What Were We Thinking?

Yep, we've gone and done it.  We are fostering 5 kittens that are about 13 weeks old.  We have been thinking about doing this for a couple years but knew we couldn't do it till we were no longer renting.  I had contacted someone letting them know we would be interested as soon as we got the renovations done on our house but we received an urgent email looking for someone willing to foster 2 kittens.  When I called the contact, I was asked if we'd be willing to watch 5 instead.  We were reluctant to take 5 at first but we might as well;  they needed a place to stay and we have the space.

The skittish one

The playful one

The reluctant one

The friendly one

The loving one

As any regular reader knows, my daughter loves all animals.  She has talked about how she wants to be a vet or work at an aquarium.  We figure that fostering will give our daughter an idea of what it's like to care for an animal (physically and emotionally) and then have to give it to it's (new) owner.

Hubby and I agree that we need to do everything we can to help our children focus their learning on  the thing God has called them to do which we'd like to this is also something they enjoy doing.  That means we first need to help make sure they REALLY know what they want to do.

Hubby has been teaching our son computer programming with programming robots as the ultimate goal.  So far our son is still very excited and gun-ho about robots as his future vocation.  This allows us to make sure that everything he does is focused on making sure he is moving toward that ultimate goal.  Why send him to horse camp if he'd be better served by $200 in cash to spend on parts to build a robot (or robot camp in a year or two when he's old enough)?

So how can we help our daughter determine if she really wants to care for animals?  That's simple, let her care for animals.  If she enjoys caring for kittens and can part with them once they are adopted, then maybe we can move on to something else like talking to someone who works at the local aquarium or talking to a vet, or someone at a zoo (or all three).  The woman from the rescue said that if these work out well, she would even consider letting us take younger ones to let my daughter get a more full experience of the kitten experience.

All I know is that these kittens are SO cute and sweet, I might have trouble parting with them too.

Oh, and we found a bonus too.  We had a couple days notice before the kittens were dropped off so we convinced the kids to do a REALLY good job of cleaning up their toys so we didn't have any kitten hazards out when they showed up.  I must say, the house ended up pretty clean.  :-)