When I was a child I slept over at my friend’s house and she had a cat. I went to bed with trepidation knowing that her cat might lie on my feet and start kneading them. The cat liked to sit on my lap too and knead into my legs – ouch. I didn’t move much for fear the cat’s sharp claws would poke into me.

We don’t have a cat. We have an adorable, dog and he is another story.  One day we were visiting friends here in Greenbelt and my oldest daughter, who was about 7, was petting their cat. She was supervised by the dad of the family. They were upstairs and me, my husband and the mom of the family, were downstairs.

I heard my daughter exclaim, “Mom”. I didn’t answer right away, because she was upstairs with an adult and sometimes when she called me, it was a false alarm. This time, I was wrong. My friend called down to us, “Um, we have a slight problem, please come up, your daughter is bleeding.” I bolted upstairs, hubbie in tow. We saw blood dripping from our daughter’s slender arm, that was scratched up from the cat. Yikes. Our friend got out the first aid kit and we cleaned her up with gauze and band aids. She had a scratch running down about two thirds of her arm.

Apparently, she was supervised, while petting the cat. After a few minutes loving on the cat, she turned away to do something else. Then she told our friend she wanted to give the cat a pat to say good bye. That’s when the cat turned on her. My daughter was very brave and only shed a few tears. We learned cats are to be enjoyed from afar. After all they are often beautiful creatures and kittens are quite cute; but for us, we are dog lovers.