Moving Braeya

I have to tell you guys about the day we moved Braeya to our new house. We hadn't known, going into all this, when we would actually move her over.

My original moving plan was to have one grand moving day, in which we would load up one house in the morning and unload at the new house in the evening and have all manner of Pinteresty signs for food at both locations, a photographer to capture the day, and the delivery of planned speeches for how loading and unloading would go.

In that moving plan, we would just take her with us when we went. Well, as you will soon read more about, that plan got ditched early on, so we had to decide when we were going to take her over. We decided to do it once we planned to sleep there full time, so last Tuesday morning was the day.

I had tried to warn Ryan about the intensity with which she hates her carrier and car rides. We'd gotten the cat carrier out of the garage as soon as we signed for this house, hoping she would get used it, want to sit in it, and be ready to travel on moving day.

F.A.I.L.

The problem with her carrier is that she IS the size of the carrier, so the ONLY way to get her inside is with her consent. She did not grant that. So this was as far into the carrier as we got her that morning.

We tried taking the lid off and putting her in from above and then putting the lid down over her. No.

We didn't have any sturdy enough boxes left.

Ryan remembered we had an old covered litter box in the garage, so we put her in that, slapped a piece of cardboard torn from an unused box over the opening and triple taped it shut.

We got her to the car {she was HOWLING so mournfully and I was sobbing} and got us all inside. We had not made it to the end of the block before she had busted through the front of that and started slinking through all the pillows and blankets we had put in the back of the car.

I was scared she'd go crazy and become a driving hazard, but in truth, she was too scared for that and just hunkered down at the back of the vehicle. We found her here when we opened the door at the new house:

I wondered if she would bolt, but she didn't. We petted her for a while, she glared back, and finally, she let Ryan pick her up and carry her inside.

We had previously carted over our loveseat, mostly so we had something there to sit on, and it turned out to be a blessing that it was there, because she actually loves that piece of furniture and seemed really happy to see it. Well, as happy as an angry and 100% traumatized cat can be.

She sat, very quietly, ignoring her toys that I gave to her, and completely not even caring about food or water.

Eventually I took her on a tour of the house, and I don't know if she got scared or lost, but she just plopped down here and refused to move for several hours:

My dad wanted to come see her; he thought it would help her if she got to see someone familiar.

Must have worked.  After he left, she walked around and started exploring. By the next day, she seemed much more at home, and as we brought more of the furniture in the house, she sort of figured out that this was really HER stuff, just in a new space.

So it's official. We can't move again in her lifetime. EVER.