Our house is all hardwood and/or laminate. It can be kind of hard on the rump to sit on the floor and play with a baby all day. I imagine it’s not so nice for said baby, either. So, to soften things up, we decided to get a play mat. We looked at the skip*hop mat Jessica has but, after sleuthing online, decided that the many pieces would simply equal more areas for cat hair to get caught.

Thanks to a tip from another parent, we found out that Canadian Tire (and other mega retailers) have large 24″ reversible floor tiles – coloured on one side, grey on the other. They’re pretty inexpensive and have less pieces to fuss over / clean. Though not as aesthetically pleasing, we opted for the simple play mats.

I knew from my research that the mats may be a target for cats to scratch. Indeed, our male cat, Guinness, has thanked us profusely for providing him with such a generous scratching pad. He loves it to bits – quite literally.

At first, we had the grey side up and flipped to the colorful side when guests were over. Sadly, we didn’t always flip them back fast enough and now both sides show some considerable wear & tear. The colorful side is a bit softer and looks nicer in photos, so that’s the side we’re keeping ‘up’ for now. Guests will just need to live with the unpleasant cat gouges. Or we’ll get a carpet to roll out over it. Who knows.

I’m really glad we got the mats – and even more glad we opted for the cheap ones. I’d be quite pissed if we had the skip*hop and Guinness did the same damage!