It’s often difficult to find foster homes for a mom cat and her kittens, and no one was sure what would happen to them. Not long after they came in, though, Amanda Kruczynski, one of the staffers at the shelter and an avid foster mom, heard about them and went to see them in their holding kennel. As soon as she saw all the kittens huddled up against their mom, she knew she couldn’t leave their fate up to chance.

“I put them all into a carrier and took them home on my lunch break,” Kruczynski told The Dodo. “I knew they would need time to heal from what they had gone through and I wanted to be able to lend a hand in that. We never did find out how they came to be in that box that night or why they were abandoned.”

From the very beginning, Meeseeks was different from his siblings. When he first arrived in his foster home, he was too small to move around much and mostly stayed curled up in a little ball. He was so tiny and fuzzy, he barely even looked real, and a lot of people had a hard time believing that he actually was.

“Nobody believed his kitten photos were real,” Kruczynski said. “He looked like a little felt toy and his size made it that much more unbelievable. Anyone who met him in person instantly fell in love and I had so many adoption inquiries about his entire litter. Talk about a one in a million cat.”