My Single Mom Life

My oh so used to be incredibly awesome couch and love seat, now look like some second hand well loved severely used, majorly discount furniture from a thrift store.

The teens are always coming in the house and doing like a slide into home plate on them after school with shoes and all, and the cats, well, there are 4 of them now in order from first to newest, Kali, Nova, Shahiro, and the newest , Carmine, who all think of all of my furniture as their personal jungle gyms and attempted scratching posts, so the couch and love seat are looking pretty shabby these days.

They look good from a slight distance, like from the front door or the other room, but once you get a good look at them, yeah, you can totally tell I have kids and cats.
Kali, Nova, and Shahiro are really good about not scratching them, Kali and Nova especially, they don't have their front claws, haven't had them for like 10 years, but Carmine, oooh man, I don't think his previous owner(s) really cared about teaching him not to scratch the furniture.
So we are trying to break him of this really bad habit.
I have several different scratching posts and toys for him, and whenever any of us see him going for the couches, we clap our hands very loudly twice and say no, and he's starting to get the hint that clawing the couches is a very bad thing to do.

The other thing we do when we catch him going for the furniture is to distract him and give him the mouse, the Scratch Rattle Roll Scratcher - Mouse.
Once he sees that, he totally forgets about the couches and plays with the mouse for a good half hour.
He claws at it's sisal back, chews on it's crinkly ears, bats around the tail with the jingle ball in it, and licks all over the whole thing because it's full of catnip.

We will break him of the furniture scratching habit, it's just going to take a bit of time I think.
It's pretty obvious that his previous owner(s) did not train him well in this area, but other than this, he's a really great cat.
He uses the litter box, he's wicked loving and sweet, and kinda quirky.
He likes having his teeth rubbed when you pet him.
He opens his mouth slightly, and will turn his head all over the place rubbing his teeth on your hand or fingers, and he purrs so loud while doing it, kinda nutty, but eh, it's cute kinda nutty.