Surprise!

We bought a new (to us) camping trailer in February, and we've been really excited to use it. A few weeks ago, we went out to clean it and put all of our camping stuff in there. When we were going through all the compartments we got a surprise in one of them; under the bench seat of the table is a little storage area and we found a whole bunch of paper that had been ripped to shreds. At first we thought, "Crap! There are mice in our new trailer," but there were absolutely no mouse droppings anywhere (thankfully.) We came to the conclusion that the previous owners must've had a dog, who chewed up all the papers (they were all the owners' manuals of the various trailer systems.) So, we cleaned it up, threw the scraps away, and put the rest of the manuals in a manila envelope and returned it to the table cubby.

Since the weather's been so lovely, we decided to de-winterize the trailer today and we took off the tarps from the roof. I carefully folded the tarps up and we decided that the spot under the table would be the perfect place to store them. So I be-bopped out to the trailer and moved the cushions and lifted up the seat...and instantly a cat jumped up and out! I screamed because it startled me so badly, and then Tess & Miles, who were just behind me screamed because I screamed! Then we all just kind of laughed, hearts beating very fast, and went to the backyard to tell Bryan about our little stowaway.

Bryan followed me back in to see where the cat had gotten in and we lifted up the seat again and saw...5 little tiny baby kittens! (I hadn't noticed them the first time because I dropped the seat so fast.) And we also saw that the papers were all ripped to shreds again. The mama cat had been building a little soft "nest" to have her babies in! Even though it's a little creepy to think that we had 6 cats in our trailer, it's also quite sweet to think about the way the mama had found a warm, clean, protected place to have her babies. These kitties are so dang tiny that we know they were just born, (we're guessing less than a week ago) and it's been at least 2 weeks since we first cleaned up the ripped papers. So, I guess she was preparing for quite a while before her babies came.

Now the dilemma is what to do with the kittens? I'm sure that we can't feed them anything (they couldn't digest anything except mama's milk), and Bryan does NOT want them in the house--especially because the mom is just a stray, so we really don't want her in our house. I don't want them to die, but I also don't want to touch them too much because I don't want the mom to smell "human smell" on them and then abandon them. So, I put them in a box with a towel, and we put the box right by the trailer, where the mom had been climbing in (there is a little door to the outside that she kept figuring out how to open; Bryan said that he had closed that little door several times recently and just figured that the wind was blowing it open--this time it's locked tight with the key.)

So, what are your suggestions about what to do with these kitties? Our hope is that the mom will come back, find them, and either move them or just stay with them in the box. We don't care if they hang around our house, as long as they're outside (with all the fields and horses by our house, we welcome any cats that can act as mousers for us.) Would anyone be interested in coming to get them? But the mama is gone, so I don't know how they'd survive without her... I'll keep you posted on what happens.

It was pretty wild. Here are a few pictures. (They really are stinkin' cute.)
Here's the little compartment and the door to the outside.

And here they are in the box. They are very sweet, all cuddled up together.