those photos are adorable, thank you!
I have an internet friend who fosters feral kittens every spring/summer (kitten season) - she has to do some hardcore socializing (you make a kitten burrito is what you do) and ever since I’ve been looking at her photos I’ve been wanting to do this.
dogs/puppies, too, of course.
so it’s useful and also a way to have animals when vet care for my actual pets is too expensive to get more. 
Thanks for the pics! So adorable!
Sorry about your cat. Our indoor/outdoor cat left the house one day about 3 months ago and never came back. But around the same time our neighbors were fostering their first set of kittens, two girls and a boy. They got the kittens when they were 2 days old. :eek: So tiny! We ended up adopting the boy kitten so we are back up to two cats.
Our other cat we got from a friend who fostered kittens for a while. She says she can’t do it anymore because she couldn’t help from keeping a kitten from each litter. She is now up to 8 cats.
Can’t find the post right now, but another Doper once described it as “like the Book of the Month Club, but with kittens.”
Pretty honest. I mean, I won’t be describing how both of these ladies still haven’t quite figured out the litter box, but otherwise. Some people are looking for playful rascals, other folks want sleepy cuddlers.
Yep, I thought these two might need some forced lovin’. The first day they holed up in a bookshelf and hissed/swiped at me whenever I got too close. But when I came out of the bedroom the next morning they stretched and walked up to me just fine. We’ve been best buds ever since. RIght now, the black one is dozing just outside the door she’s not allowed in here and she wants to be carried around while I do housework.
I, too, did foster kittens for many years while my daughters lived at home. They were the most popular kids on the block! We learned quickly to get a group with the mother, or a pregnant mother, because then the mother does all the hard work of feeding 5 kittens multiple times per day. I posted a video here one time of a large group of them roughhousing.
The shelter provides everything: food, litterbox, litter, meds, formula if needed, etc; then neuter/spay when they’re just big enough, iirc over a pound. As soon as they were healed, we’d take them back to the shelter, where my sniffling daughters would spy a new group and decide they didn’t want to keep the old bunch after all, as long as they could get a new set!
Now that my daughters have moved into their own places, one has continued fostering on her own. She calls it her kitty therapy. She prefers to get kittens with no mom, so she can do all the kitty-snuggling and feeding herself.
Let’s see if I can correctly paste a link via my phone to my thread back in 2011 on our newborn foster kittens. Picture and video links seem to be active, still.
Eta: Sad to see how many posters in that thread are no longer here.
That was a lot of cute. Did you end up keeping any of them?
Nope, but we did trade them in for a new batch.
Two years ago the two feral females in our backyard produced four litters, for a total of twelve kittens. We managed to capture 11 of the 12. But two no kill shelters were full of kittens and could only take seven.
We fostered four. We failed. We adopted all four, adding to our existing family of five.
Today, we still have our indoor-only nine. They run the house.
And I’m beginning year four as a feral cat whisperer with four regular ferals still living in my back yard (including the two females), and another four transient ferals.
We used to foster kittens. Yes, that was tons of fun. We had to buy the food and litter box and kitty litter, but the shelter provided vet care. We usually brought home a pregnant cat, and kept her and the litter until they were three months old. When we started, it was two months, but the shelter had enough luck finding homes for them that they started keeping them with their litters longer, which is really better for their socialization.
We stopped because we weren’t home enough. You really need to spend a lot of time with them. And we couldn’t give them the run of the house because our cats hated having kittens around, so we kept them in the guest bed room (which has its own bath.) But that meant were needed to spend time -there-
If I retire, I’ll probably start fostering kittens again.
I always wrote very honest blurbs about the kittens and their moms. Even psycho-mom. I wanted them to find suitable homes.
Hmmm. This thread did not go the way I expected from the title.
"Guys, fostering kittens is basically a real-life cheat code" made me think the message would be that single men who foster kittens will have gobs of single women beating a path to their door. Not for wanting the kittens, but for wanting the man.
Color me disappointed. But thanks for the cute pix. 
You are not alone.
+1
Some things don’t require cheat codes.
I’m a little surprised that the shelter encourages temporary kitten fostering. Cats are less adoptable than kittens, and you are removing most of the kitten from the cat. Or, as Ogden Nash once said:
The trouble with a kitten is THAT
Eventually, it becomes a CAT.
They can’t be adopted out until they are spayed/neutered, and that gets safer as they get older. It’s a balancing act between moving them as fast as possible, and keeping them safe.
That’s why the shelter I worked with increased the age we kept them to. Because it was really better for the kittens to wait until they were older, both for their physical health and also for their social development. They had been adopting them out at the earliest possible age, but when they became comfortable with knowing they would find them homes when they were still adorable (3 month) kittens, they kept them to three months.
Believe me, there’s plenty of kitten left in them. Many of them get adopted very shortly after their surgeries. If anything, the socialization makes them much more kittenish because they’re comfortable around people put of the gate. Kittens who have spent their whole lives in a shelter cage can often be hissy and shy.
You probably know this by now, but using a litter box is an instinct with cats, unlike dogs. No training necessary.
I had a girlfriend once, Sara, who was subletting a bedroom in a residence. She found a cute little black kitten she named “Ayari,” and left her in the bedroom while she (Sara) went to work. Sara somehow thought that Ayari wouldn’t have any nature calls until she came home, but she found out, quite by accident, that Ayari had shit in her shoe.
A little upsetting. She brought Ayari to my house and said I would have to adopt her, as she couldn’t afford the mounting shoe costs. I asked her if she had provided a litter box – no, no box. We cut off the top of an empty Kleenex box, scooped a handful of loose dirt from a bare spot in the yard, and put the box down in front of Ayari. The cat immediately jumped in, squatted down quite happily and let fly.
Sara was impressed with my feline knowledge. “How did you know she would do that?” Experience, my friend.
At the risk of coming across as insensitive, actually I couldn’t figure out the rest, except that your old cat met with some unnamed demise. When I first read this, I thought the next thing I would read was that your cat became pregnant and thus you had kittens, but after your next paragraph, I’m sure that’s not what you meant.
What happened? And I’m sorry for your loss.
Usually, but not universally.