How Smudge Got His Name

The kittens.
Our new kittens.
The little black and white one is a male, the larger tabby is a female.

I was keeping the kittens in a box. Just an old corrugated cardboard box. And I was feeding them four times a day.
I gave them evaporated milk that first day then I worried it wouldn’t be nutritionally complete for them so the very next day I went out and bought kitten milk.
Holy cow!
They don’t give kitten milk away. Five dollars for an eight ounce can of the stuff. And once you open it, it’s only good for four days. I bought it anyway. I wanted to give the kittens a good start in life.
I would heat water in the microwave and put the baby bottle of cold milk in the hot water to warm it up. I carried that and some paper towels out to the cat room. They were hungry. They are always hungry. And when they hear me coming they start crying to be fed. I’d pick the babies from the box and set them on the floor. I’m mom now and they would follow me outside where I’d set the warming milk on a stump and take my seat. They climbed up on my feet and tried to claw their way up onto my lap. At a month old their little claws are already sharp and don’t feel good on a bare leg. When the milk was warm enough I’d start feeding them. First I’d feed one until I couldn’t stand to hear the other cry anymore then I’d switch and give the other one some milk. Sometimes I let them fight it out for the one and only nipple but as is the way of life, the bigger and stronger one always wins, and that was the tabby.
It took a couple of days for the kittens to get comfortable sucking from the bottle and even then the tabby did more chewing than sucking. I started bringing a plate of canned cat food with me and the tabby was happy to suck and chew the soft food. That left the bottle free for the little black and white one.
Once the black and white one had his fill I’d offer the bottle to the tabby. I think that milk is good for her too and even though she is still more interested in chewing than sucking, I’d squeeze the bottle and she’d drink her milk that way.

One morning I’d opened a different kind of kitten milk and I couldn’t get them to drink it. After trying for a while I gave up.
“They don’t like the new milk,” I told Mike when I came back in the house.
After having had the milk in the fridge for an hour or so, I warmed it before taking it back out and trying again. This time they tore right into it. Now I’m wondering if the problem was they wanted warm milk. It was room temperature so I didn’t think I had to warm it. Now, even if it’s a new can of room temperature milk I warm it anyway and they’ve never refused their milk again.
Besides eating a lot, kittens poop a lot! I had some puppy pads around and I used those for the bottom of the box. Then I got an old tee shirt for them to lay on. Several times everyday, every time I fed them, I had to change the pad and refold the tee shirt to give them something clean to lay on. And I had to clean the babies too. Once their little tummies were full, I’d dip a paper towel in the warm water and give them a bath.
After about a week of this and five tee shirts later I knew I had to find something else to keep them in. They were active enough that they moved the pad around and the poop wasn’t just on the puppy pad anymore and the box was starting to stink. I had to move them into something I could keep clean, but what?
I let the babies stay in the cat room all day while I tried to figure out what else I could keep them in. I took a pet bed and made them a little nest and I put them in it. They could climb out if they wanted to and I leave the outside door open during the day so I worried about them. I checked on them often and I was surprised to see that the older kittens were spending time in the cat room with them. The babies seemed much happier.
Maybe I didn’t have to keep them confined during the day anymore, but I felt like I needed to keep them safe during the night.
The only thing I could come up with to keep them in, that I could keep clean and they couldn’t climb out of was my yellow recycle tub. I took my recycles out of it and carried it around to the cat room. I lined it with a puppy pad and a fresh tee shirt and after their nine o’clock feeding I put them in for the night.
What a disaster that turned out to be! The plastic wasn’t absorbent like the cardboard box and the next day the babies were covered in poop! It was even in their ears!
I fed them first then I took them in to the bathtub and gave them a bath. I set them in the back of the bathtub as I got the water warm and as soon as the water started coming from the tap, the tabby started hissing at it.
Needless to say, neither one was crazy about having a bath. Afterward I put them in the sun to dry. When I checked on them a little later the tabby had gone in to her bed but the black and white one was still sitting in the sun.

That yellow recycle tub was NOT going to work. I let it rattle around in my head all day and I start to think that I’ll just let them stay in their bed at night and not confine them. They were happier and they weren’t fouling their bed.
Mike and I were working in the garage that very same day. We chatted as we worked and I looked up in time to see the little black and white baby come through the cat flap and out into the garage. I put him back in the cat room and before I had the door closed he came back through the flap again. That little stinker! Now there would be no keeping him in!

