Sassy does drugs...

Sassy took a turn for the worst this month.  She actually started peeing on the waterproof pad - good news is it is easily cleaned up, bad news is it's a really bad habit to be forming.  When she did it the second time right in front of my husband, we decided to take the next step.  We had planned to lock her in my craft room but decided on her cage instead.

Carl got her cage out of the attic and we set it up inside the slider to the deck.  We added her litter box, blanket and food and locked her up.

This is where we found her in August so she's come full circle.  We added bird seed to the saucer outside her window so she can watch the birds.  She actually took this very well for a day or two but then started to go a little crazy.  First, she dug all the litter out of her box and scattered it all over the dining room and her cage.  In order to clean it up, I stored her in the laundry room/bathroom.  The thought occurred to me that it would be a better place to put her so we moved a litter box into the bathroom, gave her a blanket and food and put her there at night.

By the third day she was completely crazy in the cage so we moved her to the bathroom full time.  But that made me guilty even though she doesn't protest at going into the bathroom.  The idea here is to retrain her to use the litter box by putting her in an area so small that the only logical place to go is the litter box.  We started this experiment on Friday, December 28th.

Sunday, the 30th we reorganized the family room so she could spend time there.  We lined the railing with Christmas boxes and Carl made a door of sorts for the stairway.  Since we've had her in August we had been unable to coax her to jump from the back of the couch to the dining room floor.  It's only about 10 inches but she seemed unable to do it until we made the door.  She learned really fast how to get into the dining room so we brought in all the boxes from the Christmas decorations and stacked them.  We stuffed towels in the open spots between boxes and after several attempts to break through she seems to have given up.

The chair with the gold cushion is one my husband rescued from a hotel that was closing and it was in our bedroom.  I moved it downstairs so the cat could use it instead of my chair.  And she did until we started to lock her up and now she's punishing me by not using it.

So, this is where she spends her days.  You can see I've moved my computer from my craft room which is why my blog goes mostly unattended, I've been babysitting.  She goes into the bathroom at night and comes out in the morning.  In addition to kitty prison, she's been taking Kitty Prozac, 1/2 a tablet every morning since December 28th.