Last week, in the middle of the night, I was awoken by a lot of moving in my bed and it wasn’t me or my husband. I know our daughter had made her way into our bed at some point after we’d gone to sleep but she isn’t known to move that frantically. At least not in her sleep, anyway.
“Is that the cat?” I murmured, trying desperately not to have to fully wake up.
Even though I was still nearly asleep, I could still hear the terror in my daughter’s sleepy “yeah!”
Despite our best efforts to wear him out during the day, from time to time our new kitten, Timber, thinks it’s a good idea to attack us in the middle of the night. Not just pouncing on us when we move, but full on stalking our near-motionless bodies as we lay asleep in the dark, and then boldly striking, with his claws out and his little razor-sharp teeth sparkling from underneath his little mustached nose. It’s like he’s in training for some type of special forces unit and we’re his unwitting training dummies.
Being so young still, Timber hasn’t quite learned the difference between little love bites and all-out smorgasbord-mania type chomping. We must be really delicious because he loves to grab a taste out of all of us whenever possible. We’ll be walking down the hall and he’ll come flying out of nowhere, like a flying squirrel, and chomp onto whoever it is that was trying to get to the next room. Afterward, he’ll casually stroll to his next hiding spot to prepare for his next attack.
Needless to say, this cat has added an element of surprise into our regular routines.
My husband is a pretty smart fellow and he’s realized that there’s a perfect anagram for “Timber”.
To remind you, an anagram is the rearrangement of a word’s letters to create a new word. Anyway, “Timber” jumbled up and sorted out again makes: Mr. Bite.
You can’t make this stuff up. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde. One minute he’s snuggling and purring, and the other he’s trying to take a chunk out of your calf.
Anyway, back to my bed. It was because of this relentless midnight attacking that I had no other choice but to leap into action when I realized it was indeed Mr. Bite attacking my youngest that was causing the commotion.
“Where is he?” I asked my daughter.
“My feet,” she replied like it was old hat.
Still half-asleep, I reached into the darkness down toward the foot of the bed and grabbed the hairy mass and started to pull. Try as I might, I could not remove the cat from my dear child.
Gee whiz, I thought to myself. This cat is really hanging on!
I distinctly recall wondering why my daughter was so relatively calm when there was an animal bound and determined to not let go of her body.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it took me a few tugs before I was fully awake and I realized it wasn’t Timber the cat at all that I’d been desperately pulling on. It was actually my daughter’s head.
At some point since she’d climbed in with us, she’d flipped over. She’d been sleeping in the bed upside down.
To her credit, she didn’t seem to mind, or even notice I was trying to pull her head from her body.
Moving forward though, when she becomes a teenager, it might be a bit hard for me to tell her to keep her head on straight because deep down I will always remember that fateful night when she was five that I tried pretty hard to physically remove it from her shoulders.
sarah.simpson@cowichanvalleycitizen.comLike us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
