Hi everyone,
So, I’ve been browsing your site/forum for a few days now, and it’s been really helpful for answering some questions I had. But right now, I really need some individual advice.
Here’s the story from the beginning:
Our cat Luna, whom we adopted after she was found at a motorway services, got pregnant. We were supposed to get her spayed, but unfortunately, someone let her out by mistake during her first heat.
Last Tuesday marked 60 days since she’d conceived. On Thursday morning around 3:30 am (just as we were getting back from a night out), she was waiting for us, followed us everywhere, and eventually settled on the bed to have her first contractions. We tried to put her in the spot we’d prepared for her (towels, dim light, a little nook), but she wasn’t having any of it. She spent three hours having contractions almost on my lap. We were surprised because we’d been told that cats look for an isolated spot to give birth. But she seemed anxious and was reassured by my presence, my stroking, etc. At 6:30 am the first baby arrived, then the second and third about fifteen minutes apart. The fourth came an hour later. She looked exhausted, tried to sleep a bit, and with our encouragement, she finally had the fourth and the fifth.
She did everything exactly as she should: broke the sacs, licked the babies so they could breathe, ate the placentas... After a while, we moved her and the babies into a nesting box. She let us touch them without any trouble. I stayed with her all day, and when I tried to go and get something to eat, she meowed at me looking worried, followed me downstairs, and meowed at me very loudly. When I made a move to go back up to the bedroom, she stopped at every step to check I was following. I concluded that she was anxious, scared of being alone with her little ones.
After a while, we ignored her meowing and she eventually went back to her babies. Phew! Especially since we had to go away for the weekend on the Friday evening. When we got back, everything was fine; the 5 babies were in great shape and so was Luna. But every so often, she starts meowing very loudly while looking at us, as if she’s trying to make us understand something. Sometimes she goes out into the garden and leaves her babies (I’m not sure exactly how long for), and sometimes we get the impression she’s panicking. This morning, with the babies being 5 days old, she left them alone and started meowing again.
To make her understand she needed to look after her babies, I picked one up. She meowed at me, grabbed it, and moved it to a different spot. She put it under a bedside table that has a cloth over it reaching down to the floor—as if she wanted to hide it. Then after fifteen minutes, she moved all the babies over there. But then she left them alone. They meow and call for her, but she just comes and meows while looking at me. I’ve checked that she still has milk, and she seemingly does. She has dry food and water available. I also noticed this morning that she had some dried blood on her fur around her vulva. Is it normal for her to still have some discharge 5 days after giving birth?
Sorry for the wall of text, but I really wanted you to know how the birth went, seeing as she didn't act in a typical way from the start. I hope you can give me some information and, above all, reassure me. She’s just gone back to her babies this second; they’re nursing. I’m probably worrying over nothing, but I’d rather do too much than not enough. It’s like she’s having new-mum panic attacks, realising she has 5 babies to look after, getting scared and abandoning them for a bit, before changing her mind later on...
Thanks in advance
