Eyes will be open by 2 weeks or so. By 3 weeks they are starting to be able to stand up and walk. Around 4 weeks they will be able to pee and poop on their own; before that you absolutely have to help them. Get someone to show you if you don’t know how. Once they are doing that, you can start to introduce (non-milk) cat food.
Maybe there is pre-mixed formula, but I’ve only seen the powder. Buy the good stuff, and follow the directions carefully.
Update: I’ve successfully lured them into a pet crate. Haven’t closed the door on them yet, just put the crate out on the porch with the door off and have been feeding them inside of it. They have an appointment tomorrow afternoon at the vet to get shots and general checkups, then we’re going to bring them into the house.
We’ve set up our guest room for them, with blankets and water and a litter box with litter on the bottom and mulch from the yard, where they go now, on top. The plan is to get them using the box, then gradually reduce the mulch. We’ll keep them in that room for a couple of weeks.
Once they’re comfortable inside the house, I’ll make them an appointment to get fixed. After they are recovered from that, we’ll start mixing them in with the two cats we already have in the house.
My wife is still deciding on a name for the little grey tabby, but I’ve decided to name the calico “Opal.” Was flirting with “Marzen,” but my wife vetoed that, so Opal it is.
Here’s a photo of Opal from yesterday: https://i.postimg.cc/mD3VqsC5/IMG-2806.jpg
Must resist…
Hi, Opal! 
She is a pretty gal.
Be careful you don’t end up like this. :eek:
Put some kitty toys (balls, mice, ball of yarn, cardboard boxes…) in the room.
Very pretty Opal, well on the way to being not kitten but cat!
– make sure the room’s got places to hide in it (under beds, under other furniture, in boxes should work); and that any openings (even if you think they’re too small to matter) to anywhere that you don’t want them to hide are blocked off. I grabbed a barn kitten once just in time to prevent her disappearing into the floor via the opening a radiator pipe was coming through, and redirected her under the bed, where she spent her first three days or so in the house. (She is now 16, and generally prefers the top of the bed to hiding under it.)
OK, point taken. What do you feel should be done? And why cats? (reverse whattaboutism)
I’ll take that cat!
I wish good fortune to you, being the most recent subservient to the new cats.
My cat Atilla is the offspring of a feral mother. She would let us stroke her back, I never attempted to pick her up. My neighbors and I both made a “nest” for her, as she was obviously pregnant. She had the kittens in my back yard, and did not object when they were transferred to the nest on my back porch. Two eventually disappeared,a couple months down the road, another person took in one, and I adopted Atilla. He seemed like any other cat, did not act any wilder than most kittens.
He’s fourteen now.
Isn’t that cat more of a Klimt? 
Jenny
We had a feral cat have her first litter on the doorstep. ON the doorstep.
We think it was her first litter and it came upon her and she didn’t know what to do. She birthed three when she got spooked by another cat, snatched up the latest kitten she had given birth to and ran away, jumping over the fence. Leaving the other two mewling on the doorstep.
Whatchagonnado? We took them in, got the afterbirth off them, kept them warm. The next day we got kitten formula – If this happens to you be sure to get kitten infant formula ard not WEANING formula, which is easier to find, I guess, because it’s more usual to have to wean kittens than to take care of them from the jump – and fed them every two hours for what seemed like forever.
One of them, sadly, didn’t make it. The other one is now full grown, thriving, and running around my Mom’s house. Very sweet kitty, very affectionate. All he’s ever known is people loving up on him and he loves right back.
While cats figure out how to use a litter box pretty quickly, when they’re little babies the mama cat has to stimulate them to make them poop, their system are not yet fully developed. People do it by rubbing their bellies softly with a towel. Then you clean up the kitten and go about your business. That’s an important part of kitten tending but unless you get a situation like we did when they come to you two minutes old, that’s not necessary. If they can run around on their own and their tails are not at perpetual “kitten flag” attention, you can set up a box for them.
Jenny
Cat tender
Update: they got full checkups at the vet and both were disease- and internal-parasite-free. Opal had some ear mites and they both had fleas, but we were expecting that; I’d have been surprised if they didn’t have fleas. Vet took care of both of those things, too.
The vet and his techs were all very smitten and impressed with our domestication of these two. They were telling us normally when they hear someone is coming in with feral cats they get ready for war, but they couldn’t believe how tame these two were. They actually purred while getting their vaccinations.
