Cats generally do well at grooming themselves with those razor sharp tongues of theirs but sometimes they need a bit of help. Sometimes things get stuck in places they don’t belong and the task of removing said things is too great a task for them, if you know what I mean. I’m just as grossed out by that as you are, which is why I let Mike handle the dirty work.

I present to you “Poor, Pitiful Pele”:

And in case you’re a fan of felines, here’s a picture of our other cat, Buster Brown. I think he was hoping he would be next in line for a bath.

So, Friday Luke stomped on our cat, Pele (also affectionately known as “Mean Kitty Ow”). Pele wasn’t real happy about that so she bit him on the foot. She broke the skin and it bled a little. I wasn’t there but I imagine there was crying on Luke’s part. Mike cleaned up the wound thoroughly and we kept an eye on it for the rest of the day. It looked fine when we put him down to sleep at 7:30 pm but he woke up screaming at 10:30 pm. It’s unusual for him to wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes he’ll wake up and cry a little but he goes right back to sleep. This time he didn’t, so I went in to check on him. His foot was red and a little swollen and he didn’t seem real keen on us touching it. So we called the on-call doctor and he recommended we take him into the Emergency Room to get it checked out and get him some antibiotics. You can’t mess around with those cat bites. We’ve heard horror stories.

We had a wonderful time at the E.R. It wasn’t nearly as bad as we anticipated because our local hospital has an entire emergency department just for children. It’s fantastic. If you’ve ever had to take a young one to the E.R. you know how horrific it can be. We had none of that. Luke was super tired but there were toys in the rooms and the nurses and doctors were nice and smiley so he did pretty well. Of course he hated the shot of antibiotics but he recovered quickly and even waved bye-bye to the nurse to show her there were no hard feelings.

Luke’s foot is fine now and the antibiotics are helping. We have made the decision to get rid of Pele, not because we want to but because she is a danger to others. This isn’t the first time she has caused trouble. She bit our friend’s son last year and he ended up in the E.R. as well. We are going to try to find a good home for her but it’s tough because she needs a lot of attention and she still has all her claws. We know the alternative if we can’t find her a good home but we don’t like to think about it (The Big “E” word). I didn’t think this would be so hard for me, but it is. She has been with us for 7 years, almost as long as we’ve been married. She was a comfort to me through my struggles with infertility, and even through my rough days of pregnancy. I try to tell myself she’s just a cat but it’s not working so far.

Yes, she has all her claws and she is not fond of young children, but she is a beautiful tuxedo and she purrs and cuddles and she is OCD about staying clean. Other than the biting thing, she’s really a great cat. Do any of you have interest in adding a cat to your family?

Our cat, Buster Brown, is part Maine Coone. Maine Coone cats generally have very fine hair and lots of it. Also, they are very laid back. What that equates to is sometimes he gets poo-poo stuck in his hair and he just leaves it there because, well, he honestly doesn’t care. So much for cats being low maintenance. This latest poo-poo problem was so bad that Mike had to give him a bath. As expected, he didn’t really care much.