building bridges

This blog is quickly running the risk of becoming a cat blog. I apologize to those who haven’t had the pleasure of living with don’t like cats. There’s much else I wanted to blog about: the beautiful summer we’ve been having here in Toronto, the Jarvis ride protest (we were there!), the current controversies over our mayor and proposed cuts, including the marathon meeting at city hall, the plans to go to Brazil in December, my new job, and so much more! Unfortunately, all my creative energy in the past few weeks have gone into planning two new courses for the Fall, endless meetings, and finishing the dissertation (it’s done!). In the midst of all that, there are the cats. They have become part of the family and we are quickly becoming those parents that can talk about nothing else… Although I haven’t had time to chronicle much the development of our own cats – Tigger and Casper – I feel I should document the fosters we get since they are with us for only a brief period of time. So meet Coco Chanel.

Little Coco was found with her siblings in the streets of Toronto at 5 or 6 weeks old. They stayed with the foster coordinator at ACR and while her brothers grew by leaps and bounds, something seemed amiss with Little Coco. She just wouldn’t grow. Since the coordinator had too many fosters in her hands and Coco desperately needed closer attention, she sent her to me. She arrived at our place on Bastille Day – July 14th. She was nearly 12 weeks old and weighed only 630g. To give you an idea how little that is, our guys weighed 1kg at 8 weeks. Gigi, who was a small kitten, weighed 800g at 8 weeks. Coco is definitely skin and bones and looked pretty sad. The day after she arrived, Casper, our five month-old kitten got sick with vomiting and diarrhea.  It was unlikely that he caught something from Coco since there hadn’t been enough time for something to incubate. It was likely a virus and I was immediately concerned for Coco because if she caught *anything* she would probably not make it.

After a few days of uncertainty during which Casper had to take fluids under his skin to keep him hydrated and we struggled to get him to eat and little Coco’s weight didn’t seem to budge, things started looking up. Casper suddenly began to eat, neither of the other two cats seem to have caught what he had, and little Coco suddenly began to put on weight. Fast track to today, August 6th, and she weighs a remarkable 1.1 kg! Except she is not a she, turns out little Coco is a boy, a fact that was discovered when we sent her him to be spayed neutered. And he loves his foster siblings!