It’s the first day of advent tomorrow and I bet you’re really organised with your beauty advent calendars or just your Cadbury’s Dairy Milk ones, but have you stopped to think about what your cats have got to open each morning? That’s right, cats deserve an advent calendar too! A couple of weeks ago I was invited along to Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium in Shoreditch with Talented Talkers and More Than Pet Insurance where we were shown how to make advent calendars for our cats. If you know me, you’ll know I love a good cat cafe and have actually been to Lady Dinah’s several times before, so I was really excited to be invited along to this event. We were lucky enough to have the whole cafe to ourselves and the guys at Talented Talkers and More Than had supplied us with so many different treats and toys for our cats, which the resident cats couldn’t help but have a play with. I gave up trying to wrestle a cat stick off one of them and just admitted defeat as he jumped down off the table with it in his mouth! They were very protective over the supplies, despite them having their own toys to play with! It was great to meet other cat lovers, sit down with them and discuss our little feline friends as we were shown how to make our advent calendars by the ladies from Midas Touch. We were given a huge pile of card, some rulers, staplers and scissors and some precise measurements and then we were left to it. I’m not the craftiest of people (in fact, I’m rubbish at that sort of thing) so I struggled to make my advent calendar look very presentable and as you’ll see at the end of this post, it looked a bit messy! I really enjoyed the process of making it, doing something crafty is always fun, no matter how it turns out and I got a bag of goodies for my Bertie. We were given some very festive treats at the event, which even the cats were interested in. You’re not allowed to give the cats any human food though, so we had to shoo them off and make sure they kept their cheeky paws off the pigs in blankets! I had the most delicious mint hot chocolate which is the perfect festive drink and something that always reminds me of Christmas and I had more than my fair share of pigs in blankets and macarons.  The cats were more than happy to pose for photos (probably because they thought they were going to get some treats!) and they were just wandering around the cafe trying to see what was going on. They must love when there’s an event taking place, especially one where they can nick themselves some Dreamies!

Here’s my Catvent Calendar – as you can see, I didn’t get chance to finish it and it doesn’t look very good. It looks like Bertie had a go at making it himself! It got a bit battered on the train back to Winchester as well, which didn’t help so I decided not to take it back home to Staffordshire with me when I came back last weekend. Instead, I just brought all of the treats which Bertie has been enjoying this week while I’ve been looking after him. I know it’s not advent yet, but I won’t be back here until Christmas Eve so I wanted to make sure I gave him all his little treats.

If you want to see what the Catvent Calendars should really look like, here’s an infographic from Talented Talkers so you can make your own.