kittens

I've received a couple of phone calls from a granddaughter whose 3rd adopted stray cat had a batch of kittens. Yes that's 3 batches of baby kittens this last month or so.
This cat didn't seem to know how to take care of its kittens so the last call was for help in how to feed a baby kitten. I'm thinking of all the kittens we've saved over the years from when I was a little girl, when my children were little, and now to the third generation.

When I was young we had a black and white cat that we named AnnaNory, Nory for short. She was a good mama but she seemed always to have her kittens in the crawl space under the house and then would meow endlessly until someone crawled under there to bring them out and put them in a box behind the stove until they were old enough to run around outside. Dan was 7 or 8 and the only one small enough to get through the hole into the crawl space so he always rescued the kittens.
But one morning Nory woke us up Meowing frantically. Obviously she'd had kittens and we had heard Tom cats yowling during the night so she needed us to save her kittens. This time she didn't go to the crawlspace though, she was scratching at the trap door to the fruit room-root cellar under the laundry room. We lifted the door and went down the stairs and Nory rushed ahead of us. She showed us her kittens! The Tom Cats were trying to get them so she had taken them to the cellar which was just a hole that also led into the crawl space, And neatly dropped them into empty Quart jars sitting on the shelves in the cellar. We rescued each of them and fixed her a box behind the stove. She purred and purred her thankfulness.

I've often thought about what I learned from that experience. If we will do the best we can raising our children to save them from the threats involved in this earth life and have learned to communicate with a loving Heavenly Father, He will come and rescue them when we pray frantically for help. He loves us just as much as we children loved those baby kittens.