Critter Room Cleaning

I'm not working at the hospital today because I will work on Saturday. So... It was a good time to clean the critter room, and the litterboxes. There are eight litterboxes, two large chinchilla cages and a huge ferret cage. I scoop the litter boxes daily, sometimes twice a day and try to clean the ferret cage at least twice a week but I have to do a big clean every week.

Today I rolled out of bed at 10:45am and started the day by vacuuming and scraping our pellet stove. It is about 15 degrees in eastern PA today and housecleaning while frigid, well just sucks. Then I decided to start with the bedroom litterbox. It is one of two covered boxes and keeps our inappropriate eliminator Vincent from peeing in the corner. It is very exciting stuff, cleaning litterboxes. Okay maybe not, but you learn a lot about your kitties. I scrape them really well and then wash them in the tub with organic hydrogen peroxide, peppermint Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap and hot water. Scrubbing them weekly lessens the chances of litterbox avoidance and with seven cats, that is super important.

Unfortunately when I got to the second covered litterbox, which we keep in the hall closet, I found a huge amount of soaking litter. This is the box Luna Moth uses primarily. I'm afraid she may be having kidney problems. I talked to the hubby and we decided to put her in the guest room with her litterbox, just to make sure it was her. So I brought her into the room after setting up a box, a snack and water. She was playing with me on the bed and the suddenly squatted and started urinating on the comforter. I managed to grab her and put her in the box, but it confirmed my concerns. I'm very glad I work at a veterinary hospital because the fact that I can get her tests and help right away is the only thing keeping me from panicking.

After Luna peed on the bed I stopped that experiment, let her out and continued my cleaning. The chinchilla cages are easy, I just empty and clean their bottom trays, refresh their dust bath, give them alfalfa and let them do their there thing. After I got the cages and the rest of the litterboxes cleaned I shut the door to the critter room and let Sam and Rose out so I could clean their cage. Anya absolutely loves the ferrets. In fact she basically lives in a cardboard box on a shelf under their cage. She chases them around the room and they chase her back and sometimes she gets into their cage and eats their food. Rosie is obsessed with shoes and always tries to steal my lime green Crocs off my feet while I'm cleaning the cage. She's a menace. Before we moved the cats' food into the kitchen Sam would steal tons of it and hide it in corners. Most of the time if I leave them in there with Anya for a while they will tire themselves out and put themselves back to bed.

It took about two hours but I finally got everything clean and tidy and cleaned the bathroom too since I had washed the litterboxes in the tub. Now I'm suffering with my allergies to dust bath, cat litter and alfalfa and watching "Regarding Henry." Calliope is playing with a jingle ball her daddy found while he was doing his cleaning, Penelope is stalking her sisters and the others are doing their things.