If you happen to be following along with me at my Simplicity blog, you know that we're slowly but surely working on changing our way of life. Eliminating/modifying the things that cause us stress and learning to have less in order to live full lives with as little distraction as possible.
Well, part of eliminating stresses in our life was changing our pet situation. We started small and passed on the guinea pigs to a family with four girls who really wanted to add more guinea pigs to their family. Sometimes we miss hearing the little "wheet!" sounds whenever we walk into the garage, but we eliminated a $30 per month cost and I don't have to worry about having a cage cleaning on my weekly housecleaning schedule. Aiden was too small to clean out the cage and I was losing my desire to tend to the pigs. When it came down to it, they were causing more stress than joy. Per an agreement that we had made with Aiden months ago, we did get a betta fish after getting rid of the guinea pigs. The cost is almost non-existent and Aiden is able to clean out the fish tank with a little help from me. We have a story about our fish, but I'll put that in another post.
The next step was to address the stress that the cats were causing. No matter how often we cleaned, our laundry room was being coated with cat litter, Izzy knocked over the water bowl at least once per day, the carpet was being ripped to pieces, one of the cats (we never figured out which one) was urinating all over bath mats and under the boys' bunk beds. I was being awoken at least six times per night by the cats attempting to tear up the carpet. Obviously, things were NOT ok. However, we love our cats (although I was beginning to hate them), so we didn't want to just get rid of them. We decided to transition them outside. After a couple of successful days of putting them out on the back deck for a few hours, we decided it was time to make the big move. We moved all of their cat belongings to a corner of the garage and set up a bed area for them. We took a tip from our cat lady neighbor and left our garage door open a bit at the bottom so the cats could go in and out when they needed. (I might add that I attempted to put the cats out by myself earlier in the week and had my torso ripped to shreds by Izzy - I am healing nicely and it doesn't appear that anything will scar)
So this weekend was the weekend it was going to happen! And it did happen. Izzy attempted to bite one of John's fingers off in the process. I'm not joking - you should have heard the sound she made and then she purposely went for his hand. She bit down to the bone and John's finger is swollen, but we don't think it needs medical attention. After about eight hours, all three cats were outside. Unfortunately for the cats, John and I neglected to check the weather report and it was 26 degrees last night. We hoped that they would cuddle up together in their bed area in the garage and slowly get over their anger at us. It's been a little over twelve hours now and all three cats seem to be missing. I put some cat food outside for them and I'm hoping that they're just mad and will come around when they get hungry. I highly doubt they would have went wandering off on their first night, so they're probably just hiding in a bush. Needless to say, we'll all be very sad if all three of them disappear forever. We didn't want them
gone; we just needed space. But we knew this was a risk and we've been debating the risk since last September. It wasn't an easy decision, but we felt that we made the right one.
Hopefully I'll have good news to report regarding the cats in a few days.
