"Kitty" had her kittens this afternoon!

Hi, my name is Candace and my daughter's name is Shannen and our cat's name is Kitty, hence our user name. :-)

We adopted Kitty about 8 weeks ago from a friend who was moving to another state and wouldn't be able to keep her. We made an appointment with the vet a few weeks after we got her to have her checked out and spayed. To our surprise, she was pregnant!

The vet told us we had the option to spay her but I just didn't have the heart to, not to mention I wasn't too keen on teaching my ten year old daughter that this was the way to handle the situation.

Kitty is absolutely precious and loving and she has been a welcome addition to my daughter's and my lives. Apparently she was the runt of her litter so she's not really bigger than a large kitty. :-)

This is her at her biggest about a day and a half before she had her kittens:


As you can see, she's pretty small. We have been reading this board a lot for the past few days so we could learn as much as possible about giving her a comfortable and safe birthing experience.

We live in a pretty small apartment so there isn't really any place for a large dog kennel but we set up nesting boxes in a few places that she seemed to like hanging out.

She got really lovey dovey the last couple of weeks and every day we would think "this is it" but as in everything cats do, they do it in their own time and their own way. Lol

Last night she followed me into the kitchen and I noticed a few bloody streaks on the ceramic tile which freaked me out but she seemed fine and just wanted a snack.

Last night she somehow got locked in the bathroom and I found her in the bathtub. I think her water broke while she was in there because there was a residue in the tub.

But she still didn't seem like she was in active labor and she was really lovey and actually crawled back in bed with me four a few more hours where she had a nice little snooze.

When she woke up, she was very insistent for attention and wanted me to pet her everywhere. Occasionally her body would kind of shudder and then she would fun for her nest in the closet. I think she was having contractions.

I got up to get a glass of water and didn't see her follow me out of the room, assuming she was in her nest.

Twenty minutes later I could hear her yowling but couldn't find her in her nest. All the best laid plans and Kitty had somehow gotten up underneath our hope chest in the living room and had already manages to have two of her kittens. I was so proud of her! They looked healthy and happy and she had done everything she was supposed to do. What a natural!

I let her stay under the hope chest for about another hour but it seemed like she was done laboring so I carries the nest out to her and got her and the kitties in it and took them back to my closet.

About ten minutes later I heard her yowling again and she had had a third kitten. It's been about 7 hours since her last kitten and she seems very calm and is doing well taking care of the kitties.

She's being very sweet and loves to hear me praise her for being a good mommy. She's also letting me pet her and even let me pick up each kitty to check them out. Since she was so calm, I took this opportunity to clean her nest and even took a warm washrag to her to get her cleaned up. She didn't seem to love that but she was definitely a lot more happy and comfortable when I put her back in the nest. She even ate almost a whole bunch of food! She was starving after all that exertion. :-)

Here's a picture of the new little family:


Everything seems to have gone very smoothly and I'm so proud of kitty. I just want to make sure to do everything I can so that she stays healthy and the kittens thrive.

She had two that have similar coloring to her and one Tabby. My daughter has already decided that we HAVE to keep Cheddar (as she named her).

The one thing I thought was weird? Two of them don't have tails. Is this normal?

This with no tails isnt common, but not necessarily unique. Probably something genetic.

You seems to do everything very well, but I had not seen you mention weighting them.

Get a scale measuring in grammes (electronical, many be cheap) and weight them every day.

Good luck!

The little red one is probably a boy . Torbies (this is what Kitty's color/pattern is called, or tortie/tabby if you don't want to abbreviate) can have red females so there's a possibility it's a girl but 75% of red tabbies are male so chances are higher it's a boy. If you want to post a booty shot I'm sure someone will be able to tell . The other 2 are female if they're torties (the one I can see in the pic is definitely tortie). The tailless gene isn't rare but it's not super common either. Kind of cool!

Thanks a lot for the info guys! I have not weighed them yet but will definitely get a scale tomorrow that weighs in grams. It's about one thirty in the am here. We're all tuckered out but had to come down from our adrenalin high so we can get some sleep!

As far as the two tail-less kitties, I can't believed I missed that until just a couple hours ago. I have wanted to fuss with them too much because I didn't want to make Kitty anxious. This last time I went to check on her, she wanted to have a little bit more kibble so I sat on the floor of the closet, talking to her and keeping her company while she ate. She seemed to relax a bit while I did that and actually let me examine the kittens in a bit more detail. That's when I noticed the missing tails! Lol. The Torbie/Tabby is one of the ones without a tail as well as the one that matches her coloring almost perfectly. The only one with a tail is the darkest one. They are all perfectly adorable though and again, I couldn't be more proud of Kitty. She's a champ! That being said she will definitely be getting spayed as soon as the kitties are weaned.

I will try to take a few more pictures but I'm a little limited because I am using my tablet and it only takes rear facing pics. I have a great digital camera but have to work out how to attach it to the tablet. :-)

I did some research on tailless cats and found out they are called bobtailed or manx. My friend confirmed that there was a bob-tail Tom that wandered her neighborhood so that might be the daddy cat.

Can't wait to find out if they are boys or girls...will post more pics as soon as I can!

Bob-tail, yes, that just means they have a bobbed tail (). But Manx is a breed, and the chances of random kittens having any pure breed in them is pretty slim, so you wouldn't call them Manx kittens. I love their little bobtails!

I can see the one kitten is a tortie, so almost definitely a girl (only about 1 in 3000 torties is a boy). If the other dark one has both red and black (or brown) on her, then she's a girl too (if she looks like Kitty then yes--you can see how Kitty has those small orange bits on her face and side). The red (orange) tabby, like I said, has a 75% chance of being male, 25% chance of being female. It'll be interesting to see how it goes .