In 1995, Antioch Cattery produced 11 kittens. All of them were males. Late in the summer, we bred Hosca Kal Aktris Scarale, a cream cameo tabby and white. Trissy produced a litter for us, on my birthday, November 13. In her litter, there were three cream tabby boys, and one white girl. This was the only girl we produced that year, so we named her "Antioch Thank Heaven 4 Little Girls". Around the house, she was known as "Maedchen".

Maedchen was a fat little butterball. I thought she would never have show type. However, I kept her, as she represented a breeding between her German momma and her American daddy. Maedchen was a sweet, but ornery little girl.

When Maedchen was twelve weeks old, we decided to place a pet door in one of our interior doors. This was intended to give the cats access to a room of their own, with no canine trespassers. We installed the door according to the directions given, and the cats immediately showed an interest in it, and began using it.

Less than 24 hours later, I discovered that Maedchen had injured her tail. She had caught it in the flap of the pet door, and feeling the door close upon it, she panicked, and pulled. There was a bolt on the inside of the frame of the door, and her tail had been caught between the end of the bolt and the flap. When she pulled, this served to rip a 2 inch gash, lengthwise, in the middle third of her tail.

I rushed her to the vet, who sutured the wound. He honored my request to suture the tail without shaving the hair around the wound. However, during the night, Maedchen gained access to the sutures, and removed them. Worried, I took her to a different vet, who told me that he could not resuture the tail without shaving it. I allowed him to do this, because scar tissue in the tail worried me even more than the loss of hair. He covered her sutures with lots of bandaging.

Little Maedchen had to wear an Elizabethan collar for a few weeks, but even this collar did not prevent her from removing the bandage. Back we went for an even bigger collar, which then proved too large for her neck... and we ended up with a hand-made deal, made out of a paint bucket.

Soon, Maedchen's tail healed, the sutures were removed, and we began the impatient wait for fur to grow on her tail so that we could show her. Luckily, no scar tissue ever formed. It took EIGHT MORE MONTHS for her tail "fluff" to look fairly decent, and so, Maedchen had her "coming out" at the October show, in Buffalo, NY.

Another fiasco! The show hotel in Buffalo, had no heat. It was quite cold outside, winter paying an early visit. There was LOTS of snow... Steve and I bundled up in piles of blankets, and we ran a space heater the hotel gave us, but the room was still bitter cold. I worried about Maedchen getting sick. However, she proved that she was an enterprising little girl after all. She climbed under the covers with mommy, and never left, all night. The next morning, in the showhall, she showed that she had learned a new trick! All day, she slept UNDER her lambswool bed!

I knew I loved Maedchen's eyes, which were unusually large and expressive. She was not as extreme as some cats I had shown, and I wished she had more hair, especially on her tail! I was very pleased, however, when she granded at the Louisville show, in December.

Just for fun, I took her to the Si Sawat show, in Zanesville, in January of 1997. It was a wonderful show! Maedchen won top ten awards in five of the six rings, and had Second Best Cat in the two longhair rings! My friends started to encourage me to campaign my little girl.

Well, this was a bad year for me, financially. I was a substitute schoolbus driver, and was not working many hours. BUT...I hated to stay home, when I had a nice girl to show! So, I took an extra job, working evenings and weekends, for the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. This was fund-raising, and my first time doing anything like that, but it was a good cause, and I learned to enjoy it. Between the two jobs, however, I was exhausted. I finally stopped working at night, in the month of March.

The extra job prevented me from attending the shows, of course. Weekends were mandatory. However, I had a wonderful friend, whom I could trust with my little baby - Sandi Douglass (Teakatut Cattery), a Colorpoint Shorthair breeder. Sandi, and her friend Gail Moser (Pawtrek Cattery), took Maedchen to the shows, and I stayed home and worked. On a rare occasion, I would attend on Sunday only.

Another problem cropped up, soon after we began to campaign Maedchen. I would bathe Maedchen for a show, and she would look wonderful. The next day, on the morning of the show, I would find a little hole in her fur, where she had scratched the fur out! Sigh!