A new foster cat: Nyx and her six kittens

We’ve received a new foster cat on saturday of last week (4/9) and she was super dooper pregnant, then become extremely ill the following day with an upper respiratory infection, struggling to breath, but then had six kittens on Wednesday (4/13).  I was there alone for half of the delivery and had to manually rupture the kitten sacks and clean off the babies, because she wasn’t able to even lift her head very much.  Five kittens were delivered in about 2 hours, then about an hour later a smaller sixth one was delivered.  it wasn’t until the 17th that mama Nyx started to breath better, and for the vast portion of that time period she was sick she wasn’t eating or drinking on her own, and thus had to be hand feed with a syringe for that entire time, and the vet recommended bottle feeding the babies.  So, for the last week, my wife and I have been bottle feeding and cleaning kitten butts manually every two hours.  It’s been challenging on both a physical level and an emotional one, there was a point that I thought Nyx had given up, but today has given me a fair bit of hope for her.  Baby #6 though isn’t doing very well and we’re not sure if it’s going to survive much longer, as it doesn’t seem to be able to swallow properly.

Mama Nyx and her six kittens.

For this process I needed an additional webcam to keep an eye on things, and settled on a Wyze v3 camera, which is fantastic for this purpose, and I bought it nearly 100% based on the theory that I could install some official custom firmware for it that would enable RTSP, but it turns out that they’ve pulled that firmware for “reasons” that they don’t actually go into, so now I get to have a third party camera in our cat room until I can figure out the entire thing.  Right now though, the camera will be as it is, because it’s doing the job I’ve asked of it, and it’s doing it surprisingly well for a $35 camera.  I’m pretty sure that they’re loosing money on the hardware with the expectation that a certain % of purchases will lead to monthly revenue for subscriptions to their hosting service.