With a lot of cats and kittens coming through the house, I have found ways to be thrifty or practical without reducing quality of car or play for them. I will spend extra money on great litter or good quality food, but there are times that spending more is not necessarily a benefit.

Take the common kitty puff ball. You can buy a pack of four for about $2 at a pet store. Or you can buy a bag of about 300 from a craft store for about $5. Granted they’re not exactly as well made, but they’re destined to be destroyed, lost, and fought over. So they’re not going to last forever in a room full of kittens.

In retrospect, I should have fully thought out my decision in the craft store when I bought a bag of several hundred assorted size puff balls, in ‘natural’ colors–black, white and shades of browns. That massive bag has lasted us through four litters of kittens.

They’ve had fun. They’ve lost them under furniture, stuffed them in water bowls and wet food dishes, and buried them in litter boxes. And because I had hundreds, whenever one got too gross, I just threw it away and pulled out a few replacements.

I, on the other hand, was introduced to a new game–poop or puffball? Kittens, and even cats, tend to kick lovely nuggets of poop out of their litter boxes when they get overexcited doing their business. Sometimes I go into the kitten room to clean up and find a brownish, roundish object on the floor, and I hear the game show music start up. Is this object a puffball or a poop? Dare I touch it with my bare hands? It’s got some litter dust on it, but that could go either way. Do I waste a paper towel and find out it’s a puffball? Hurry, hurry… time is ticking away…

Sometimes I win the game and it’s a puffball. Sometimes it’s not.

Note to future self: pick out the most colorful ones you can find next time. We’ve got these on our kitty Amazon wish list…