After my trip to Pittsburgh mid-summer, I was home for a day or so before RAL contacted me about a small litter of kittens needing a place to crash for a few weeks. The best thing about fostering is that it works around my travel schedule which this year… has been quite a lot! There was 1 female and 2 males, so obviously they must be named after the kids show Spidey and His Amazing Friends characters Spidey, Ghost Spider, and Spin!
All I know about their history is that they were separated from their mom the day before we picked them up to bring them to our home. They came with horrible diarrhea and a bit of eye discharge, but with lots of meds and special food that all cleared up pretty quickly thankfully.
Immediately after getting them home, I could tell that Spidey was way more social and friendly than Ghost Spider and Spin. He would come up to me purring, looking to be held and given kisses. While GS and Spin would run away when I came to give them attention. In fact, the first few days Ghost Spider would even hiss at me a bit! It took some time but with constant positive reinforcement and lots of soft cuddles and talking the others eventually came around.
A few weeks after taking them in, I had a work trip to National Harbor, MD planned for work. So I made arrangements with RAL to bring them to the shelter or another foster home as usual. It turned out that they had space at the shelter and felt they would get good exposure to adopters by staying there for a bit. So before I headed off on my trip, I dropped them off at the temporary cat building that RAL has setup during their construction. Side note: WHOA construction on the newly remodeled building is coming along so well it seems. The building is going to be massive!
Ghost Spider had already had an applicant and we’d done a virtual “meet and greet” over FaceTime – so she was actually adopted only a few hours after I returned them to the shelter. While on the train to the DC area, I received some texts and a photo of Ghost Spider settling on her new mom’s lap. Evidently she purred the whole way home 🥰
When I returned a few days later, I reached out to RAL to see how the other two were doing and learned that they’d been adopted over the weekend! We’re so happy for all 3 of them and glad that our hard work of socializing these kittens clearly paid off.
I’m now back from that trip and we’re on standby for our next fosters – Willa has already requested more as clearly she’s addicted to fostering like me!
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