Semi-feral mom brought back her kittens!

So about a month and a half ago this feral cat that we had been feeding gave birth on our second story deck. We gave her a covered box and kept feeding her but after a week she moved her litter into our neighbor’s yard just on the other side of our fence. Our neighbor isn’t particularly friendly and has a REALLY messy yard full of heavy junk - great for a mom cat hiding kittens, not great for unwelcome neighbors going kitten hunting. Mom kept coming back to our second story deck so we kept feeding her to make sure she would still be able to feed the babies. They were out of sight for about a month.

Flash forward to yesterday, she brought all SEVEN kittens back to our second story deck one by one over the course of 36 hours.

So here’s where we need some advice. Our living situation doesn’t allow us to keep the kittens indoors. We have ample space on our deck and have a kitten proof pen set up for everything they would need. Mom is still technically a community cat and comes and goes as she pleases - and we would like for the kittens to stay with mom as long as possible (they’re currently six weeks old).

Most likely what we’ll do is put a net over the pen for peace of mind and allow the mom supervised visits. She seems pretty indifferent when we handle the kittens and when we let her into the pen where the kittens are (we have to lure her in with food; she hasn’t gone in on her own), she’ll hang out with them, feed them, and then dip out by jumping the walls.

My concern is that something might spook mom and she’ll try to take them again, but if she went to the trouble of bringing all seven kittens to us would that even be something we need to worry about?

Thank you for reading this egregiously long post.