A notebook at the feeding station catches treatments as they happen
Flea applications tend to happen in the evening routine, after a meal, when the cat is settled and findable, which makes the notebook stored with the food supplies an unusually well-placed log. There is no trip to a drawer or a search for a phone: the book is where your hands already are, and a record written within minutes of the application is a record that actually exists. The failure mode of this spot is not distance but disorder, because a general kitchen notebook accumulates shopping lists and messages that bury the treatment dates unless each cat has protected pages of her own.
One guarded page per cat for dates alone
Reserve a full page per cat, headed with her name, used for nothing but treatment entries. Each entry is a single dated line: the date applied, who did it, and the next due date copied from the interval guidance on the packaging while it is still in front of you. Keep entries in strict date order down the page, never squeezed into margins or written on whichever page fell open, because the value of the page is the unbroken sequence. At a glance, the gaps and bunching in that sequence tell the story: a missed month shows as white space, a dangerously early repeat shows as two lines crowding together.
Add a small reaction note after each application
Flea products occasionally disagree with an individual cat, and memory for which application preceded a bout of frantic scratching or a patch of sore skin fades within days. Use the space under each dated line for a brief note a day or two later: nothing unusual, or what you observed and when it settled. Over several cycles this turns a date list into evidence a vet can use, distinguishing a one-off irritation from a pattern tied to a particular product on a particular cat. Keep the notes factual and short so writing them stays a habit rather than a chore you abandon by the third treatment.
Let the feeding routine prompt the due check
Because you open this notebook around meals, build the due check into a weekly feeding moment, for instance the first evening feed of the week, when you turn to each cat's page and read the next due dates against the week ahead. Any treatment falling due gets done that week on a planned evening rather than discovered late, and any cat who was hard to catch gets a deliberate second attempt noted on her page instead of a hopeful assumption. If another person in the house applies a treatment, the house rule is simple: no entry in the notebook, no assumption it happened, so helpers write their line before they leave the kitchen.
Paper by the food bins needs a sturdier counterpart
A notebook beside food and water lives a risky life: splashes, spills, a helper tidying it into a drawer, or the book simply filling up and being replaced, with the treatment history stranded in the old volume. Copy the essentials somewhere that survives the kitchen. When a vet needs the sequence, when a sitter asks what was last applied and when, or when a reaction means reconstructing months of dates quickly, a maintained record outside the notebook earns its keep. That is what KinsLe Pet Passport holds for each cat, her treatment dates kept within her own packet so the kitchen log is never the only copy.