Neko' s baby pictures...

This holiday week has given me time to scroll through my pictures of Neko and Sake as well as the "little boys", Kuro and Taka. Yesterday I removed some 1000 pics and found some of my favorites - to start up I thought to share some baby pics of Neko.

As a kitten he slept soundly and I could not resist playing some tricks with his favorite toys:

Some irresistible looks :

Look at his whisks - bitten away by his brothers. It took a long time before they were "restored" to the natural length:

With the sun shining through the window and sitting in Jaakko's lap - how about a nap:

Next time - Sake as a kitten:)

Souvenirs from the Jyväskylä Catshow...

We attended the Jyväskylä Catshow on the 16th of February with all 4 boys. We had a good time, Kuro was nominated and all the others were also competing for a nomination.
Little did we know what was going to happen a little less than 2 weeks later:

On the morning of the 1st of March Taka became sick with a stomach flu. Fortunately we were able to secure an appointment to our wonderful VET on the same day and Taka started to get treatment and hydration at once. He was truly feeling quite poorly.
We cancelled our planned trip to Pesäkallio summer cottage for our vacation and committed ourselves fully to nursing the sick cat. Next thing we knew was that also Kuro started to show signs of the flu so he joined the VET-rounds for hydration.

Here are two pictures of the boys still recuperating and being quite "low-key" which is very unusual for them:

Totally against the laws of nature Sake has been vigorously treating and cleaning his sons as they have not had the strength to do so by themselves. Our VET told us that usually healthy cats leave the sick ones alone in order to not being sick themselves.

Currently, while I am writing this, Sake and Neko are still OK and hopefully stay that way also.

Here is Taka already feeling better at his favorite spot in the catmax tree:

We heard from our friends that several cats had caught the same disease after the Jyväskylä catshow and we tried to figure out why. One thing which was different from all other cat shows we have attended was the foreign vet that checked our cats when we came to the show. She did not des-infect her hands between the cats and her overall hygiene with the cats was quite poor.

It is of course difficult to be absolutely sure about this but we were not the only ones noticing the behavior of this strange vet. As many cats that caught this disease were from category III it might also be that the disease spread through one of the judges, but as said, difficult to be sure.

So, dear friends,  be careful out there and keep a lot of dis-infectant with you when you attend the shows. And see to it that vets as well as judges treat your cats with the hygiene and courtesy your wonderful cats are entitled to.