Author: jonber2021

A History of My Cats, Summary

Green dot – Alive and in our house.

Yellow dot – Alive and generally only goes to our house for protection and food.

Red dot – Alive but doesn’t live near us.

Black dot – Dead.

  • Mittens
  • Gumball
  • Tango
  • Shema
  • Sumi
  • Zoe
  • Ziggy
  • First litter Kitten 1
  • First litter Kitten 2
  • First litter Kitten 3
  • First litter Kitten 4
  • Oliver
  • Tubby
  • Cutie
  • Second litter Kitten 1
  • Second litter Kitten 2
  • Badger
  • Penelope
  • Bandit
  • Frenchie
  • Bigfoot

Total cats: 21

Current alive cats: 13

Current alive cats that live with us: 6

A History of My Cats, Part 6 of 6

Now with life calm and hosting 5 cats in our house (Mittens, Shema, Zoe, Ziggy [the male of the two original Maine Coons] and Cutie), my family started to get bored again. Zoe and Ziggy hadn’t gotten neutered yet. They once again started to get ideas, both my parents and Ziggy.

We decided why not, another litter. We get to try again and hopefully not having more than a 50% mortality rate this time. Zoe got pregnant again soon after, and it didn’t take a whole lot of time for the kittens to come out. 7 of them, twice in a row.

But we were much better prepared this time. There was still a kitten to perish in the first day, which we were expecting. What we weren’t expecting is an umbilical cord to wrap them all up and wrangle them together, which was very scary. Thankfully, it was undone on the first day, but it still was wrapped around one of the kittens’ feet, which took a little later to be fixed and now is a scar today.

Unlike last time, my mom weighed them everyday. This helped us make sure they were on track and weren’t starting to fall behind on milk. But one of them was. Despite our best efforts and a lot of trying to bottle-feed them, they still died.

This was a let-down, but we still had more than 60% more kittens than last litter. We had low hopes, but actually the other 5 kittens made it out fine. With our worries behind us, handling 8 Maine Coons in the same house was a pretty fun and chaotic time. It didn’t last long though, and they grew up. Once again, my mom hosted a (Fake) democratic process. Here’s a list of the surviving second litter of kittens:

  • Light Gray – Now named Badger. He was the biggest kitten, by far. He’s very fluffy and a little goofy, but also decently affectionate and very playful. Has a gray and white smooth fur.
  • Big Tabby – Now named Frenchie. Along with Bigfoot, his gender was uncertain and still is today. He’s pretty moderate in all aspects of personality. Has a gray mix tabby fur.
  • Bigfoot – Named after how he was the one who got his foot tied by the umbilical cord. Also moderate in personality. Has gray fur with a very white muzzle.
  • White Stripe – Now named Penelope. Very cute and has very sharp claws. Very playful. She has a distinctive white stripe on the middle of her face, and looks scarily like her mom.
  • White Muzzle – Now named Bandit. I think she’s very cute. Isn’t playful at all. Whenever she was picked up, she would scream extremely loudly. Has a white triangle on her face.

We ended up keeping Badger, and the reasoning was that my mom wanted to see just how big we would get. She probably made the correct call, but I still wish we could’ve kept Bandit instead.

Now, it’s just Zoe, Ziggy, Cutie and Badger that live with us. Mittens and Shema pretty much only be outside but we feed them and occaisonally pet them.

A History of My Cats, Part 5 of 6

Those were some of the most exciting and anxious months of my life, waiting for the ‘day’ to arrive. We even placed bets on when it would. Eventually, I woke up one morning to a lot of high pitched squeaking, and it wasn’t rats. The next few days are just a blur. We all put so much focus into the kittens. It’s weird because we were expecting 3 to 5 kittens, and got 7. There being 7 kittens, combined with that Zoe was a Maine Coon, young, it was all of our first times and she actually only had 5 working teats, it led to a bad time.

Quickly, 2 of the 7 kittens just faded and didn’t get enough milk in the first few days. They were new to us and we were expecting it so we didn’t get super sad. Our hopes were high for the rest of the kittens to survive the first few weeks, when one of them got an injury and quickly became in critical condition since she couldn’t nurse well. Dead at a week old. Then another kitten who was also behind on nutrition died. That was definitely hard for my family to get through.

Less than half of the 7 kittens ended up living. They were:

  • Dark Gray (now named Oliver) – Named for his consistently dark fur. He was a very stoic and calm kitten, who didn’t play often and definitely was not very affectionate.
  • Tubby – Named for how fat he looked. He was a goofy tuxedo kitten, who was very playful and affectionate. He was the biggest.
  • Light Gray (now named Cutie) – Named for her consistently light gray fur. She was a super affectionate and a little playful kitten. One of her eyes was actually blind.

