This post is part of a social shopper marketing insight campaign with Pollinate Media Group®, Litter Genie® and Fancy Feast®, but all my opinions are my own. #pmedia #Catparents http://my-disclosur.es/OBsstV
In the pet parenthood game, as with most anything in life, there are winners and there are, well, non-winners.
By any quantifiable metric, my two cats, the queens of this 1-story slab castle, have it made in the shade and in the sun beams that dart through the spaces left between the haphazardly closed curtains on lazy mid-afternoons. Theirs is a fanciful life of folded blanket squares, chilled spring water, Olive Garden-esque never ending food bowls, and eight adoring hands for which to be petted morning, noon and night.
I have it fairly easy too, generally-speaking, in life, but within their lives I know my place.
If they are curled up on the throne, I am toiling away in the proverbial fields, tending to their needs, their purring pleas for a refresh of this or a scoop of that. But for as much splendor as they enjoy no one would mistake their crunchy everyday dry food for haute cuisine. Sure, they like it well enough, and, just as every single smartphone owner scrambles for a USB plug and a wall outlet vacancy, my two kitties walk in concentric circles around my feet when their supply dips to 20% capacity, twitching like they’ll never be made whole again. But I have also seen the way they attack a can of wet food, it is as close to an Animal Planet documentary as one can get with a piece of handsome stoneware involved. Up until now, they’ve been given the moist gold of wet cat food only on holidays and on the anniversaries of their joining our family, but thanks to the Litter Genie + Fancy Feast dealio happening at Target as I type and you read, Queen Tilly the Fierce and Queen Whisper the Meek are enjoying a culinary renaissance.
Meanwhile, while they lap up the Fancy Feast goodness laid before their piercing eyes and sandpaper tongues for Sunday night ‘family dinner’, I’m on the floor in the laundry room scooping their ‘business’ into a device so new to me that my plastic shopping bag of plastic shopping bags is still overflowing. Listen, I do serve at the pleasure of Tilly and Whisper but I don’t scoop their poop every day. I think you’re supposed to, especially for whiskered royalty, but I can’t stomach using and disposing of that many plastic bags. We’re not on the disposable circuit in life — eschewing the paper plates, towels, cups, and the rest of the easily thrown away stuff — so the tightly-wound plastic bags (usually from Target, where I’d accidentally on-purpose forget my reusables to build up a supply of cat poop bags) of clumped-up cat droppings were the only real wasteful trash we’d produce in this kingdom. Thanks to Litter Genie’s cat litter disposal system that can accept, um, scooped up deposits from a single cat for up to two weeks without being swapped out, I now give the queens a quick scoop daily to ensure their luxurious lives are even more so. And I don’t have to feel like a jester with bags upon bags of stinky royal poop collecting in the trash can.
Another potential benefit from the Litter Genie that has me crossing my fingers? My daughters might now actually help with scooping the cat’s litter — you know, the job they SWORE they’d do if we adopted a 2nd cat last year, ahem, yeah about that — since they can easily make it a part of their daily responsibilities without having to tie a single plastic bag or, worse of all, make a trip to the dreaded stinky trash can.
*Full disclosure, I first assembled the Litter Genie wrong. This is remarkable because there is but ONE piece that needs to be installed into the Genie, and somehow I messed it up, thus continuing my handy man ineptitude — did I ever tell you about the time I built a wheelbarrow…backwards? I’m a jester and a non-winner when it comes to just about everything a ‘real guy’ could handle with ease. I had to watch the Litter Genie video to finally figure out my mistake [hangs head in shame]. This is why I’m merely a servant boy in the cats’ kingdom.
