Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The cuteness never ends...

Last weekend was a special treat. My parents came to visit. (I have no pictures of that.) Sure they wanted to see the new foundation in all it's glory. Doug was compelled to install a dimmer switch in the dining room (thanks, we love it!) and noodle with a couple other projects. We had a couple nice meals out together and just generally hung out around the house. My parents are pretty chill, so we like hanging with them. But Mom really wanted to get a little face time with the cutest baby on Alameda! So last Saturday we had Dan, Irene and little Natasha over for dinner! Maybe I'll get some more pics when Mom uploads hers. 















Now, while I must agree that Natasha is by far the cutest human baby we've had in our house.... We have gone against all rational thought and were totally sucked into bringing our own little baby home this weekend. We made the terrible mistake of stopping by PetCo on the way back from dropping the parents off at the airport. All we wanted was a new litter box! Of course the crazy cat rescue ladies were there. Of course they had a whole herd of little kittens on hand to tempt us with. And of course we had to pull out this little black ball of fuzzy cuteness and hold her.... 















You'll notice the beautiful hardwood floors underneath the kitten? That's because we adopted her!!! She's sitting in our office room right now! OMG she is the friendliest, most adorable little buzzing kitten ever. Jonathan suggested that we name her Pandora, since we figured that all hell would break loose as soon as we took her out of the box inside the house. Well that was a good prediction 'cause as soon as we brought her in, MuShu (our 3 year old Maine Coon) went straight for the jugular. It was a little scary, so we put Pandora in the office room in the back and we're just going to give them time to get used to each other through the door. 

Later on we showed Lucky (our oldest) the kitten and she totally didn't care. MuShu on the other hand is acting very put out. She actually threw a tantrum yesterday, crying and pounding her paws on the carpet in the dining room in front of Jonathan. Wish he had caught that on video. MuShu is calming down a little after a couple days. We hope that by the time Pandora comes out of quarantine MuShu will at least tolerate her enough to bond. The idea is that MuShu and Pandora can play and then MuShu will leave Lucky alone more. Lucky is too old and sick to play anymore. Lucky has been starting to act a little more normal and started coming out of the closet a bit since the foundation work stopped. We're very happy about that. 

So as soon as we brought Pandora home we noticed she sneezed a lot. And the snot coming out of her nose was not clear. When we adopted her, her foster ladies told us that the dry skin on her ear was just a little dry spot that would clear up and that the discharge from her sneezy nose was from the dry air and the fans they had been running all day in the room. (all the kittens that day had snotty noses and eyes) They assured me that she'd been to a vet and she had a clean bill of health. I admit that my internal radar saw red lights flashing but she was SO FREAKIN' CUTE. And we adopted MuShu from a different Petco rescue in Southern CA before with no issues at all so we gambled on this one.

Well, Pandora is now living up to her name. She was continuously sneezing when we brought her home, yellowish-green stuff coming out of her nose. And the dry patch on her ear (which was totally visible BTW) was getting worse. 

A trip to Providence Veterinary confirmed our fear that she had a fever, some kind of viral infection AND ringworm! Great. The vet was able to figure out the ringworm by waving a black-light over the skin. Apparently it glows! So now she gets to stay quarantined for 3 weeks while we give her baths and antibiotics. DRAG. Plus there's the mild threat of exposure to my husband, me and the other two cats in the house since ringworm can, in some cases, transfer to humans. Not common but it happens. (FYI, ringworm actually has nothing to do with worms. It is a fungus like athletes foot.)

Now, I understand that these things happen. I understand that non-profit animal rescues do the best they can with the limited resources they have to work with. I understand that the sweet, wonderful selfless ladies who are fostering the cats do the best they can as well. They are awesome and I salute them for the work that they do. I just think that maybe you need to be 100% sure that the kitten you are adopting out has a 100% clean bill of health. Not just the FIV test and some shots. I would think that ringworm would be easy to spot by someone who fosters a lot of cats or at least easy to spot by the vet who checks out a lot of foster cats. But like I said, these things happen. It's not the end of the world but it was an unpleasant surprise. 

Of course we're keeping little Pandora, and we're ok with taking on the extra cost and work to make her well. That's what a responsible pet owner does. We love the new addition to our family and can't wait to let her out of her room so she can socialize with MuShu and Lucky. I think in the long run it will be good for both of them. MuShu was definitely too territorial. 

More pictures to come!