Hi, everyone, and welcome to my kitten nursery!
So in this video,
I'm going to show you guys my neonatal kitten routine
in my nursery, and show you kind of how the flow works when I'm working with a litter of kittens
to do their kitten routine.
As you can see in this room, we have two incubators
where the kittens live until they're three weeks old,
and then we have a couple surfaces that we can work on with the kittens.
The kittens I'm going to be working with today are two and a half weeks old, which means they're eating about every three and a half hours.
So it is time for them to eat, and I'm going to show you guys their routine.
These kittens are our lil' helpings. These guys are Dash and Splash,
Dollop, Smidgen,
and Sprinkle. So what I do when it's time to feed them is
I take one of them out. Dollop's always at the front.
Dollop's always ready to go first. Close this back up, and then right here
I have my tissues. So I just grab a couple tissues and I stimulate them to go to the bathroom.
Dollop is going pee.
After they go to the bathroom, I turn the scale on, and I get a pre-feeding weight on the kittens in grams.
Dollop's pre-feeding weight is 353 grams.
Next up, I feed the kitten.
Dollop's so hungry!
Now that Dollop has had her food, I put her back on the scale, and I get a post-feeding weight.
She is 359, so that means that she gained 6 grams
at her feeding.
Now after they eat, you might need to clean them up.
So I go into my wipe warmer and I pull out a wipe, and then I just clean her up.
I clean her little face,
and I clean her little butt. And that's it. Once she's all cleaned up, she can go back into the incubator.
But in this case, I'm going to do a full clean on the incubator.
So what I'll do instead is I will take a little plastic tub, and once the kitten is done,
they go into the tub.
Once all the kittens are done eating,
all the kittens are in the tub, I can go in. I can clean out all of that bedding
and I can give them new bedding.
Whoo! Hi, guys!
Not yet!
So now it's Sprinkle's turn.
Splash's turn.
Smidgen!
Last but certainly not least, Mr. Dash.
Like getting picked last in gym class. I'm sorry, buddy.
Tissues,
help him pee.
Get a pre-feeding weight.
Bottle feed.
Get a post-feeding weight. Clean him up.
And put him back with his friends.
So now I have a temporary tub full of kittens, and I can go into their more permanent space,
And I can clean it out and change the bedding.
Good job, guys!
This routine makes things super easy.
You just get in the flow of doing each kitten one after another
every couple hours on the schedule that works for their age, and pretty soon
they're ready to graduate their tiny space and make it into a bigger play pen. Thanks for watching my neonatal kitten routine!