A couple of days ago I found myself remembering how I felt when I first had to handle the smallest kitten I had ever personally encountered. I was scared. No, that's an understatement to end all understatements. I was completely terrified and felt more inadequate than I had ever felt. The culmination of this emotional wringer was an actual panic attack, when the kitten in my care had taken a fall down the three flights of stairs we had in our rental at the time. I thought I had just killed a fellow earthling through my negligence. Well, it was an overreaction, of course, and the kitten landed on his feet, dusted himself off and went about the rest of his day. That kitten was our first cat Vader whom we had adopted from a rescue. He was only 7 weeks old when he came to us. And like I said, the smallest thing I'd ever had to hold. Vader's first day with us The next time I encountered the smallest creatures again was when our first foster kittens arrived. They were a bit bigge...

 Every now and again my phone tells me that I have too many pictures in it. So I have to go through them and make my heart into a stone and start deleting the million duplicates I have in there. Of course, it also takes me on long trips down memory lane. And one of my most recent clean-up jobs brought this old thing back to mind again - I noticed that even today, over two years on from the original 'thank you' post, almost every single cat in our foster home ends up photographed on the cat stand. You know, this one: Eden sizing it up And never have I had to make any of them pose on the stand - they all volunteer, so to speak. Because they just love it. So I realised that this one object would allow me to chronicle almost all of their stories! I did a spot of counting - since the Bin Babies, we've had another 40+ cats enjoy the cat stand. Plus, of course, our first cat Vader, who is almost 9 years old, weighs almost 6 kg and can barely fit on the stand, but loves it anyway:)...

G found Coco in a car engine on the golf course. We estimated that she was about 7-8 weeks of age at the time. We asked the charity to advertise her as 'found and safe with finder', in case this uber-friendly kitten had an owner looking for her somewhere. Well, no-one came forward over two weeks, so we had to decide either to foster her for the charity and find a new home for her through them, or just adopt her straight off the bat. To be honest, I think G had made his mind up pretty much as soon as he had brought her home:) So, Coco became the newest member of our family. I guess this is not strictly a foster story, it's more like a skip-the-foster story:) Coco joined our family in August 2022. And she fit right in, she was promptly taken under the wings of our resident feline big brothers Charlie and Tiger, who became her play pals (that was Tiger, really, more than Charlie) and cuddle buddies. Coco was a real cat's cat, and besides Tiger, she also befriended a string...

 This is Sanna, our 100th foster cat: Well, Sanna came to us with her six 5-day-old babies in toe: Of course, our first thought was - here we go, folks, it's Poppy's Babies time again! But, no, Sanna's story is very different from Poppy's. Mostly because with Poppy I had about a month to get to know her, and by the time her babies came around we had formed quite a special bond. Sanna, on the other hand, was handed to the vets in town four days after she'd given birth to her litter, so she was understandably not the happiest of all bunnies when she found herself surrounded by new absolutely everything. And on top of all that, she was suffering from one of the worst cases of gastrointestinal worms I'd ever seen! I mean, after 99 cats, we'd seen all sorts - live worms in a foamy vomit pouring out of the cutest mouths, worms hanging out of anuses, worm eggs in poop, etc. But Sanna's case really took things to another level. I don't panic or overreact eas...