Usually growing up for kittens is very easy because the female will give them the food they need, as milk, until they learn how to eat real food. Teaching them to eat real food can be done in many ways; I have chosen to describe the way we have done this in all our years as breeders because it has proven to be perfect for us and our kittens. Our experience is based on 62 litters spread over 15 years.

Here we have 2 females who are raising their kittens together, which is something that does not always work out but usually the mothers don’t mind sharing the birthing box and share responsibility for their kittens. In this case the kittens were born 4 days apart and one of the mothers delivered 5 kittens whereas the other mother only gave birth to 1 kitten. It made more sense that they took care of the 6 kittens together.

On the day the kittens are born they are weighed and I continue to weigh them once a day until they are at least 4 weeks old. I try to weigh them at the same time every day. The kittens might not gain weigh the first 24 hours and they can also lose a few grams. If a kitten has either lost a bit of weight or hasn’t gained at all, I will usually weigh it twice a day; in the morning and in the evening. I will also prepare some milk and give it to the kitten each time I weigh it. I use kitten replacement milk that is already made as a formula and can be bought in cans. Since it’s only good for 72 hours, I measure up the amount I think I will need for the first 24 hours and the rest is put into ice cube bags. I can thaw the amount I need each time I supplement the kitten(s). It’s not easy to get into the ice cube bag so I use a funnel.

If the kittens seem healthy after the first 4 weeks have passed I will only weigh them once a week thereafter. If I’m not sure if they are gaining enough weight, I will continue to weigh them every day, until I can see that everything is alright with their development. Some times it’s only 1 or 2 of the kittens I continue to weigh once a day. If the kittens get diarrhoea when they begin to eat solid food, I sometimes start to weigh them once a day again, just to be on the safe side.

When I give the kittens supplement I use a syringe, either a 5 ml or a 10 ml, depending on how many kittens need supplementing. I ONLY supplement the kitten if it has suckling reflexes. If the kitten has no suckling reflex it can be very hard to give it the milk and you should contact your vet and ask what he/she thinks you should do.

Once I have finished giving the kitten its milk, I will place it in front of the mother who will take care of the cleaning. If there is some leftover milk I will give it to the mother who usually drinks it with delight. The syringe is cleaned under cold running water, wiped dry and put in a special box in the refrigerator. If you use this procedure, you can use the syringe until the kittens no longer need supplementing but afterwards you should throw it out.

Once the kittens are approx. 4 weeks old they will start to crawl out of the birthing box, some will do it a bit earlier some a bit later, depending on their individual development. When they start crawling out of the box and explore their surroundings, they will get in contact with their mothers food and some of the kittens will try to eat the dry food, but their teeth are not always developed enough at this age to eat it.

We usually offer them a mixture of cod roe and crème fraiche and they will normally eat this with pleasure. We serve it on a flat plate and some of the kittens will put their head down and eat nicely from the beginning, others will walk around all over the food and can’t find it. Then there are those that will stand by the plate and sniff, up into the air, because until now they have been lying beside their mother and nursed with their heads turn upwards, so food is suppose to come from above, right? I will put some of the mixture on one finger, open the kitten’s mouth and put the mixture inside the kitten’s mouth. Some kittens are so fast that they will take a good bite of my finger, BEFORE I get a chance to remove it and a kitten’s teeth are sharp as a needle! As an alternative you can use a tea spoon because that won’t hurt their teeth.

Such a kitten is almost impossible to wipe clean properly, because the cod roe and crème fraiche is really greasy and hard to get off again. I chose to wash all the kittens in the litter in the kitchen sink, every time they had had a meal, until they knew how to eat nicely!

After 1 week I will begin to put tuna in water, mackerel in tomato sauce or Hills canned kitten food in the mixture. All the time there is Hills dried food placed near the mixture along with clean water. If the kittens are really interested in the dry food, but can’t chew it, I have bought an electrical machine that can chop it up in smaller pieces which I will spray over some of the dry food or put into the mixture. We offer them the mixture 2 – 3 times a day, pending on how much they and their mother eat. If it’s very hot weather I will boil some water, let it cool off and mix with the hills dry food in a Tupperware or another plastic container. Once the dry food has taken in the amount of water it can hold, which is surprisingly much, I will give it to the kittens, either on its own or mixed with their usual mixture, and the rest will be put into the refrigerator until later or the next day. Especially during summer it’s vital that the kittens gets enough fluid and because cats generally aren’t good at drinking enough water, this will ensure that the kittens and their mother get enough fluid.

