I've been awake for longer than I've been up, if that makes sense, and it's got nothing to do with Easter. And now we are risen and beginning the business of Easter Sunday.
A week ago, we had another little bed-peeing incident with Max so, since I have vowed that he will not be going to the shelter on my watch and that I will figure out what the problem is, I called my friend Susan, the cat whisperer.
I'm not a particularly woowoo person, but Susan has a lot of cat-cred in my eyes, having offered some insights about other incidents that proved true. And she uses her intuition and insights into animal behavior to make her recommendations, which fits my criteria for a credible advisor.
Her insight, when she had a chance to come over to the house and check things out, was that Max was literally pissed off because I shut him and Loosy and Lily out of the bedroom in the middle of the night. She based this on the clues I offered her: the peeing has happened only first thing in the morning while the bed is still warm, I have always let the cats sleep with me until I have to get up in the night to use the john and then shut them out so that I'm not weighted down with catness all night long, and they come to the closed door and scratch or meow until I get up and feed them (at 5:30 a.m.!).
This definitely has the ring of good sense to it. Her recommendation, however, was a little harder to accept, but I agreed that I would experiment with letting the cats stay on the bed all night and would not shut them out.
So we have been doing this since Thursday, mostly successfully. No pee incidents have occurred, though it may be too soon to be sure about that, and I have been surprised that it's not that difficult to sleep soundly with Loosy tucked under my chin all night, Lily hunkered up against one leg and Max purring loudly in my ear.
This morning at 4:30, after a calm night, the wind kicked up and woke the cats, who began to prowl the house, suggesting that it was time for them to be fed. I stayed in bed for another hour, not willing to start a precedent of getting up whenever they told me to, and got up at 5:30, my normal time to rise.
I figured, what the heck, it's Easter, the whole of Christendom is considering getting up to go to the sunrise service. Probably most of them will turn over and go back to sleep, but those who rise will be rewarded with a commemoration of the thrill of Easter: He is Risen Indeed! And so are we.
4 comments:
Well, good luck with Max. My solution is just to keep the bedroom door closed at all times that I am not going in or out. I do know people who can sleep with cats all over them (I think they call people like that Christians, although some would certainly deny it), but I am not one of them.
Thanks, LF, for your good wishes. I am not sure why catted-up sleepers would fall into the Christian category (so to speak), unless it has something to do with endless patience. Do elaborate, if you wish.
You understood what I had in mind quite correctly. Endless patience it is. Of course, it is not always a good idea. My cats learned that when I started to speak Polish
(the language in which I usually swear), they were in trouble. Perhaps endless patience and teaching a cat Polish are similar in that they consume time, however.
Risen with kitties! I'm attempting to type this with an 11.5-lb cat in my lap who is VERY insistent on attention, and who also sleeps in the crook of my arm on the bed at night. It would probably help my sleep if I kicked the cats out, except that they've been in or on my bed for about 10 years now, so it's really me that's been trained.
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