Puff [5]

Michael says: We acquired Puff one cold and rainy Saturday in Phoenix. My boys and I went to visit friends and on the way home we decided to stop at the new Hobby Lobby to look for a remote-controlled boat. The store is in a big strip mall with lots of parking spaces. As we were walking into the store, we saw this tiny kitten in the parking lot. It looked like it had been run over and was not moving, and we assumed it must be dead. I told my boys that we would go into the store and look to see if it was still there when we came out. When we came out of the store the kitten was not where it had been. We were back in the car ready to leave when my middle son spotted it on a parking berm. Someone had apparently moved it. My son got out of the car to take a closer look, and he screamed, "I see the kitten moving!" My boys wanted to know what we could do to help it. I told them to pick it up and I would call my friend Dr. Robert Hatch, the local vet, to see what we should do. Dr. Hatch explained how to bottle-feed the kitten and nurse it back to health. The first few days he just slept and ate. He could not walk or stand up and we thought that he might have some injuries. But Dr. Hatch came by to check on him and said that all was fine. The kitten quickly became a very aggressive eater, chewing through several bottle nipples. He must have developed these eating habits during his days on the streets. We named him Puff after the character in the children's pre-primers featuring Sally, Dick, and Jane because he looked just the kitten from the stories. Puff is now a happy member of our household and gets to see Dr. Hatch on a regular basis.