Page one, line one, in red pen and underlined twice: If you don't see Mabel, find her before you leave.
Everything else in the binder is useful. That line is the one I'd keep if I could only keep one. A drop-in sitter can fill a bowl, scoop a box and change the water without ever laying eyes on the cat, and a cat hiding for a normal reason looks exactly like a cat hiding because something is wrong, or one who got shut in a closet. The only way to tell is to look. An empty food bowl tells you she ate. It doesn't tell you she's okay.
The binder started as two handwritten pages on the kitchen counter in July 2025, the first time we hired Tasha. Addie, the teenager down the street, used them for three visits last September, and Tasha had them again in June. Each time, something got added. This weekend I finally typed the whole thing up and put it in a one-inch blue binder with sheet protectors, about $9 at Target. Here's what's in it.
Food, exactly
- Morning visit: one 3-ounce can of Fancy Feast Classic pâté on the white saucer, on the counter by the toaster. (Mabel eats on the counter. It's a long story involving a dog.)
- Evening visit: a second can, plus her small scoop of dry, one level eighth of a cup, in the blue bowl. At home she gets the dry at bedtime. With a sitter, it goes in at the evening visit.
- Fresh water every visit, in the kitchen and in the second bowl upstairs.
- Toss any wet food left from the last visit before serving new.
- Treats: three crunchy ones, maximum. She will act like she hasn't had any. She has.
Since April she's been on mostly wet food, so the old instruction ("top off the kibble bowl") is gone, and the binder spells out the cans in a way my two pages never did.
The litter routine and the house
Mabel's box is in the basement, in the corner by the laundry tub, filled with unscented clumping clay. The binder asks for a scoop at every visit, clumps tied in a bag and dropped in the bin in the garage, and a top-up from the litter bucket when it gets low. There's also a line about what normal looks like. Since the switch to wet food she makes bigger clumps, and if a sitter finds much less than usual, or nothing at all, I want to hear about it the same day.
In bold on the same page: Leave the basement door wedged open. It swings shut on its own when the window units are running, and if it closes, she's cut off from her box. There's a rubber doorstop for exactly this, and a photo of it in place.
Then the hiding spots, in the order I'd check them: under our bed upstairs, behind the boxes in the craft room, the floor of the hall closet and the cabinet under the bathroom sink if anyone's left it open. Windows stay shut and locked while we're away, and the living room unit stays on, set warm. Mabel has never been outdoors and isn't a door-dasher, but the binder asks that the back door be closed before any food comes out, just in case.
The vet page
At work, the hardest calls are the ones about a pet whose owner can't be reached. A clinic can do a lot less, a lot more slowly, without someone who can say yes. So the vet page has:
- Our clinic's number and hours, plus the number and address of the after-hours emergency hospital and how long the drive takes.
- A signed note authorizing care for Mabel up to a set dollar amount if nobody can reach us within an hour, with both our cell numbers under it.
- Her basics: nine years old, about ten pounds, indoor only, missing three teeth since her 2025 dental, no medications. Her flea and tick treatment is mine to do, not the sitter's.
- A copy of her insurance card, since her policy started in April. The sitter never pays a thing. We pay the clinic and file the claim ourselves, but with the card in there, whoever brings her in can answer the question when it's asked.
- The handful of things that mean "call me now": hiding through two visits in a row, not touching her food, straining in the box, or breathing with her mouth open.
That last list is mine, for my cat, written with her history in mind. What belongs on yours is worth a five-minute conversation with your own vet before the trip.
Everything else
A contact sheet with our cells, my parents in Mora (35 minutes away, with a key) and our neighbors next door, who have the spare. The Wi-Fi password. Where the breaker box is. How to thump the top of the living room unit when it starts to rattle. And a last page Tasha suggested in June: a photo of Mabel looking ordinary, so a sitter who's only met her twice knows what ordinary is.
When I set the finished binder on the kitchen table, Mabel walked across it, sat down squarely on the vet page and stayed there for twenty minutes. I've decided to take that as approval of the format.
