little kitten

This story is not in the book, but I wanted to include it because this kitten was a part of our lives and touched our hearts.

Chip woke up and opened the front door to get his newspaper and he noticed that there was a box in the middle of the street that cars were having to swerve to avoid. He didn’t want the box to cause an accident so he picked it up to break it down and throw in the trash. When he looked inside the box, he saw the most terrible thing, someone had put a little kitten in the box and put it in the street. The kitten looked like it was 4 weeks old, it was a tiny thing and it had no business being in a box in the middle of the street, but apparently it had no choice because someone had put it there on purpose.

Chip brought the box inside the house and woke me up. We had our own cat at the time named Shanaynay who didn’t like other animals because she wanted all the attention to herself. He told me what happened with the kitten in the box and said that he didn’t understand why anyone would do such a horrible twisted thing to an animal.

We went to the store and bought some baby kitten food and a new litter box and a food dish and took care of her. We didn’t know what to name her so we just named her Baby since she was one.

She was a little neurotic even at that young age so I left her alone and let her decide when she wanted to be held. Every night I put her in a bed which I made up for her by my closet door which was also near her food and litter box. I had to sleep with my bedroom door closed so Shanaynay wouldn’t sneak in the room in the middle of the night and kill her.

We had her for a couple of weeks and one morning when I woke up she was sound asleep under my chin. We had just moved in this house and I didn’t have my bed on my grandmothers bed frame yet so she was able to climb the side of the mattress with her sharp claws. I was sleeping on my stomach and she had climbed up on my bed and snuck in there to keep herself warm. That let me know she was comfortable with me.

She started growing up and was big enough that I felt that Shanaynay would get along with her if we put them together. It took her awhile to be comfortable with Baby, but we stopped closing my door and gave her free reign of the house. Shanaynay still growled at her, but she wasn’t smacking or clawing at her. It was a fine line but I thought she was getting comfortable with Baby that they would eventually become best friends.

Chip played with her a lot. He would run through the house and she would chase him all the time. One day he was playing with her and she was running by herself in the kitchen and she ran into the back door head first. Chip picked her up and noticed that her eyes were spinning. I was in bed sleeping and he woke me up to come look at her. I didn’t know what either of us could have done and I was still half asleep when he showed her to me so I went back to sleep. In the morning he was crying and he had stayed up with her all night long. We took her to the vet which is a 2 minute walk from our house and they told us that she had major neurological damage and that it would probably cost thousands of dollars in medical bills and there was no guarantee that they could save her. Our only option was to have her put to sleep humanely.

They gave us a few minutes to think it over. We both sat in the room bawling our eyes out because Chip had saved her six months prior from being murdered by a car in the street. Somehow we were meant to save her, yet death was still going to take her from the world. She got a six month extension, but it seemed as though her time on this plane was over. We couldn’t afford to pay that kind of money to save a kittens life when we didn’t know if it would make a difference, so we let them take her from us.

That was one of the saddest days in our lives, but we knew that we did the right thing by her. We gave her a reason to trust people who may have abused her in the beginning of her life and it gave her more time than she was originally supposed to get. We will never forget Baby.

Here are some pictures of her: