A Happy Noise

It's no big secret if you know my kid, or if you read about her very often, that she just loves to torture our poor cat. Despite my best efforts to keep her from doing so. The problem is, if I were to give her a time out for every time she was harassing him then she'd be in time out all day. Plus she's very sly and manages to bug him without actually crossing that fine line into cat abuse. She'll chase him around the house, or "hug" him by laying all over him, and so forth. It's not hitting or kicking or hair pulling but it's fairly ambiguous stuff that I can't get her for. I mean how can I say, "Hey, don't hug your cat!" I suppose he's kind of asking for it too. Maybe he's a masochist...he could hide from her but instead he actually seeks her out lots of times so maybe its not as bad as it would seem between them. Still, in an effort to teach Bree manners around cats (so that when someone else's cat doesn't appreciate being layed on she doesn't get scratched up) I've been trying to show her how to "talk" to Bogart. We've talked about looking at his ears and that if they're laying back that means he's not really having fun. And, the other big thing I taught her was about Bogart's happy noise. I don't think she'd ever really noticed him purring before (probably because he's not usually purring around her) so, the other day when he was sitting on MY lap and purring away I pointed it out to her. I had her put her ear up real close to his head while he was purring and listen. After a few seconds she started laughing at the funny noise he was making. "That's his happy noise," I told her, "He makes it when he likes what you're doing. You can make him make his happy noise when you pet his head nice, like this." This idea seems to be working out. I mean, she'll still chase him down and all that, but now there are quite a few times when she'll want to hear his happy noise and handle him more gently. The funny part of it though was when, on a whim, I asked Bree the other day, "Do you have a happy noise?" In response, she started making this snorting, inhaling, weird kind of noise, trying to copy a purr. It was even funnier though when one day after Travis got home she suddenly was making that noise out of nowhere. He had absolutely no idea what she was doing and looked over at me like "What the ?!" "She's purring like the cat." I clarified for him. "It's my happy noise Dad," she added. He laughed for a few minutes after that one.