I expected to see the tabby come through the flap too but it was days before she was brave enough. I find it amusing that the smaller kitten is the more adventurous of the two.
But now I had something new to worry about. I didn’t want the babies to get lost in the garage at night or follow one of the cats through the outside flap and get lost in the dark or worse yet, fall prey to a predator. I decided I’d lock the cat doors at night.
The first night I did this something tried to dig under the outside flap to get in. It didn’t work. He didn’t get in. I think it was a raccoon. We have one that has been visiting in the night.
“How do you know it’s a raccoon?” you ask.
He’s left his paw prints behind a couple of times. Once on the floor with grease from the leftover chicken bones that I’d put out for the cats the night before and again in the bottom of the rainwater tub I keep outside the cat room as a drinking station for the critters.

Locking the cat flaps at night has been working pretty well. Spitfire is not happy about it though. He’s the smartest of the older kittens, either that or he’s the luckiest. He’s learned that there are some pretty yummy leftovers when I get done feeding the babies. He’s gotten so that he hangs out with the new babies all day long waiting for feeding time. Then it became such a challenge to keep him out of the food until after the babies were done that I had to lock him out of the kitten room. The door into the garage has glass the whole way to the floor and Spitfire will stand there, his paws on the window and cry at me. But I do open the door to the outside to let the fresh air in. One of these days he’s going to figure out that if he goes around the outside he can get in that way.

“Why don’t you feed the other kittens first?” you ask.
I do. But it doesn’t take Rascal, Spitfire and Feisty long to eat a can of food and they are always done with it before the babies are done eating.
The tabby is thriving on canned cat food. When I first started taking care of them, the tabby weighed eleven ounces, the black and white one weighed nine ounces. I weighed them yesterday and the tabby is almost a pound at fifteen point some odd ounces, and the black and white one is just ten ounces. The tabby likes the milk from the bottle but doesn’t suck often; content to lap at the milk as I squeeze the bottle. The black and white one only wants the bottle and has no interest in the canned food at all.
I know that besides food, living things need contact. A mother cat will nap and spend hours in the nest with her babies. I’m their mother now, or so they think, and I haven’t been spending much time with them beyond feeding them.
A few times I brought the babies around to the front while the Kipp’s were here. Maggie, their Bernese Mountain dog, is very good with all the cats and Rosie likes to help me feed the babies.

“So, have you thought about what to name the babies yet?” I asked Lamar.
“Let’s do what the Indians do and let them earn their names,” Lamar replied.
A couple of days later, again asking the question, Lamar says, “Mike called the black and white one cutie when he picked it up. How about Cutie?”
“He’s a boy. Cutie would be a better name for a girl.” Did that sound ungrateful?
On Wednesday Mike and I had some time where we weren’t doing much and I was feeling guilty. “Do you want to go out with me and sit with the kittens for a little while?” I asked him.
He said okay and I took my coffee and we went out. I set my coffee on our hillbilly side table, aka a tree stump. The black and white one made it to me first and I picked him up as he tried to climb my leg. I handed him to Mike and I cuddled with the tabby who came in second.
The babies were hungry. I’d fed them a couple of hours earlier and I wasn’t going to feed them now. They would have to wait another couple of hours until it was time. I tried leaving some dry kitten food for them but the other cats just eat it. The black and white baby wasn’t happy and was being very vocal. Mike had had enough and handed him back to me. The tabby was nosing around my chin and the black and white one, whom I just sat in my lap, came up behind her, stuck his nose in her butt and started sucking.
I know right! Gross!
I told Momma about it on the phone. “He wasn’t ready to lose his momma,” she replied and if she was grossed out, she didn’t let on. “Remember Babs, the little kitten I’d gotten from you one year? She was a little young and not ready to lose her momma either and she used to suck on my clothes.”
The next day when the Kipp’s came to feed the wild cats, I got a bottle for Rosie to feed the babies.
“Are you going to tell them what’s on his face?” Mike asked.
I told Rosie and Lamar the story and ended with, “We can call him Shitface,”
“You can’t say that in church,” Mike admonished.
I know. Not nice. But a name he earned.
Rosie was feeding him and she talked to him as he suckled. “You look like you have a smudge on your nose,” she cooed.

“Smudge,” I exclaimed. “That sounds a lot nicer than Shitface doesn’t it?”
Lamar laughed. “Yes it does.”
“And you can say that in church!” I said to Mike.
And Smudge got his name.
The very next day, I brought the kittens around for some social time and made a bottle for Rosie to feed Smudge, but the Kipp’s were early and Smudge wasn’t all that hungry. He was plenty squirmy though. Rosie set him down and picked up the little tabby for a little lovin.
“You  look like your eyeliner got away from you,” Rosie told the tabby. “That’s what mine was looking like and that’s why I stopped wearing it.”

“Cleo!” I said. “Like Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Cleopatra!”

And Cleo got her name.
And that is how, thanks to Rosie, both kittens got their names within a day of each other.
With that, we shall call this one done!