Feeding & Nutrition

A three-week-old kitten landed on my doorstep in a shoebox, dropped off by a neighbour who'd found her under a garden shed. No mother, no note, just a shaking little scrap with her eyes barely open and a mew that sounded like static. The rescue line said they were full and asked if I could hold her for the night. That night became three weeks, and I accidentally became a kitten foster without meaning to.

I'd never fed anything that small. The bottle they lent me felt enormous in her mouth, and she wouldn't latch. She pushed at it, turned her head, made these tiny furious noises like she was arguing with the concept of feeding. After an hour of both of us stressed and her getting cold, I rang the foster coordinator, who laughed kindly and said most first-timers fight the bottle. Warm the formula, she said. Stroke the back. Let her tell you how, don't force the how on her.

Kitten milk replacer is the only thing that goes in. Cow's milk is a shortcut to diarrhoea, and a dehydrated kitten doesn't have spare anything to lose. I mixed it to the temperature you'd test on your wrist, lukewarm, never hot enough to scald that tiny mouth, and warmed the bottle under running water between feeds because it cools faster than you'd believe in a cold kitchen.

The breakthrough was dropping the bottle entirely. I drew the formula into a small syringe, no needle, and rested the tip at the side of her mouth rather than the front. She sucked it herself once she tasted it, slow at first, then with the greedy little conviction of something that had decided life was worth the effort. A few drops, pause, let her swallow, never flood her. Kittens this young can inhale liquid into the lungs if you rush, and that's a mess nobody comes back from.

Every two to three hours, around the clock. The 3am feed is its own kind of tired, the house silent, the kettle off so you don't wake the street. I set an alarm, dragged myself to the kitchen in a dressing gown, warmed the mix, and sat with her in a towel because she needed the heat as much as the food. A cold kitten won't eat, and a fed kitten who's cold still fades. The towel trick came from the coordinator too. Warm, contained, safe, like she was still tucked somewhere she trusted.

They can't go to the toilet on their own at that age. After each feed I'd take a damp cotton pad and gently rub her bottom until she went, the way a mother would lick. Sounds odd until you're doing it at four in the morning for a creature the size of your thumb, and then it's just care, no different from anything else you'd do for something that trusts you completely and can't say thank you.

I weighed her on the kitchen scales every morning, a ritual I took more seriously than my own breakfast. The first few days she barely held steady, and I panicked quietly into my coffee. Then she climbed, gram by gram, and the panic turned into a small daily victory I looked forward to. A kitten gaining is a kitten living. A kitten stalling means something's wrong, and you call someone faster than pride allows, because there's no time to spare at that size.

By week two she'd opened both eyes properly and discovered her legs, wobbling like a foal on a first try. By week three she was batting at the syringe like it owed her an apology and trying to climb my sleeve during feeds. That's when the bottle finally worked, because she'd decided the world was interesting and food was part of it, not a fight to be won.

She went to an adopter with a cat already at home and a garden she'll never be allowed to explore unsupervised, which is the right kind of boring ending. I kept the towel, because sentiment is allowed when the work was this small and this constant. Fostering that size asks more of you than you expect and gives back a version of tired you don't mind carrying, the kind that means something got done.

The weaning onto wet food came quietly, almost without me noticing. One morning she batted the syringe away and went for the saucer of sloppy mush I'd left as a test, and that was that, the bottle retired to a drawer for good. Watching something that small decide it was ready, on its own clock, taught me more about patience than any of the hard nights had. You can't rush the helpless ones. You just show up every few hours and trust the gram-by-gram gain.

The coordinator rang halfway through, just to check she was alive and gaining, and I realised I'd stopped dreading the calls. They'd become a chance to report good news, a small pride I hadn't felt about anything in months. Fostering that size asks more of you than you expect and gives back a version of tired you don't mind carrying, the kind that means something got done before you'd even finished your coffee.

I'd do the 3am feeds again tomorrow, and I'd complain the whole time, and I'd mean neither.