MEQUON - The next time you complain about your teenager hogging the bathroom, consider sharing it with seven cats.

That’s the fix Mequon resident Suzanne Gmirek finds herself in every morning since training her cats to use the toilet.

One by one, or even sometimes in twos, the cats pounce onto the toilet seat to do their morning "duty." Then they await the treat that is supposed to follow.

Now don’t assume that Gmirek is one of those "crazy" cat people who hordes felines and treats them as if they were her children.

It wasn’t that long ago when she really didn’t like cats, she said. But then her husband, Michael, took to feeding a feral cat outside their home. In return, the cat brought the Gmireks her five kittens.

Suzanne Gmirek brought them into her home just to "socialize" them, she said, but soon became very attached to three of them. There was one condition, however, if she was going to share her home with cats.

"There was no way I could ever have had three cats and four litter boxes in the house," said Gmirek, a massage therapist in Mequon.

So she took a page from her sister’s cat potty training experiences and set out to move the felines from the litter box to the commode.

Gmirek detailed the entire six-month process in an online journal that she shared with her fellow cat potty trainers.

"The rewards of toilet training the kittens are many so much more than just being litter free," she wrote. "We learned so much about the kittens and the power of positive reinforcement."

But getting to that point took a good bit of trial and error, including numerous "accidents" in almost every room but the bathroom.

The process started with a special potty seat designed just for cats. It might best be described as a litter box in the shape of a toilet seat.

Within a month, Gmirek moved the box to the bathroom and gradually decreased the amount of cat litter in it.

Soon, she moved the cat seat on top of the toilet and bought a second cat seat to keep on the bathroom floor.

"The kittens were very inquisitive about that new Catseat with water un-derneath it," Gmirek wrote at the time.

But moving the seat above water was, technically, moving too quickly for the cats, and Gmirek found that she needed to include the tray device that holds the litter before any of the cats would use it.

She also needed to include lots of praise and rewards, such as scraps of ham, turkey and tuna.

Within a month, her training turned into a routine that started very early in the morning.

"I started the habit of taking all the kittens in the bathroom with me when I got up around 4 a.m.," Gmirek wrote in her online journal. "I cleaned my teeth and washed up etc., and the kittens knew it was time for them to go potty and they’d get a treat."

If the kitten didn’t go, he or she didn’t get to leave the bathroom. And neither did Gmirek.

There were some mornings when she took her laptop in with her as she waited for the cats to do what one is supposed to do in the bathroom.

Eventually all three kittens were fully adjusted to using the human commode and Gmirek was free of the litter box.

Her routine didn’t change much, though. She still gets up at 4 a.m. and she’s still followed by the cats, where they take their turns heeding the call of nature.

Only now, there are four more cats in the mix.

Less than a year after toilet training the first three kittens, the feral cat brought back another litter of young ones. Gmirek took in four more of them and trained them as she had their siblings.

Gmirek also nabbed the mother, had her spayed and released her back outside.

"There will be no more kittens in this house," Gmirek insisted.