Bouncing bitties--raising feline "children"

Between Smokey and Nocturne, my partner and I thought we had
sufficient cats for a two-bedroom apartment.  In the summer of 2003, I
was on military service, he was finishing his masters' degree, and we
were three weeks away from moving halfway across the country...when he
found a pair of three week old kittens sitting on a styrofoam slab
next to the trash behind his school's loading dock.

The bitties (itty bitty kitties) were just sitting there--no nest, no
mother, no bed, no one around--as if the sky had opened and dropped
them there.  Obviously he couldn't leave them, and the local animal
shelter was overflowing with up to 30 unwanted cats dropped off per
DAY.  That is not a good circumstance to hope you'll find someone with
money, time, and ability to handraise kittens that young.  So he put
them in a syringe box and carried them home (a walk of over an hour
since he got kicked off the bus for having animals.)

Next he went on the internet and learned how to care for them--how to
bottlefeed, how to keep them warm, how to use a cottonball to assist
them in urinating and defacating, etc.  After feeding, cottonballing,
bathing, drying, preparing a box, and putting the bouncing bits in, he
emailed me to inform me the cat population of the apartment had
doubled.

I drew a leave pass and came home to take the bits to the vet for a
checkup, where they pronounced us caretakers of two healthy infants.
They also said they were too young to adopt out for five more
weeks...ie, after the move.  So...my partner wrote his masters' thesis
with a lapful of infant kittens, and then three weeks later he drove
halfway across Canada with kittens in the shotgun seat of his car,
feeding and cottoning them every three hours at rest stops and gas
stations.  (while I followed with Smokey and Nox in my car).

Nocturne was /exceedingly/ unimpressed by the kittens, and avoided
whatever room they were in.  She was also agitated at the state of her
'kingdom" as we packed for the move.  Upon arrival in her new home,
she settled right in.  Smokey got over his initial fear of an avenging
mamacat and promptly made the kittens his new playmates.  Nox
appreciates having someone ELSE to play with Smokey so she can ignore
him.  Both adult cats groom the kittens.  Our new vet says the duo is
remarkably feline-socialized for human-raised kittens since they had
adult cats to model their behaviour on.  However...the kittens believe
my partner is their biological mother.  They sleep on him, follow him
around, search for nipples in his hair.  He is their MomDad.

Obviously when you are someone's Mom and MomDad you do not give away
your children...so...we now have four beautiful adult cats.

The bitties did not knead until they were over a year old.  They did
not need that behaviour to nurse.  They eventually learned it from
Nocturne.

We are not sure whether it was our destiny to find them, or whether
the discovery was sheerly by chance.  Therefore, their names are
Kumani (Destiny in an African language) and Tyche (goddess of Chance).

--Enfilade