Hello everyone -

Long time, no post, I know. We've been happy and healthy enjoying our home that we bought last year, and busy with work. Our cats love our home, as we knew they would, and since it's spring, we've been spending lots of time in our 3-season room. I just recently took pictures of the cats enjoying a 70-degree day out here earlier this week that I need to get developed and hopefully will post soon.

Anyway, my issue is this...we're going on vacation to Jamaica soon (June 10-17) to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary a bit early (it's actually Aug 4), and this will be first time that we've left our cats for that long. We debated whether or not to take the 4 wonderful kitties to Southern Illinois, where our parents live, to have one set of our parents catsit for them. However, we've discovered from our trips to the vet recently that 2 of the 4 really get traumatized by going in the car for any length of time, and the last time they went away from our house for a few days with us, they weren't too happy. So, we're thinking that for the week-long vacation, we're going to have our across-the-cul-de-sac neighbor who we recently started hanging out with (who also has a dog that we've looked in on a couple of times), come by a couple times each day to check the litter, check the food and water levels and pet the cats (if they come out to see her). We think this probably will be the most stress-free solution for them, since the cats will stay in the comfort of their own home, plus it has the added bonus of someone looking in on our house while we're gone too.

Do you guys have any advice as to what exactly to tell our cat-sitter/neighbor and how much the going rate is for providing this type of help to us while we're away?

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions...