The Cat Whisperer

If the way we’ve raised our cats is any indication, Mr. Candy and I are going to be terrible parents.

Truly.  It cannot be a good sign when you allow two overweight fluffballs to waddle into your house, sniff around and raise their Kitty Nation flag over your submissive heads.   Our food is their food.  Our furniture is their scratching post.  In fact, we have absolutely no control over anything in our household.  We curl into the fetal position, knees tucked around our chins, to ensure our cats are comfy at the foot of our bed at night.  Because God forbid THEY should lose any sleep.   They jump onto the new leather chair that I was just about to occupy and, rather than assert my allegedly superior position in the evolutionary tree, I ask them if they would like a silk pillow on which to rest their delicate heads.

The main culprit and monster pooper

And just to make sure we understand they rule the roost?  The 22-lb. monster cat, Matty, regularly poops on the hardwood floor.  A not-so-little gift from him to us human minions.

With another sure-to-be-monster-pooper on the way, Mr. Candy and I belatedly decided to use everything in our arsenal to fix Monster Cat’s longtime “issue,” including taking him to a very helpful veterinarian in West Hollywood.

“I looked up solutions on the Internet before you came, but nothing really stood out to me,” Helpful Vet shrugged.

Wow.  Thanks!  We never thought of trying THAT.

We responded as any angry customer would:  by dutifully forking over a hundred bucks and asking if we could fetch him a silk pillow.

Having exhausted our personal ammunition, we finally had to call in back-up troops:  The Cat Whisperer.  Fueled by encouragement from my mom who declared, “A hundred-fifty-bucks for a kitty quack?  Are you NUTS?!” and my unhealthy obsession with Cesar Millan, Mr. Candy and I hired a seasoned “cat behaviorist” to visit our home and show us how to regain control of our house before Baby Girl arrives.  Or, at least, how to get the cats to contribute toward the mortgage payments and sizable Meow Mix bills.

I smiled myself to sleep, knees firmly under chin, dreaming of our Cat Whisperer frolicking with Marcy and (Fatty) Matty on the streets of Los Angeles, Cesar Millan-style, and returning to us with two well-behaved cats who always use the scratching posts and litter boxes — while they, of course, entertain us by reciting a Petrarchan Sonnet in fluent Italian.

Which is precisely how the visit went a few weekends ago.  Minus the frolicking, resultant behaving and sonnet reciting.

Okay, so we have had minimal progress.  At the Cat Whisperer’s urging, we added yet another litter box on our first floor, which Fatty Matty uses… as a landmark to poop next to.

“It’s all about baby steps,” my hubby assures me as I furiously consider introducing the new litter box to Matty’s backside in an entirely different way.

And, although the startlingly big and ugly wooden scratching post that she recommended buying hasn’t deterred Fatty Matty from using our dressers as his personal claw massager, the excessive catnip my husband sprinkled on it has induced Matty into a permanently high state.  In fact, it’s only a matter of time till his fluffy ass is dancing around in the buff and playing the bongo drums.

Which, I think we can all agree, is INFINITELY more entertaining than reciting sonnets.  Not to mention a guaranteed reality show:  “Dancing With the Buzzed Drummer Kitties.”

Sure, I’ll still have poop on my bathroom floor.  But at least it will cover the Meow Mix bills.