Soon the kittens eat more and more dry food; it’s rare that a kitten doesn’t start eating it on its own, so in the end they are only eating the dry food and we give them the mixture as an extra snack once a day. When the kittens leave at 12 weeks of age they are used to only eating the dry food, which makes it easier for their new owners, so this is some thing we try to ensure with each litter we have.

When the kittens start exploring what’s outside the box, one of the things they find is the litter tray. We usually put 2 litter trays in the enclosure where the kittens and their mother are kept, remove the big litter tray that has been there so far, because it has too high sides for the kittens to get past. The kittens will eat the cat litter and this is PERFECTLY normal. If they were born in nature they would eat the dirt because this will jumpstart their intestine system, this is needed for the kitten to change their food from milk to solid food without any problems. This is also the reason why we use cat litter with normal size instead of the compact cat litter because that will be like cement in the kitten’s intestine and it can unfortunately kill itL. This happened some years ago with another breeder so the choice to use the normal litter was easy to make. The kittens will usually eat the cat litter for about a week but they can do it for a lot longer and there is no need to panic about it. Unless they eat so much that they won’t have room for food but we have never encountered that and I would think that this is not a possible scenario at all.

One more reason to keep the kittens in the enclosure for 5 – 6 weeks is that they will learn to use the litter tray without any encouragement from us; it will come totally naturally for them. When they are approx. 6 weeks old we will move them over into the new playpen (as shown below) and take the enclosure away. The trick is to NOT give the kittens too much space before they know how to use a litter tray. Once they have learned to climb over the side of the playpen we will take it away as well and give them access to all of the living room as well as the kitchen.

If we have more than one litter of kittens and they have been born with a relatively big gap between them we will take the oldest litter and put them into the playpen even if they don’t have the right age to be placed there.

The only thing there matters is that you find the solutions that suit you and look at the options you have in your home. The only thing there is a MUST IMO is that it is easy to clean:-)

Once the kittens have full access to the living room we put no limitations to what they can or can’t do. They constantly try to push their abilities further and they examine EVERYTHING. I can still remember when a kitten buyer wrote to me when she saw a picture on our hp with HER kitten in the top of the climbing post the day after she has purchased a starter climbing post half the sizeJ Norwegian Forest cats likes to climb and I encouraged her to go to the pet store and change it to the full size climbing post that goes all the way up to the ceiling.

We have German Shepherd dogs and they meet the kittens before they are let out of the enclosure but only under our supervision, because a dog IS a predator and there is the chance that if it sees a movement in the corner of the eye, like a fly that flies by, they can make a quick movement like a snap, to catch it, and they can do the same with the kittens. We have never had problems when the dogs have been together with the kittens but we have stuck to this rule with success; not letting them alone with the kittens while they are very young. And even when the kittens are 10 – 11 weeks old we don’t leave the dogs alone with the kittens for long. If we are preparing dinner in the kitchen we can keep an eye on the way the dogs interact with the kittens. Usually the mother(s) will let the dogs know that they TOO are keeping an watchful eye on their kittens and some of them will even have total control over the dogs when they have kittens; in fact the dogs are terrified of some of the females when they have kittens, but are totally relaxed around them once the kittens have moved.

Even though we have no children of our own it has never been a problem if the buyers had children, which the following pictures fully illustrate:

Our main priority is to put the kittens though “as much as possible” because we feel that this will make them better equipped to handle almost anything the future might throw at them. We will vacuum as much or even more when we have kittens as usual. We have an electrical coffee grinder which we also use when we have kittens. The telly is of course also turned on whenever we want to watch it. The only thing we don’t have is a door bell which means that some of our kittens get a bit surprised or startled when they hear it the first time in their new home.

Even though we have several runs where our adult cats can get out each day, we never let the kittens out into any of them, partly because we don’t want them to try to be outside if they are going to live in an apartment the rest of their life, partly because we want them to have at least their first vaccine before they are exposed to “nature” and since we don’t vaccinate them before the age of 11 weeks, there will not be enough time to let them go outside before they leave when they are 12 weeks old. Granted we have had kittens that stayed longer than 12 weeks but we have still kept them inside. We have on occasions taken kittens outside to take some better pictures of them because a forest cat does look better in its natural environment. The kittens we keep in our breeding program will be let out in a run with their mother, once they have been vaccinated the second time. And little by little we will let them be exposed to more and more cats until they have met them all. They also meet our rabbits when they are let out in the run for the first time and it’s usually the kitten that gets scared when they meet this strange creature for the first time.

The rabbits live their life in the runs where they have access to their own houses, which the cats also enjoy lying inJ. Some of them are smart enough to use the cat flaps as well and thus gain access to the cat houses too:-)

And here come some funny pictures/situations our wonderful kittens have been in:-)