Happy Birthday to Peaches who is celebrating her 20th birthday on May 1. Way to go Peaches!! To honor Peaches, Bernadette Kazmarski is offering a beautiful cat print. You can bid on the Peaches and Peonies print through midnight May 1 by leaving a comment on her blog. The auction proceeds will benefit FosterCat. For more information visit here.

Bloggers are also sharing stories and tips about living and caring for older cats to help Peaches celebrate. My cat that lived the longest was Katarina who was almost seventeen-years-old. The last year of her life she was in renal failure. Tatianna lived to be almost sixteen-years-old. She was also in renal failure, but lived with the disease for three years.

One of the things I recall about having two geriatric cats was how my household furnishings were arranged to accommodate their varying physical and medical needs. As the cats aged, they were no longer able to jump high. In the last months of their lives, I built a stair case of cardboard boxes, so they could easily crawl into the master bed—where they had slept their entire lives.

Tatianna adopted a flat cardboard box that a large checkbook cover was shipped in. The twelve-by-sixteen-inch box was big enough for her to stretch out, and she could exercise her front paws by rubbing on its well-defined edges. She could sleep for hours on that box. The box became part of the décor and occupied a spot under my coffee table for over a year.

For almost three years, I decorated the archway of my kitchen with a suspended lactated ringers solution drip bag. Every day I pulled the small, round breakfast table, which normally lived in the middle of the kitchen, over a couple feet toward the entryway so that it was within the reach of the drip bag. That was where Tatianna was given her fluids.

Rooms accented with cardboard boxes and drip bags—well not exactly Better Homes and Gardens material! But my dear fur friends were comfortable and could enjoy life up until the end. And that was what counted.

Bountiful Blessings!