A temporary foster during a housing gap asks a lot of a friendship: your friend takes on a cat whose ways they know only socially, in a home the cat has never lived in, for a stay whose end date may move. The information you hand over is what decides whether that goes smoothly. A verbal tour and a bag of food is not enough, because the details that matter surface at midnight, not during the friendly handover chat. Write the brief as if your friend could never ask a follow-up question, and organize it around the cat's day.
Food, Litter, and the Familiar Routine
Start with feeding, exactly as it is served at home. Name the food itself, the amount you serve and the times you serve it, where the bowl goes, and what happens with leftovers. Cover treats just as precisely: which ones, how many, and when, because a fosterer being kind with treats can undo a routine and upset a stomach. If the cat is a grazer or a strict two-meal cat, say so, along with anything the cat must never be fed.
Then match the litter setup the cat already knows: the kind of litter, where the box lives in your friend's home by prior agreement, how often you scoop, and where supplies are kept. A cat in a strange home judges safety partly through these anchors, and a litter arrangement that matches home as closely as the foster home allows is the strongest settling tool you can hand over.
Habits, Handling, and Hiding Places
Name the hiding places: where the cat goes when startled (and it will be startled in the first days), under which furniture, behind which curtains — so your friend reads a missing cat as a hiding cat rather than an escaped one. State handling preferences plainly and without apology. If the cat dislikes being picked up, write exactly that, along with how the cat does like contact, a chin scratch on its own approach, being left to climb into a lap uninvited. Note warnings too: a cat who swats when a belly is touched, or who bolts at the vacuum, saves your friend learning by experiment.
Vet Contact, Authorization, and Medication
Give the veterinarian's name, practice, and contact details, and add an emergency authorization note beside them: who may authorize care if the cat is hurt or ill while you are unreachable, and the order in which people should be contacted, your friend first as the person on the spot, then you, then any second contact you name. Keep the note signed and dated; practices vary in what they accept, and the note plus a reachable owner covers most of what a practice needs to act promptly.
Any medication is covered only exactly as prescribed: what it is, when it is given, how the cat takes it, written as plainly as the label allows, with nothing added, skipped, or substituted on anyone's judgment. Note the expected length of the stay as honestly as you know it, your reachable contact and the times you are hardest to reach, and send the cat with its comfort items, a familiar-smelling blanket and a favorite toy.
The Packet That Travels
Assemble all of it as one handover pack rather than a thread of messages your friend scrolls through at midnight. The pack is the Pet Passport in the plain sense: the records packet that holds vaccination entries and health notes, the contacts and authorization, and the written brief on food, litter, habits, and handling, all in one place. Hand the packet over with the cat, talk your friend through it once in person, and leave a copy of your own so you can answer questions from the same pages. Additions during the stay, a vet visit or a newly discovered hiding place, get written into the packet by your friend as they happen.
When the stay ends, the packet returns alongside the cat, its foster notes added to the Pet Passport file on KinsLe for the next handover.