Happy Birthday Dib!

Well, actually it was his birthday yesterday. Four years ago (and a day), my mom's neighbor found a litter of four tiny kittens. They were less than a day old, and they were abandoned. Something had attacked the kittens (we don't know what) and their mom was gone. One of the kittens had an injured paw, and another one had a piece of his ear torn off. The kitten with the injured paw died a few days later, but the other three survived.  My cat was the one with the injured ear (you can kind of see the nick in his ear in the picture below).

For several months, my mom and I traded off getting up every few hours in the middle of the night (on school nights, I might add) to bottle feed and "clean up" the kittens. In case you didn't know, tiny kittens need to be stimulated in order to go to the bathroom (this is not a fun task. It involved a wet wash cloth, a screaming kitten, and a lot of poop). Raising kittens that young involved a lot of work and sacrifice. So while I normally wouldn't celebrate a cat's birthday, I really was their mother (in a weird sort of way), and so I do appreciate their birth. We didn't throw him a party or anything. I just gave him a couple of treats and called him "Birthday Boy" all day :)

Happy Birthday, Dib!