umbilical cord!  It mentioned how kittens that are still with their mother are likely to lose the umbilical cord sooner than orphaned kittens.  This is because the mother tends to lick that area causing the umbilical cord to fall off when it's becoming loose.  But as people taking care of an orphaned kitten, we tend to avoid touching that area and wait for it to fall off without any added help.  Phoenix's umbilical cord definitely stayed on longer than I had expected, so this reasoning might explain why!

I also received a text from Linda (my resident kitten-guru!).  She had read my blog post from yesterday and asked me to call her if I wanted advice on cutting the bottle nipples.  Great timing!  I had already written today's blog section all about my failures with prepping the bottle nipples by this time, so this offer came with impeccable timing 😂.  Turns out, with a bit of work and a butter knife, you can force a miracle nipple into my bottles!  I also learned a tip on how to use toothpick to help cut future bottle nipples.  For now, the miracle nipple should get me through for quite some time, but I'm glad to learn that this is apparently an art form that takes some practice.

And so with miracle nipple in place, I attempted another bottle feeding in the evening.  Success!  This was actually much easier than syringe feeding.  He latched on much faster and dined away.  And while I had read multiple times that estimating feeding amount was more difficult with bottle feeding, it somehow still took me by surprise.  From my side, he had eaten "a ton".  But I had gotten rough weight estimates on formula.  Roughly 1mL is about 1g... and the bottle had only dropped about 2g in weight.  So much for "a ton" - seems like there was room for plenty more.  So I gave him another set from the bottle and let him eat his fill.

I got another pro-tip from Linda today.  We don't have a microwave, so we've been heating up our formula by filling up a cup with hot water, and then putting a bottle or container containing formula into the cup to warm up.  Without the microwave, we've been using our electric kettle multiple times per day.  Linda mentioned using a thermos that could keep the water hot for days!  So I now have a thermos filled with hot water so that we can be even more efficient with our feedings.  This will be especially useful overnight.

Flashback

I don't think I ever showed a picture of where we first found Phoenix!  He was under our small porch/deck when we found him.  You can see the little deck that I'm talking about in the first picture on the left.  The last two are pictures from under that deck where we found him by himself.  I don't have any pictures of him under there.  The first time I went out, I was worried about getting in the way of the mother, so I went back inside pretty quickly.  The second time I went out, I was more concerned about bringing him inside.  That and the spiders.  I am rather afraid of spiders, and from the pictures you can probably understand why I was stressed about getting this little kitten out.

I was also looking back at some of the original photos of him.  He's grown so much!  It's a little insane.  Here's a side by side from day 1 to today.  You can't really see his body from the day 1 picture, but you can see that my hands aren't curled around the kitten as much as the newer photo.  Also, just look at his big head now!  Check out Photos By Day to scroll down and see pictures of him over the course of each day.

Photos and Videos

Butt baths are going to be a part of our lives moving forward.  I gave him another one today, and I will likely need to do this 1-2 times per day while the diarrhea is still a thing.  Here's his post bath photos!

It's always fun to walk by and check out where he's decided to sleep for that moment.  He moves around often enough, so it's always fun to see where he's ended up!  Found him in this headlock today, and had to snap a picture!

Another set of various sleeping photos throughout the day.

Sleeping kitten video!  It's short, so definitely watch to the end!

I caught him sleeping with his tongue sticking out, but when I went to snap a photo, he covered his face with his paw!  It was as if he knew I was coming.  "Stop embarrassing me on your blog, Mom".