Thanks again everyone!
I'm so sorry to hear you lost them, but thank you for sharing! At this point, rescuing is a long way off, as I know I have a lot more to learn. I'd want to get to a point where I was mentally and financially capable of taking on whatever was thrown at me, and I know I'm certainly not there yet.
I'm positively in awe of your ability to handfeed that many at once. I was beyond stressed with one and when I had to handfeed two, I almost lost my mind. They were both so young that neither one of them liked the taste of the formula AT ALL, so it really was a battle to get them to eat anything. How on earth did you manage with 6 for two weeks? That's just amazing to me!
Well, I don't know about being financially able to take care of everything... if every chin that we have got sick at the same time I'd be panicking, but that's what credit cards are for, right? Haha. Though I do have a decent amount of money put aside for emergencies, so it pretty much never comes to that. For everything else, there's care credit and credit cards.
Somehow, I didn't have too much trouble with handfeeding, actually (for the first 3 babies... the second three just never did well and declined pretty fast after their mom passed). The babies ate pretty well for me. I started feeding them with a syringe, which they did fine with at the beginning (held 1 CC), but one of the babies was a freaking little pig and I'd have to refill the syringe like 10 times in one feeding... so a breeder friend gave me the suggestion of using a glass babyfood jar with one of the stoppers/glass tubes from a ryerson water bottle. When I started using that, they could drink as much as they wanted without me having to refill... and they drank at their pace (rather than me pushing on the syringe to get the liquid out), so that really did seem to work better for them.
I won't say it was easy - as you know, you get very little sleep while handfeeding. It was especially hard for me (just bad timing) because I was in the few weeks before taking the Indiana bar exam. So every day I had a review session to go to that took several hours and then I also was working... and studying in my free time... so it was a busy busy few months for me. During my review sessions, we had a break for lunch. I would feed them right before I left, run home for lunch and feed them, and then feed them the second I got home (which was about every 2 hours, more or less, the review sessions lasted around 5 hours). Then when I'd go to work, same thing. For two months I kept telling my managers that I needed to take long lunches and I could only work short shifts (4-5 hours) so that I could go home at lunch to feed and then not be gone too long so I could feed again. Thank god I had understanding managers. And then of course at night, I would be up every two hours. For me, it got to the point where I didn't even try to sleep the entire night. I would go to sleep for two hours, wake up and feed, stay up for a few hours, feed again, go back to sleep for another two hours... my sleep schedule was messed up for quite some time, but it did work out pretty well.... since all I was doing in my free time was studying, I parked a chair and small table near the chin cages so I could just get the chins out every 2 hours easily to feed.
Once the chins hit about 6 weeks, they could go about 2-3 hours between feedings, and then I had the bar exam. I want to say Indiana's is about 8 hours long each day (there's two days). Both days I fed first thing in the morning, went there, went home on lunch, and ran back to take the afternoon portion, ran home and fed right after. I will say it was the worst timing ever to handfeed, but you know, when you choose to rescue and/or breed, you have to be prepared to do whatever comes your way.
The second batch of chins were born a few days after the bar exam, thank god, and I was still feeding the first batch. Things went ok for the first day, but then mom started bleeding, was rushed to the vet, and ultimately didn't make it. Unfortunately, the babies declined fast. As all my breeder chins are super-slow breeders (I've had all of ONE baby born in the last 2 years from my breeders--my current kit Sugar), I didn't have a mom to foster, but I put the babies in with a super-mellow chin that I have that had fostered for a previous breeder. The kits loved her... but they just weren't eating well, no matter what I did, and they all died about two weeks later within a day or two of each other....they had been gaining, but all seemed to start showing signs of neurological problems, and passed shortly afterwards.
I will say that I thought of almost nothing else for those months. It almost got the point where I was on autopilot - every two hours the timer would beep, I'd go feed the chins, and then I'd be back to whatever I was doing. It was busy busy. But in the end, at least the first set made it and they all found homes and are doing well.
I attached some pics of the babies being handfed and Shimmy fostering the second set of kits.
