Addy was playing with her Curious George stuffed animal the other day and managed to catch the attention of our enormous, opinionated cat, Merry. George has loops of thread that define his fingers and toes. More accurately he had loops of thread that defined them; he now has loose threads in a couple of places. Merry doesn't understand that George is Addy's special toy, even if he does have enticing, dangling threads that dance when Addy plays with him. So Merry attacked George and scared the tar out of poor Addy.
Unfortunately, each day since then poor Addy has gotten more and more nervous around the cat and keeps asking us to put Merry in the kitchen. Fortunately, Merry is too obese to jump over the baby gates (not that I like having her this fat--I don't--but it comes in handy for this particular situation). The whole thing actually kept progressing to the point that Addy told us that her surgery incisions from last month were actually scratches from Merry. I don't want her to fear the cat any more than she does, so I tried to just explain to her that Merry didn't scratch her; Merry had scratched George a little, but not her.
I failed. Miserably.
How did I fail? Because next came the inevitable follow-up question: if not the cat, then who? Mommy? Daddy? Miss C?
Her world made sense with the blame being assigned to Merry, but I don't want her to be afraid of the cat for something she didn't do. On the other hand I don't want her to be afraid of either the surgeon or the hospital (or any of the rest of us, for that matter). We managed to leave it at "the boo-boos just happened and they're getting better now," but only just barely. I'm sure the question will come up again.
On a more positive note, we went today and got the casts made for Addy's new AFOs. Yay! KAFO casts will be next week. Super yay!
