Monday 5 August 2019

Meowing on Mondays ~ In The Sandbox with The B Team and Today's Chat is All About Living In A Multi-Cat Household

Meowing on Mondays ~ In The Sandbox with The B Team ©BionicBasil®

Happy Monday Pawsies

And welcome to our furst 

Meowing on Mondays ~ In The Sandbox with The B Team 

What does that mean we hear mew ask? well fabulous furriends it means we're in the sandbox fur our weekly chat session, which could be about anything.

Meowing on Mondays ~ In The Sandbox with The B Team ©BionicBasil® Sandbox Graphic

By the way, no hissing, no spitting, no smacky paws or swiping, no flicking sand and definitely no widdling or pooping in the sandbox either! MOL 

Today we're going to talk about living in a multi-cat household and what that involves.


 Living In A Multi-Cat Household

Now we know that some hoomans may have only one kitty.  Some have two or maybe even three. But how does having even more kitties wurk in today's fast paced wurld?

At BBHQ we usually run at six cats constantly, that seems to be the magic number fur us, our Goldilocks number - not too many and not too little, the 'just right' ratio.  Though we have had times where we've been down to only three, and we've also been as high as eight indoor plus feeding several strays too that visited our garden daily.

So how does this wurk fur us?

Having six cats is quite a bit of wurk and here's why:

Everyone needs to have one to one time with the P.A. and/or dad. It's very impawtant that all B Team memfurs have this time daily.  So if we each get only 10 minutes, that's an hour minimum.

Plus we like to have playtime and outside time too. We're only allowed outside if the P.A. or dad is on paw to snoopervise us. Usually the P.A. will do some gardening while she keeps an eye on us and as she and dad wurk Mon - Fri this means we only get outdoor time when they get back from wurk. 

So kitty entertaining takes up a lot of free time.

Next there's the grooming/brushing.

Now some of us like being brushed and pampered, while others not so much. Fur instance, Parsley will let mew brush him 24/7, there is neffur enough brush fur him; he will sit, stand or lay down and take as much as mew can give! MOL   

While Pandora our hairy little Ewok/Sasquatch cat, hates being brushed and the P.A. has to literally walk around the house while trying to brush her; she gets mats in her fur because she's such a hairy beast and we have every type of grooming implement going to try and combat this issue. Though the one she likes the best - well tolerates better than anything - is actually the P.A.'s Tangle Teaser brush - which is now Pandora's! MOL
Pandora's Tangle Teezer Brush @BionicBasil® Meowing on Mondays BBHQ
Pandora's Tangle Teezer

If you would like to purrchase one of these brushes, a google search will bring up a selection fur mew.  

Smooch likes a bit of brush as does Melyvn, Amber also doesn't mind, although Fudge is not keen, though he is getting used to the pet mitt, more about that in an upcoming post.

None of us like ear cleaning, eye cleaning or nail clipping and will do anything to avoid these activities.

Feeding Time At BBHQ and Watering Holes

We're furry lucky to have our own kitty kitchen [aka the laundry] and we all know which station aka bowl is ours. This is our regular line up.
Feeding Time At BBHQ @BionicBasil® Meowing on Mondays
From the top:

Pandora
Smooch
Fudge

[a bowl of dry food stationed between Parsley and Fudge]

Parsley
Amber

And young Melvyn who is more like his Great Uncle Basil than we could have ever imagined, eats his on the counter top to the right out of shot. We all eat together and we have a couple of snacks a day. Plus if we get hungry we go and put in a request fur an extra meal; this entails [pardon the pun] finding the P.A. meowing a lot and then leading her towards the kitty kitchen, this method wurks 90% of the time.

We also have dry food available 24/7, which is topped up as needed and stationed around the house in various locations along with clean water.

We use stainless steel bowls as they are more hygienic, plastic dishes are a no go here and can cause chin acne in some kitties, so be careful.  We have clean bowls fur morning and evening meals, so that means lots of washing up.  Also all our bowls are on place-mats and we use kitchen roll too, so clean up is easy if there's any spills, or someone starts throwing their food about.

Our water bowls are many and stationed around the house, plus upstairs too. These all need changing/cleaning daily as food debris and dust can collect.  We have Brita filtered water too, as our tap water is hard and doesn't taste that nice, plus we had used a couple of water fountains until recently; we had a pump failure on our Catit fountain, and sadly when the P.A. had her accident the Miaustore fountain was broken in the fall out of ceiling debris and we've not replaced either yet, but we do like water fountains, especially Fudge. 

The P.A. also grows us fresh cat grass weekly, and she grows us catnip too, so we've got an endless supply of fresh greens.
Cat Grass in Happy Grass Pots @BionicBasil® Meowing on Mondays BBHQ
We'll be showing mew how to make our Happy Grass Pots in our next Crafting with Cats post.

Kitty Bathroom

The B Teams Bathroom Habits... we have at the moment several trays that all get changed daily fur a completely clean one, this is the system that wurks fur us due to Smooch's inappropriate widdling issues. Some days a tray may last a little longer but generally it's all change once a day.

