Kinky, Part I

I have a new kitten, or "kuting" (pronounced koo-ting') in Tagalog. She popped into my life early on Wednesday, November 11 at 5:55am when I was headed out of my condo on the way to teach the 6:30am class. Walking up the little hill on Scout Bayoran Street, I heard a sound like a car alarm emanating from the spot by the road where people leave trash and leftovers that area cats come around to eat. I soon realized that the big sound was coming from the tiniest of kittens, staggering out into the street towards me screaming at the top of its lungs. Its eyes must have just barely opened.

"Here's my cat," I thought, and picked it up. It immediately stopped meowing, and a quick peek at its underside suggested that it was probably a she - a guess soon to be verified by the vet. We
jumped in a tricycle and sped over to yoga, where the students were surprised to see this adorable, teensy kitten with me. She literally fit in the palm of my hand - which was fortunate, because not wanting to leave her alone in the dark studio during the early morning class, I held her in a washcloth in my hand throughout the whole thing. Good thing that Bikram Yoga is supposed to be taught without hands-on corrections!

I'd been waiting for the right cat to come along for a while. It is said that fortune favors the
prepared mind, which is what my mind was with respect to this 2-week-old kitten. My family are total cat people. We always had one, briefly two, while I was growing up, my parents now have two and my sister one. I've seen so many cats on the streets of Manila, generally they do a lot better than the stray cats I've seen in New York and Boston, probably because of the warm year-round climate here. But it's clearly not an easy life, and I've seen many dead cats and many dead kittens on the street. I've also seen many tiny kittens alone in the street, kittens who are undoubtedly not long for this world. I've always thought it would be fascinating to raise a kitten from a newborn, though I didn't want to take a kitten away from its mother before being weaned. A newborn kitten tragically separated from its mother before being weaned, however, I knew would provide me the chance to rear a tiny kitten. After I moved into my new apartment on the weekend of November 6th-7th, I guess the universe knew I was ready to take on the challenge of rearing a baby kitten.

By the time the 6:30am class was over, studio staff had arrived and the kitten had someone to hang out with in the cool lobby rather than having to sweat it out with me in the yoga room. I ran down to the deli downstairs to get some milk for her, but didn't have much luck trying to feed her using the straw as a dropper.

After teaching the 8:30am class, what else was there to do but Google "raising baby kittens"? Sometimes it seems that most of what I learn these days is from the internet. I quickly learned that she would need to be bottle-fed formula every 2-3 hours for the first several weeks of her life. Also that for the first few weeks, she wouldn't be able to go to the bathroom for herself - at the age when kittens are in their mother's nest, the mother licks them to stimulate going to the bathroom and swallows the waste, thus preventing the nest from being soiled. So tiny kittens need to be massaged with a damp tissue to allow them to go to the bathroom! When I did this for my little girl, she peed amamazing amount for such a tiny creature - indeed she did not produce so much pee again for several weeks when she was much bigger and eating and drinking much more. It must have been a while since she'd last been helped to go to the bathroom.

What a day to pick up a new kitten - unusually, I had two more classes to cover in Makati in the evening for another teacher. I didn't bother to find out if pets are allowed on the MRT (turns out
they aren't, but it was a long time before I found that out) - I tucked the curled-up little girl in
the shawl around my neck and she quietly sat there as we went through the bag search and into the MRT. (About until the time I went home for Christmas, she proved an expert shawl-hider and we sneaked into malls and the MRT frequently.) I stopped at MegaMall in Ortigas to stop in at the pet store I'd seen there, Animal House, which turned out to be a great place - they have vet services, and they carry kitten formula and bottles. They weighed her (135g), confirmed her gender as female, estimated her age at 10 days to 2 weeks, and instructed me to bring her back in a week for her first deworming treatment.

Before teaching I met my friend Andria for coffee. I'd been challenged to get the little baby to
drink her milk, but Andria (who has a young son and thus experience feeding babies) got her to take her first long drink, and she was an expert bottle-drinker from that time forward. Andria and I also came up with a name for the kitten. She has an unusual tail - it's very common for cats in Manila to be tailless or to have strangely formed tails. This little kitten had a tail that was normal for about six or so vertebrae, then turned about 90 degrees to the left for about six more vertebrae. With such an adorable kink in her tail, (and a family traditon of having cats with suggestive names - it's a long story, but the cat we got whe I was in 5th grade was named Beaver - that's right, a pussy named Beaver), how could I resist calling her Kinky?

Kinky came with me to the Makati studio, slept like a champ while I was teaching, and got fed after each 90-minute class. Then we took a cab home and thus began two weeks of waking up every two hours to feed the baby. All I can say is I'm glad kittens grow up so much faster than human babies! I can't imagine waking up for middle-of-the-night feedings for months on end. Thank goodness the little princess was sleeping through the night after about two weeks - two weeks during which she more than doubled her weight!