Thank you for giving us joy.

For just about three weeks, our house was filled with the pitter patter of kitten feet, squeals of laughter from Ella, mornings of bolting out of bed to let our four loves out of their 'cave' (aka cage), carrying each of them around like babies, purring...

It was also filled with (what seemed like) endless kitty litter box cleaning, securing every breakable item, hoisting curtains up over the curtain rods, feedings, medicating...

IT. WAS. AWESOME.

On Tuesday, we returned to the Humane Society with our little foster kitties. We had done our job, and done it quite well. Each had more than doubled in weight. Each was healthy. Each had been socialized, grabbed and held by more hands than I can count.

IT. WAS. SAD.

We were thankful to have KatieRoz join us to lessen the blow. And I treated the girls to ice cream after we left them behind. Ice cream always helps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simba and Ella and Eskimo kisses.

But when we got home and the house was painfully quiet and all the routines of playing and cleaning up were gone, there were sobs from little Ella - sobs like I can't remember ever hearing from her. And I cried too. There we sat on the couch, crying over kittens. She fell asleep for 3 1/2 hours that afternoon.

It would have been sooooo much easier to keep one or two of our fosters. What we did was harder: loving and growing those little souls so that a forever family could give them a happy life. I had a few ulterior motives to this project and I feel quite pleased that all were met. Ella bonded with pets...and boy did she. Here we are six days after their departure and she is still talking about them and carrying around photographs such as these here. We provided a parallel to her life before us and how very important foster parents were to her first months. We laughed. A lot.

There is another side story to all of this, too.

This little girl with Ella adopted Una. She and her mama are friends of ours and live only a few blocks away. Ella will be able to keep up to speed on little Una (now named Darling). This weekend has been a flurry of smart phone pics and videos already!

We can't wait to prep the house in a few weeks for our next litter. I've been told that letting go of your first fosters is the hardest, that it gets easier. Maybe??? But we're up for finding out because the joy that was going on in our house far outweighs it all.

~H