First trip to the Vet!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently!! I've been very busy... had to travel for work for a couple of weeks. Which meant Coke was left alone at home, the poor thing! Thankfully the first week, my friend Yang was in town and she stays at my house everytime she comes back so she helped care for Coke whilst I was away. When she left, Muna and Eema paid daily house calls to feed abd play with Coke so she doesn't get too lonely.

Still, when I got home, it was in quite a bit of a mess! Coke had her version of a 'wild party' I guess and there are torn up newspapers/magazines and loose bits of play string everywhere.

Included here are pictures of her first trip to the vet a few days back. She's almost 3 months now so I took her in for her first vaccination and deworm, and a good scrub to clean her of lice and mites she might've contracted after being born.

She was very quiet after the trip, I'm guessing the visit to the doctor was quite a shock to her! Haha. Poor little thing. The vet was nice, a very young guy whose clinic is based in Palm Springs in Mutiara Damansara (near where I live).

I have to take her in for a follow-up jab of vaccines in a month's time.

Coke's Day Out

I gave Coke his first collar today. He's grown quite big now and can fit into a kitten collar that I had lying around in the house. It's silver-blue and sparkly and has a shiny blue bell in it which makes Eema laugh at the 'glam-ness' of it all haha.

Another first for today was that I took Coke out of the house and back down to the cafe... the first time he's been back there since the the weekend we rescued him.

OH YES I FORGOT TO POST ABOUT AN IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT IN COKE'S FAMILY DRAMA!! His mother, Scaramouche, who went missing for about a month and was feared dead... RETURNED! I'm not kidding. For many weeks she was gone, having abandoned her kitten... and then suddenly about a week or so ago, she just reappeared in front of our cafe. Although glad she's alive, we're all quite annoyed with her for abandoning her baby and now that she's back she's being quite irritating at how pushy she is trying to get into the cafe despite the fact that we give her food outside.

Anyway. Since she's here and Galileo is here, I thought I'd try to introduce Coke to them, and get Coke exposed to other cats too. Coke was quite timid and scared meeting the two adult cats, but curious enough to slowly approach them. Galileo was well-behaved and just sniffed around Coke before swaggering off to drink from puddles in the rain. Scaramouche on the other hand was mean! She took a swipe at Coke which frightened the poor little fella... so Eema and I didn't let her near Coke again after that.

I let Coke play outside the cafe for close to an hour before taking him back upstairs to the condo. I think that was enough adventure for the day :)

Fizzy Cola!

My cat and I bring new meaning to the term "Fizzy Cola" :p

First Bite

Coke's almost 5 weeks old so I thought it's time to slowly introduce him to solid food. Went to the pet shop for recommendations and bought Royal Canin's Babycat product, as the biscuits are really tiny (it's so cute!) in size than normal dry cat food to make it easier for baby kittens to feed on. The price may vary a little between pet stores around KL I guess, but I got the 400g package for RM19.50. I bought the smallest packet to try it out first and see if Coke takes a liking to it....

And guess what? I didn't even need to persuade him to eat the biscuits! After feeding him some milk I took the bottle away and poured out the biscuits and he just dove right in! So cute! I guess Coke couldn't wait to use his teeth to crunch on something finally.

I'm planning to keep him on the milk formula still, but not as much as before. Probably once he's about 10-12 weeks old I'll see if I can take the milk away and start giving him canned food along with the dry biscuits. We'll see.

Obsession!

I don't know if it's related to Coke growing teeth, or if it's just a weird phase, but Coke's suddenly developed this obsession to really clamp down on the teat of the bottle whilst feeding on his milk. He'll drink the milk like normal until the bottle's about half finished, and then he'll grab it with his paws and clamps down with his mouth and just goes crazy hahaha. I tried prying it away from him when he first started doing it, but he'll just run after the bottle again so I end up letting him do it until he's bored and lets the bottle go by himself. It amuses me. :D

Watch it for yourselves!

Strength to Climb

I'm starting to let Coke roam around the house on its own for a few days now, training him to be less skittish and encourage curiosity. And to my surprise, just tonight, I came out of my room to find him ON the sofa! Yep... he climbed it on his own! Must've been a major feat for someone so tiny hehe.

Coke Litter

A milestone! Baby Coke learns how to use the kitty litter (slightly modified, used a shoebox instead of the normal litter tray because it's too big for Coke to climb in and out of).

Coke drinks Milk

Coke is drinking milk! Yeay! I had quite a sleepless night last night as the kitten would wake up meowing for food every few hours. He (well... I'm still unsure about the gender, but I'll just use 'he' for now) is starting to learn to drink from the bottle now. We still need to coax him a bit to bite the teat but once he has it in his mouth, he suckles fine.

More pics from this afternoon...

The Emergency Adoption

I'm starting this blog to capture the stories of a tiny, furry little newcomer to my daily life - a 2-week old abandoned kitten whom I've decided to name Coca Fandango, nicknamed Coke (will explain the name later!).

I own a cafe in Damansara Perdana, and there's always been this stray cat hanging around the shop since the first day I took over operations from the cafe's previous owner. We call that cat, an adult female, Scaramouche. She always sleeps outside the cafe and lays claim on the territory... demanding food whenever she's hungry, and trying to sneak in to sleep inside the warmth of the cafe everytime a customer opens the front door.

She gave birth to a kitten on the 26th of September, a few days before Hari Raya. We put up a box for her, and she seemed alright mothering her newborn, so we left her to it.

On Friday the 10th of October, Scaramouche went missing. We didn't see her anywhere, and she didn't even come to claim her lunch and dinner meals as she usually does. Yesterday, whilst it was raining outside, we could hear the crying of her kitten just outside the cafe. So when nightfall came and still there was no sign of Scaramouche running to her baby's aid, I went outside to search for the kitten, whom I found shivering and wet in a drain by the bush to the side of my cafe.

I took the little furball inside, got it dry, and started thinking... what do I do with a baby kitten?! I've had countless cats in my care, but never had to start looking after one without its mom when it's just 2-weeks old. After a bit of Googling (thank god for the Internet and readily-available source of information), I found out that I should not feed the kitten cow's milk, as they're not able to digest it. A quick check at the time told me I still had about 20 minutes before the nearest pet store closed, so I rushed to my car, drove to the store, and managed to run in and make my purchase before the cash registers were closed for the night.

Armed with a kitten bottle feeder and a tub of specially-formulated kitten milk replacement, I headed back to the cafe to the beginning of a new role - surrogate mother to the kitten.

The kitten won't take the bottle at first, I guess it didn't know how to do so. I force fed it some formula still, and decided to take it home with me, knowing that it would mean a sleepless night ahead.

And so, without a proper pet carrier around, my friend Muna suggested that I put the kitten in one of our empty Coca-Cola carton boxes, hence the name Coke popped up. And since the mom and dad (another stray cat who hangs about our cafe alot) are named Scaramouche and Galileo Figaro respectively, I decided to honor the Bohemian Rhapsody-themed family naming convention by adding Fandango as the kitten's second name.

And so, fellow readers... I present to you, Coca Fandango :)

The Coca-Cola carton that became Coke's makeshift home last night :

Feeding Coke at 3am, whilst Tobek (my family cat) looks on


Curious Tobek taking a closer sniff and look, no doubt wondering, "that's not MY offspring, is it??"



Tobek was a good boy the entire night, standing guard and watching everytime I fed Coke, but never making a fuss about it.

So, wish me luck with raising this poor, motherless, furry Coke into a healthy bouncing cat. Will update more as we go along!