RewriteRule to move directory folder without moving landing page

I’d like to redirect the content of a section of a website without redirecting the landing page of this section.

Its a wordpress site by the way and we are talking about moving the categories that were under this «directory».

Here’s a exemple of the categories and the redirect :

/articles-bebe/alimentation-bebe/ –> /cat/articles-bebe/alimentation-bebe/

Here is what I did so I don’t have to create 1 000 redirect for each categories.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /


RewriteRule ^articles-bebe/(.*)$  /cat/articles-bebe/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

All the redirect works great for all the pages inside the section, however the « articles-bebe » has landing page that I don’t want to redirect to the new section /cat/…

So this needs to stay as is :

/articles-bebe/ -> /articles-bebe/

When right now its getting redirected to :

/articles-bebe/ -> /cat/articles-bebe/

Is there a way to add an exception to the RewriteRule that I added so the 2 pages do no get redirected to the new section ?