When we moved I ordered new furniture for my living room. At our new house I have both a living and a family room which is awesome! You guys know I have two cats, Peanut and Buttercup. Feel free to follow them on their IG account. Now new furniture and cats do not go together.
I do not believe in declawing cats. Therefore, I have to suffer the consequence of cats occasionally scratching something they shouldn’t. Having had the cats scratch up furniture in the past, I decided to do some research on how to best protect the new furniture. I ended up purchasing some cat repellent spray that I have been using regularly. It seems to be working.
Now the reason that I am sharing this with you is because in addition to the cat repellent spray I ended up buying a cat attraction (catnip) spray as well. In my research I learned that you can’t just repel the cats from being on certain furniture or in certain areas you have to also attract them to where they are supposed to be. I spray the attraction spay on their cats towers and beds and I spray the repellent on my furniture. This strategy has been working pretty good so far. S,o I decided to you a similar strategy for Baby Joy Chaser.
I started to decorate our house for Christmas and I know from past experience that he is going to want to touch the tree and everything else. He knocked over the tree I think twice last year and he was only crawling. I know we’re going to be in for it this year, LOL.
Following the cat strategy, I got him his own little felt Christmas tree. It has ornaments that he can stick on it. The plan is to redirect him to his own little Christmas tree whenever he starts to bother any of our decorations. Similar to the cats, he has a place to be redirected too whenever he is told to leave something alone.
Now this got me to thinking. Here’s a strategy that works for animals. I think it is going to work okay for the baby. I need to use the strategy on myself. There are a few behaviors that I need to modify. I need to figure out corresponding behaviors that I can redirect myself to when I’m trying to tell myself not to do something. I’ve often trief to stop some of these behaviors without success and I think it’s because I have not given myself a suitable redirection plan.
Here I am at almost 40 years old learning life lessons from cats and babies LOL. l Ineed to give so serious thought about what kind of redirection plan will work for me.
Have you ever come up with a specific redirection plan when trying to change a bad habit or modify an undesirable behavior? Were you successful? What was your plan?
