How not to clean a cat

There are many ways I could have entitled this entry from this past week.

 

Aerial's Worst Day

Cat Scratch Fever

A Wet Pussy

Spray & Wash

 

But instead of writing any of those titles, I'm going to teach you how to NOT clean a cat.

 

If you're a child, say around the age of four, and you figure your mother is thinking you're just playing in your toy kitchen setup, so she's going to let you giggle about like a schoolgirl by yourself while she envisions you sipping tea with your feline friend, maybe it's not such a good idea to saturate the cat in any kind of substance, especially since that cat will soon later go find your mother and try to lay on her lap.  This is bad because your mother will quickly discover the cat saturated in Lysol Kitchen Cleaner.  And while she wonders out loud what happened, you instantly reply with an "oops, sorry," giving away your part in the crime.

 

Drenching a cat in Lysol Kitchen spray is not how one would typically clean a cat.  And if you do any of these above things mentioned in this scenario, do not be surprised if your mother asks you to go to your room.  But you will be surprised she asks you calmly to go to such a place, because she's not as irrational in this scenario as perhaps even she thought she'd be. 

The mother then has to take the cat into the bathroom with a bottle of cat shampoo in tow.  The cat will instantly growl and cry in the bathroom, her sounds echoing and bouncing throughout the room.  The cat will boycott this idea and protest the evil waters by leaving vicious marks on your mother's arms.  This is impressive since the cat doesn't havefront claws, but the back claws leave the impressions of a suicide attempt gone wrong.  Luckily, it was side to side and not up and down.  After numerous failed attempts and lots of loud cries from both the feline and the mother and a few exits on the mother's behalf to clean her wounds, the mother manages to hold the cat into the tub long enough to smother her in shampoo and bath water, hoping to rid the cat of any kind of Lysol residue.  The cat will by no means be appreciative.

 

After all is said and done, and the blood is no longer gushing from the mother's skin, Mother and Child have a nice discussion with no yelling involved, surprisingly.  But the conversation does involve how to not clean a cat, how cats should not lick Lysol, and how Lysol should only be used by adults and just because your mother's done a lot of cleaning in the kitchen lately, doesn't mean the child needs to.  Especially involving a cat, because a cat is not a Kitchen.  As stated clearly on the Lysol label.

 

And although you may say you didn't mean to, that's not entirely true.  However, apologies certainly help in these sort of situations, especially when given to the feline cat.