You want us to do what?

After the torture of bathing, and the longest drive ever, we arrived at our first show in Reno.  We met some nice people, we met some not as nice people.  We found a great friend in a Bengal breeder named Monique.  We set up our benching area, we put on our cute matching shirts, and we loaded the cats into their fancy blue benching cages.  They immediately got small....then they started to get cranky....then we had the nerve to walk them through the noisy, stinky room, to wire cages where some stranger pulled them out tail first, put them on a table and TOUCHED them all over!  None of our pandemic cats were happy.  Most show cats begin as kittens.  No one waits until they're a year old to parade them through the show rings.  Except this year, when everyone did.  Thank goodness that that judges were caring, kind people.  They helped the newbies from people to cats, make it through the day.  We had to zip closed the partitions in the show cages and add fluff beds so the crew could have some quiet time.  They got more and more ferocious at that first show.  And they kept losing.  Partly, because my grooming wasn't quite perfect yet, partly because there was a kitty there that the judges preferred, partly because they were downright surly.  Their eyes dilated with the stress so you couldn't see how blue they were.  Tails were tucked, ears were flattened.  It was hard to see their beauty.  But they did it.  We did it.  Boy, was that a stressful day!

But we moved forward and drove to the Pasadena show a couple of weeks later.  My grooming was better, and the cats were less terrified so they all did a little bit better.  CeCe did quite well, making it into a couple of finals.  Penny earned a final after offering to kill every maine coon in the building.  Rummy was busy being small in her fear so she was largely overlooked. After Penny earned her Champion title, we let her take the rest of the day off.  Then WindFall earned his.  All in, we felt more successful for several reasons and decided to try a CFA show the next month.  

We had heard bad things about CFA shows....too many persians and ragdolls.....too many snooty people.....harsh judges.  We had a great first experience with our newbie handler, Lee guiding us all day long.  We made more new friends, and had an overall happy day.  All four of our cats completed their six rings and earned titles.  CeCe was invited to a final, earning 7th best cat.  We're signed up for another CFA show in October but we've decided to retire Penny and Rummy because it really just isn't the way they want to spend their day.  WindFall has gotten better and better at showing so he'll continue as will CeCe (after she had her babies) since the judges really love her.  It's so interesting to see which cat each judge prefers. We've been taking notes, so that as we continue to grow the MyLuckyDay crew, we know that we're leaning into the standard.  One final show for 2021 next month.....maybe we'll get a judge who loves red!