They are currently locked in my guest room. We took the mattress off the old rope bed that’s in there so it’s just a wood bed frame and some bookshelves that I put hard plastic barriers over. They have a blanket on the floor, the crate that we took them to the vet in (that they are still using as their “kitten cave”), some toys, water, dry food, cardboard scratching pad, litter box.
They seem pretty smart. Having never used a litter box before, they figured it out immediately. They’ve been going in the mulch in the yard, so I just put litter in the bottom of the pan and put some mulch on top. They seem to have made the connection. They also intuited what the scratching pad was for and have been scratching it and not the walls and furniture.
I was a little afraid they were going to be lonely and meow-y when we left them alone but they’re fine. Apparently we inadvertently trained them to not be needy; every day while they were living outside I’d feed them and give them attention for 10-20 minutes, then I’d just go inside and close the door. They are super affectionate when I’m in there but they are fine when I leave. When I spend time with them in the room then leave, they just accept it.
We have to keep them apart from our other two cats because of the mites and fleas, for 3 weeks. After that we’ll take them back to the vet for a booster vaccine then we’ll get them fixed and they can meet Whitney (13) and Pixie (3). We think Pixie will enjoy having some friends; Whitney’s an old lady and has no interest in playing with her.
Kitten pics! The calico is Opal, the gray tabby is Willa.
At the vet: https://i.postimg.cc/rsLVGzfB/IMG-2821.jpg
Kitten pile in their new room: https://i.postimg.cc/tT6RVFNd/IMG-2828.jpg
Kitten pile on my lap last night: https://i.postimg.cc/FK8sRT3s/IMG-2847.jpg
SQUEE!
Congratulations on the new additions to your family.
I wish more people had your heart and your smarts; you’ve done all the right things for these cats. Which is not so common, too many people think because cats are independent minded they can do for themselves, don’t need people, don’t need anything. This is how we get these herds of feral cats under people’s porches and etc. My old neighborhood has such an enclave. It’s too difficult to catch 'em to get 'em neutered/spayed, no one can afford it even if they could catch them. My mother feeds them because she can’t bear the thought of them being hungry. They’re often weeded out by coyotes or loose dogs too, and that is heartbreaking. Sometimes we see cats that people have simply turfed out in the mix as well; try to rescue them when we can. My mother takes kittens in for spay/neuter when she can catch them.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Yes, get them young. I still feed a mom and one of her kittens. Unfortunately, the kitten was older when we realized he was in need of a home. We spayed and neutered seven cats that year.
Yes we adopted two from the backyard that we are technically “fostering” but I am sure we are keeping them- brother and sister. TNRed. Now after a few years they still dont want to be picked up but they both love getting petted and will ask for it.
IME leaving the mattress there would have been no problem – at least unless you consider hearing kittens bounce on and off the bed to be a problem. Mine enjoyed the bed greatly once they came out from under it (which doesn’t seem to be an issue with yours; judging by the pictures they don’t feel it all that necessary to hide.)
Yup.
The trick to housebreaking kittens is just to give them only one thing in the room they can dig and bury in – remove any potted plants, for instance. Healthy kittens will use the pan if it’s the only such option in there.
They’re not alone: there’s two of them, so they have each other.
This is one of multiple ways in which it’s easier to have two kittens than one.
Seconding Squeeee! and adding D’awwwww!
– has your tabby got several small patches of orange? looks like it in the picture; especially in the picture at the vet. if so, is that actually a tom?
The reason we took it off is the fleas. Vet said the stuff he put on them would take 3 days to fully work, and in the meantime we wanted to remove everything that we could from the room so it would be easier to clean, both of the remaining fleas and just in general.
Yes. She has a little sliver of orange on the top of her head, some random short orange streaks on her body, and her feet. The vet saw it and remarked “Same father.”
awww, congrats on your new pets.
We cared for orphan kittens, once. We definitely had to help them pee and poop, but it was easy, we just gently wiped their bums with a warm wet washcloth.
And yes, babies aren’t “feral”. They are not-yet-socialized. Those kittens were the tamest, most human-centric kittens we ever fostered. We also fostered some older, semi-feral kittens and young cats, with the goal of socializing them enough to live comfortably with humans.
Oh yes, we have two raised from a day old cats, they follow us everywhere, they are super affectionate.
Ah. That makes sense, about the fleas. Flea eggs in the mattress are well worth avoiding.
Or else two orange fathers –
Pretty kitty. And female, I gather.
