As I told you, Greta had six kittens. Just four of them seamed to fit to eat at once. Of course those that were the smallest were always pushed away by their siblings So I found myself having to choose between feeding them myself, from a bottle with kitten milk formula, or going once every hour and moving all the kittens around so all of them had a chance to eat.
Newborn kittens are soo small and soo limp, and their umbilical cord is still raw. So I wanted to avoid having to touch and handle them too much. Feeding from a bottle has the danger of not feeding enough or overfeeding, plus you have to burp them, but the biggest danger is for them to inhale the milk (if too much is coming from the bottle) and damage their lungs.
So I chose to try to rotate all the kittens at the mom nipples. I had to stay on my knees and hold the little ones while they were eating. And they would eat for few minutes and fall asleep, and their brothers would push them away and take their places, and then they would fall asleep. So then I would put back at the nipples the little ones. I was both worried and physically hurting. Theoretically I knew I would have to weight them all every day to see if they indeed gain weight. But after the first two days they seemed to gain similar weight (the starting weight was very different) and I just didn't have the energy to weight them every day, so I developed the "squeeze test", I should patent it, it worked great... I would gently squeeze the kittens belly to be sure they are plump, so full...
An interesting thing I found on the internet, is that each kitten puts its own pheromones on the mom nipple, and each of them goes and eat from that specific nipple all the time. So after the first days, I tried to be aware of which kittens eats on what nipple. They seemed to be only four easily accessible nipples. But, as I kept moving them around, one of the biggest kittens gave up on its nipple and went underneath its siblings. The place that s/he gave up was just under the back leg of mom, protected. So one of the little kittens found its safe place to eat. I've tried to put the other little kitten on the nipple near the moms front leg, but it wasn't such a success, s/he was moved as the others were moving. So I had to go to them for the whole week, really once every hour, to be sure everybody is eating and to help the one that was always pushed away.
So it was hard work, but they are all doing fine and getting cuter and cuter!
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