Of course, my family was not about to keep 3 more kittens. After an actual democratic process, we decided Cutie would be worth it the most to keep, and gave the other 2 away.

A History of My Cats, Part 4 of 6

Sumi got hit by a car and was killed on the spot early in the morning. My mom came into my room, tears on her face I’d never seen before, and we just hugged. I remember a few days before the crash I was trying to lure Shema outside with treats and Sumi came and looked up with the cutest face and Shema just went back inside.

That was the first time I’ve experienced so much grief. For the next few weeks, it felt like there was a hole where my heart was. That’s all I can say about it though, I was mostly okay. My mom wasn’t. She wanted a replacement immediately. after a 6 hour drive and >$4000 spent, she came back with my dad and holding two new young kittens. Purebred Maine Coons. They were the most amazing things we’ve ever saw. Without my bias, I would say they’re much better than Shema.

One of them was a male and one of them was a female. They were both from different families. My family got some ideas, but they were conflicted. My mom put it up to the democratic process to decide whether or not they would have kittens, to which she veto’d and decided yes. After a year of patiently not neutering them, the female (Zoe) got pregnant.

 

A History of My Cats, Part 3 of 6

With Tango being not liked and both him and Mittens generally absent, my family was still searching for a good affectionate cat. My birthday was coming up, and I was too, so for my birthday my family let me get a cat from the shelter.

They were expecting me to get some cute and nice cat. Instead, I glanced over all those and saw a little tortoiseshell girl hiding away in her locker. She was obviously very scared. I chose her, to my family’s dismay. The second I opened the locker door, she darted across and out the room.

Shema, named after one of my idols at the time, was not a very well-behaved cat. I suspect that she had gone through abuse or trauma before being taken in by the shelter. She was a chronic pisser on everything that was valuable like my backpack, and was very scared by anything. When we had people over, she would hide under a bed. But I still loved her very much, and she was the most comfortable with me. There would be times where she would cuddle with me to bed every night.

A few weeks later, my family brought in another cat. They said it was for my brother’s birthday (which had been a couple months ago) but I’m pretty sure it’s because they hated Shema. He was an orange tabby long-hair, and he was positively huge, at least compared to all our other cats. He was the perfect mix of cute, cuddly, and cool for my family. He was all of their undisputed favorite from the second they saw him in the shelter where I was looking.

He was named Sumi. Sumi was definitely more calm than Shema. But, their differences could not be ignored, and soon after we got them they started avoiding each other. Eventually, Sumi got the downstairs, where all my family lived, and Shema got the upstairs where I lived. It would’ve been a pretty good deal, but it was hindered by the fact that all of the entrances to the outside were downstairs.

That and how Shema couldn’t control her bladder led to a pretty bad situation. The next couple years of my life were absolutely horrid, in regards to how often Shema peed everywhere. We tried a litter box, but it was our first time with them and messed up all the important parts. After around a year of us toying with different solutions to the predicament, something happened that ultimately ended it.

A History of My Cats, Part 2 of 6

Because Gumball only gradually left us and also was very mean and clawed us often, we were not sad to see her go. Although, we were already getting bored of Mittens, so we took it upon ourselves to get a new cat. We went to a shelter and found a cute little tabby. I named him Tango because it looked like he liked the name.

When we got home with him, the rest of my family quickly started not liking him, since he was basically like Mittens in mostly being in the house just for food. But he took a liking to me, and I took a very big liking to him after seeing that his eyes were lazy; I think it’s what made him so cute for me.

Tango eventually started falling to the same fate as Gumball, coming inside less and less often. After disappearing for several months, he came back dragging around half of his dead tail. He had gotten into a fight with another cat or something and half of his tail was dead. My family debated whether to put him down or not, and it made me very stressed and sad. I convinced them to spend $2500 to amputate the dead half of his tail.

Later, we found out he had been going to the neighbor across the street from us, and pretty much lived with him now. He had also gotten really fat, funnily enough. I haven’t seen him in a while, but I’m pretty sure he’s still alive and well.

A History Of My Cats, Part 1 of 6

My first experience living with cats was when I was around 5 or 6 years old. A friend of my mom had a new litter of cats to give away and we came over and snagged two kittens. A tuxedo male and a grey tabby female. Every family who has ever had at least one cat with white paws will name it Mittens, so that’s what we did. The female was named Gumball, but I can’t remember why.

We quickly learned of the hardships of owning cats, or at least I did. We didn’t have to deal with litter boxes since we let them outside freely via a cat door, however this ended up with them being attached to the outside. Especially Gumball, who started only coming in for food and hissed at us. She started coming in less often and went missing for several months a couple times before we found her dead on the road run over by a car.