An early morning wake-up call

It was really in the morning yesterday. Ryan and I were both sleeping peacefully and were startled awake by the most blood-curdling cat screaming/screeching/whatever-it-was I have ever heard in my life. Just to back up a few steps. We've been having fantastic weather here and we've been sleeping with the windows open. Well, Zoey and Cooper love when we leave the sliding door open so they can enjoy the fresh air. And now that Ryan and I have figured out how to lock the screen door {ahem, cough, cough} we sometimes leave it open for them at night. Ok, so fast forward to us sleeping peacefully.  At 3:30 am we literally wake to hearing the worse cat cry/screaming/whatever-it-was ever. Ryan and I both fly out of bed. {We've never got out of bed so fast at 3:30 in the morning before!} Ryan is running down the hallway, my left calf rebelled at my attempt to move so fast so early in the morning and gave me a nice charlie horse all the while I'm thinking that something is in the kitchen eating one of our cats. No joke. I seriously thought something busted through the screen door and was eating one of the cats alive. That is how blood curdling those cat screams were! {It was so awful!} We make it to the kitchen in about 0.01 seconds flat, the screen door is still closed and intact, there's no other animal in our house eating out cats but Zoey was about to kill Cooper. I don't kid, I'm serious. These cats never fight and Zoey was attacking Cooper. They never fight, let alone Zoey rarely moves! If they are playing with each other, it's always Cooper chasing Zoey or Zoey laying there like a big blob because she is lazy. Well, not yesterday morning. Both Zoey and Cooper were huge puff balls and Cooper had a giant mohawk all the way down his back.  {He was freaked out to say the least.} Even after we broke up their death match by turning the lights on, Zoey stalked Cooper and they sat hissing/growling at each other like we've never seen before. I took a video of it with my cell phone {because I was clearly not thinking clearly at the wee hours of the morning if I thought video taping was a better idea that getting these two kiddos separated!} but we've never seen this behavior out of either of them. I thought for sure Zoey had rabies. Honest, she's never been like this before. Zoey cornered Cooper behind the table but he somehow was able to escape past her. Zoey even attempted to go after him after he was downstairs. Ryan and I are both freaked out at this point, not knowing what in the world was going on. I grabbed a towel so I could wrap Zoey up in it and hopefully settle her down. I also wanted to make sure she wasn't going to bite me {remember, I'm thinking rabies}. So I wrapped her up in this towel, nice and tight so she couldn't bite or scratch me and held her until she settled down. Ryan went to make sure Cooper was okay. He apparently had hunks of hair coming out from where it looks like Zoey may have bite him - poor Coop. We separated them in different rooms for the night so whatever was going on didn't continue. Talk about adrenaline! I would be perfectly content NEVER waking up to that sound again in my entire life. It was awful. I think that there must have been some animal that came up to the screen door or something to make our cats acts so crazily.  Anyways, poor Cooper was caught off gaurd by the whole thing as he may have, umm, he may have lost control of his bodily functions during the whole ordeal :/ So there we are at 3:30ish in the morning cleaning up the floor while keeping our cats seperated.  Ryan and I both went to work pretty tired yesterday :( When Ryan got home, he sent me this picture via text with the caption 'They're bff's again.' Seriously?!? I don't get what happened but these certainly aren't the same cats from that morning.

And there they sit where it all went down in the early hours of the morning. Geez cats, please don't do that again. When I finally got home last night 9:30-10ish pm {I was in the OR late and then grabbed dinner with my chief}, tired as could be since we had this unexpected 3:30 wake up call, I then spent over two hours shampooing the carpet to be on the safe side since there was that little additional incident. I definitely did not get enough sleep last night but at least we didn't get woken up in the middle of the night again lastnight. We have made the decision to just forget about sleeping with the sliding door open...

~Ashley