The waxing and waning of the kittens’ weight

It hasn’t exactly been easy maintaining the kittens’ weight and also making sure there is some increase every 24 hours ever since I took over handraising them 100%.

To ensure I can nip any issue in the bud, as of today (6th Mar), I weighed them at every feed. These are their weights ever since Samantha had to stop breastfeeding.

Akira and Indra’s weight loss really frightened me, so I had to beef up the volume of the milk at each feed. As much as they could take.

If I don’t exceed 10ml at each feed, their weight drops very fast. Kai’s 4ml milk at 12pm today was because he ate a lot of chicken all by himself. But it was only during two meals that he ate. The other times, I merely placed a small amount of chicken into their mouths which they would chew and swallow.

The feeding charts that I looked at actually recommend a much higher volume per feed, but I cannot reach that as the kittens don’t want to drink that much.

According to this chart, their stomach capacity is about 18-20ml, but all three of them simply cannot drink so much. And I also worry about overfeeding as this is more dangerous than underfeeding.

We are currently only averaging at about 12ml per feed, which is less than the lower boundary of 14ml in the first chart. We absolutely cannot follow the second chart – their readings are way, way too high.

These charts come from western countries so I wonder if, like humans, their cats eat more than our Asian cats? There is no way we can match those figures, especially the total volume per day.

But weight-wise, Kai, Akira and Indra are ahead of their age group. They are even heavier than the Monsters when they were at this same age! And the Monsters were 100% breastfed by Minnie. I did not have to do a thing except to build obstacle courses for them to explore and play on.

The kittens are 24 days old today, so that places them at 3-4 weeks.