Until recently we used  Bob Martins Cat Litter - non clumping, it was like the Catsan white litter, but the dust was getting quite intense and the ever escalating price made the P.A. look fur an alternative.  She decided to revert back to the recycled newspaper litter, which she buys on Amazon and has delivered to the house. There's no dust and minimum odour when soiled.

We have our trays in various locations downstairs so that everyone can use a tray somewhere without being bothered by another kitty or feeling vulnerable. 

Amber our elderly matriarch suffers from arthritis and finds it difficult to squat fully, so she inadvertently widdles over the side.  So to try and combat multiple widdle rivers the P.A. has employed an extra tactic to keep the widdle rivers to a minimum.  She places our regular tray on a grow-bag tray, although if Amber gets on an angle, a widdle river is inevitable but it does stop a lot.

Litter Tray At BBHQ @BionicBasil® Meowing on Mondays
To eliminate widdle rivers altogether we need a tray like the one above, but a square one! MOL

Beds and Scratch Posts/Cat Trees

We have multiple sleeping places around the house and several tall scratch post/cat trees. 

We love a windowsill and each one upstairs has a little blanket on as they're our favourite.  The P.A. has spent a fortune on funky cat beds over the years only to discover that we don't like them, what we do like is sleeping on is:- the bed, the cat beds that she has made, and sofa's.

So at no time is there any need to squabble fur space.

We are also exceptionally lucky to have a catservatory with some really high cat shelves, accessible from our tallest cat tree.
In The Gods In The Catservatory @BionicBasil®
So there's somewhere fur effurypurrdy, and nopurrdy gets in anyone's space unless they're invited! MOL
Parsley and Fudge on the Snuggle Blanket @BionicBasil®

Parsley and Fudge sharing the Snuggle Mat


In summary, The B Team live a most harmonious life.  There are very few spats, as everyone seems to get along, so we are extremely fortunate in that respect.

Looking after 6 kitties does take a lot of work, and planning is vital to running a smooth oppurration, but as the P.A. says, she wouldn't have it any other way! 

*Top Tip* get a really good cordless vacuum for your daily clean, as there's a lot of cat hair which mew won't want building up, and a regular brush is useless as it just makes everything airborne.  We use a Dyson and find it wurks great, before that we tried other brands but they didn't have the power.

If there's any questions mew have about how we organise things, cleaning, routines, etc... feel free to ask. 


A lot of our blogging furriends have as many if not a lot more kitties than us, so fur all those that exceed our number of kitties per household, purrhaps mew could tell us about your experiences and top tips?

Join us again on Wednesday when we're here with The Pet Parade... in the meantime

Keep calm, and purr on

Bestest purrs

 The B Team xox








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13 comments:

  1. I'm tired just reading about all the work your personal assistant does. She's happy to do it for sure. You're all so well taken care of. As it should be.

    Thank you for joining the Awww Mondays Blog Hop.

    Have a fabulous Awww Monday. My best to your PA and dad. ♥

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  2. A great cat hideaway - love them all in a row eating.

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  3. What a wonderful organization ! Your humans do a pawsome job to keep harmony in the household ! Purrs

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  4. Lovely! A great place for kitties!
    Thanks for linking up at https://image-in-ing.blogspot.com/2019/08/mmmmmmm.html

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  5. Our mom can barely keep up with the two of us! Your person does a fab job!

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  6. Such a terrific post and, as you know, we can relate to all of that!

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  7. You are very lucky kitties. We can't leave dry food out because Sammy and Joanie will eat it all and yack it up. :) XO

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  8. My human could barely cope with three cats! It boggles her mind how people with more do it.

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  9. You have everything well organised. When we took on my MIL's 10 cats after she died they were obviously set in their ways so we had to change things slowly for them. They were always fed in the yard with two big round dishes and all ate together. They also slept in one of the barns at night. When we sold the farmhouse along with some land and the barn, that had to change. They had already started coming up to our bungalow so at night I would feed them in the woodshed (a small barn) and while they were eating I would shut them in overnight to get them out of the habit of sleeping in their old places. They had always been outdoor farm cats, but it wasn't long before most of them decided to join us indoors much to the annoyance of the cat we already had. He didn't appreciate having to fight for his place on the bed.

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  10. You all make a multi-cat household look effortless!

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  11. I have double your number plus a couple that belong to my roommate. I find the 1-1 time the hardest. My littles just don’t get the concept and want to be in the middle of everything! I think that’s why Plush likes traveling. He gets me all to himself all weekend and the show scene is all about him and his desires, he gets to eat what he wants, be groomed til every fur is purrfect and generally spoiled. I didn’t plan to live with this many, and it won’t happen again but I wouldn’t change it. Someone told me to just give some away and I asked him which one of his children he’d like to give away and how would he choose? Same thing for me.

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  12. Yup, Your PA and Daddy are *busy* with all the kitty things! How on earth do you find time to blog, MOL! I had only two and a pup and it was busy to the Max...now its one kitty and 2 oups, and yes, still busy.
    The most kitties we ever had was three and a pup...trust me that was busy! Well for me it was:)

    Keep up the wonderful work and the kitty tales you blog for us to read about.

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  13. One big happy family is the way to go—or only princess, MOL Either way, having a human staff is very hard tiring work, so I do recommend cats choose wisely so they get the best service ;)
    Purrs
    ERin

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