Yay, for Button!

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Poor little guy passed right out, during the drive. For a while, there, he was really trying to get out of the carrier, and almost got the door open!

The exchange has been done, though. He is now with the Cat Lady. He’ll stay at the rescue for a week for standard vet care, then – if all goes well – be on his way to his forever home.

Even the Cat Lady commented on how tiny he is. He has definitely grown since we found him in the junk pile, but not by much!

One of the Cat Lady’s daughters was in the vehicle with her. She ended up holding Button rather than putting him in their carrier, and he actually started to fall asleep in her arms within minutes!

The Cat Lady also gave us a donation of cat food. There was a couple of cases of cat food – the kind that comes in pairs of packets with individual meal portions – plus a small bag of “immunity boosting” kibble.

She also found her bottle of the antibiotic drops for the eye baby. We are to give one drop in each eye, every 12 hours, for at least 14 days. She also warned that this stuff does does tend to burn, but to make sure not to wipe it off.

The hard part is going to be opening the eyes enough to get the drops in there!

I’ve got the kitten inside and in the carrier for the night. I’d gone out for my evening routine and found her in the outer yard, heading for the driveway, giving out her squeaky meow! The poor thing can’t open her eyes at all, even after we wash them. The eyelids are just too swoleen.

The girls and I will be doing the first dose of drops, soon. The kitten has already eaten and settled down in the carrier. Thanks to the individual portion cat food donation, it was easy to mix up some cat soup, just for the eye kitten, with the same supplements we use for the big batch we made for all the cats. When we added the food and water bowls to the carrier, I got some of the soup onto her mouth a few times before she figured it out and started lapping it up.

She asked us to keep her up to date on how things go. After Button has gone on to his forever home, they might be able to take this one for care. I appreciate that, but fear they’ll be stuck with another one of our sick cats – to go with the 6 cats from us they already have, all of which have had some sort of health problem! At least with The Wolfman, it was an injury that healed, rather than things like viral infections or heart problems.

She has us booked for the beginning of September for a spay or neuter. She’ll send me the exact date when she has a chance. This will be whichever cat we can catch, so I really want to get that isolation shelter finished before then. I was able to do the last of the painting this afternoon, which means assembling the frame can start tomorrow!

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Several minutes later…

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Wow. So much just happened in just a short time!

First, I started getting updates from the Cat Lady. Button has been eating well and sleeping well.

From his teeth, he looks like an 11 week old kitten, but he’s the size of a 6 week old kitten!

His eyes are weepy, which we could see, but he also had ulcerations in the back of his mouth, which we did not know about! Classic calicivirus, she says, and expects him to be put on antibiotics when he sees the vet tomorrow. Which likely means other kittens have it, too.

She also warned us that there is a severe panleukopenia outbreak in the province right now, and what symptoms to watch out for, and recommending to use bleach to clean even the outside bowls, if possible.

As we were chatting, my daughter came down and we took the eyes baby into the washroom to try and get those drops in. I don’t know that we managed to open the eyes enough, but at least it’s a start.

While that was happening, the phone started ringing. When I got to it, I found a message from my mother to call her.

*sigh*

My mother just heard geese flying by, and that reminded her that she wanted to take me and the girls to a nearby migratory reserve.

She has no idea what a problem this request is.

I told her, I would talk to the girls.

She didn’t like that, and then offered me a choice. We could go to the reserve and have a picnic there, or we could share a meal at the one local restaurant, then go to the cemetery where my father, brother and other family members are buried. That, I definitely don’t want to do, because then she’ll want to come here, and that’s never pleasant.

She could tell I wasn’t enthused, and I tried to explain.

First, there’s the fact that we all keep different hours, so my daughters would have to mess up their schedules. Which they wouldn’t mind doing, if it was for something pleasant, but my mother is never pleasant with them, but rather always testing and prodding and judging.

The other thing is, it would leave my husband here at the farm on his own – and no one to be on watch in case our vandal has another mental break and decides to burn the house down or something. A concern she dismissed.

What I couldn’t figure out how to explain was that, because of her own behaviour towards them – and how she treats me – the girls just don’t want to be around her.

It didn’t matter, though. She instead went on a rant about how I keep the girls basically imprisoned upstairs, and they should be free to go places.

I told her, just because she doesn’t see something, and it doesn’t involve her, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. The girls can go where they want (frankly, I wish they did want to go out more, but they don’t). They are adults and free to do so.

She instead started ranting that no, they aren’t free, and now she can see why the government takes children away from their parents, because they don’t know how to parent…

Which is when I said goodbye and hung up.

I think she has forgotten that the girls are 28 and 31 years old, not the 9 and 12 year old’s they were when we left this province because of her. She did not approve of our homeschooling and kept reporting us to different levels, making up lies about what was going on in our household (which she knew nothing about, but thought she did). Each time, we got “investigated” and they recognized that this was a problem with her, not us – but at that point, the next place left for her to report us would be children’s services, and she would have been perfectly willing to do that, and have the girls taken from us, simply because she did not approve of how we were raising our kids.

*sigh*

Well, that’s it. I’m done for now. I need to update my family and siblings on what just happened, because she’s going to cause problems for us over this.

*sigh*

I would really love to have a boring life right now.

The Re-Farmer

Update: Well, I talked to my daughters, and they really do want to go to the nature reserve. With my daughter’s work schedule, though, she had deadlines she needs to meet before the end of August, so we looked into September. My mother’s 93rd birthday is in September, so that fits, too. So we picked an open day, I called my mother back, and now she’s all happy – though she really tried to get it to be sooner! September will be too cold, she says… 😄

All that drama, and for what?

*sigh*