I don’t wake up in the morning to an alarm clock anymore. I wake up to a cat.
Sometimes it’s just one cat, but sometimes it’s as many as all three. They all decide they want to fight, chase each other, and bang into the walls at about seven o’clock each morning. I wake up to the sound of growling, and little claws trying to find purchase on the hardwood floor as the cats run as fast as they can down the hallway until they slam into the bathroom door at the far end.
This skittering and scratching is often followed by loud crashes as the cats take their disagreement up onto the bathroom counter. Hairdryers, toothbrushes, and makeup bottles all get tossed to the floor during the tumult, and I find myself lying awake in bed and wondering why I haven’t already relegated those hairy alarm clocks to the great outdoors.
They can run around all they like out in the yard without disturbing my slumber.
It doesn’t really seem fair to me that an animal that sleeps 23 hours every day is responsible for keeping me awake so frequently. The only time they seem to move is when they get up to eat, or when they decide to chase and wrestle with one another. And the wrestling always seems to coincide with me trying to go to sleep at night or early in the morning about an hour before my alarm clock is about to go off.
It’s like they plan it that way.
Can cats tell time?
During the day, when I am already awake, I can always find the cats in the exact same place: Willow and Scout generally sleep under the bed, or in the living room cat tree, and Sukoshi is curled up on the couch’s ottoman. If I pick one of them up or pet them, they open their eyes and glare at me like they haven’t just been asleep for the last twelve hours straight. It seems a bit hypocritical to me. That’s all I’m saying.
If I move them, they immediately return to whatever spot they had been occupying and go back to sleep. It’s like trying to rouse a coma patient. On the bright side, picking them up is extremely easy since they hang in my arms motionless like some kind of sand-filled pillow as I carry them around. It must be a sort of superpower that allows a cat to sleep so much even when everyone else in the house is up and moving around.
For the most part, I just leave the cats alone when they’re sleeping. Unless, of course, Willow (the fat one) has curled up on the couch in the spot where I like to sit. Then I have to shove the furry lump of dough aside to make room for myself. This is usually when I get one eye open, a brief meow of annoyance, and maybe a quick grooming of mussed fur to demonstrate her dislike of having been touched. Within a few seconds, she is back asleep with her tongue still out of her mouth and a string of drool trailing from her chin to the couch cushion.
Then, when the sun sets, something magical (or demonic) happens. My wife and I crawl into bed and say goodnight, and the cats are suddenly possessed of more internal energy than they know what to do with. One cat will jump onto the bed and attack my feet under the covers, another leaps onto the dresser and decides to push everything there to the floor. The third cat (usually Sukoshi) will wait patiently in the bathroom until one of her partners gets tired and decides to tag her into the ring. That’s when Sukoshi springs to action, vaulting into the litter box and attempting to toss every last bit of litter from the box onto the bathroom floor.
If I get out of bed to yell at them, they all race from the bedroom into the kitchen. This is followed by several bangs and yowls as they knock over the garbage can or try to clear the kitchen counters of whatever pots and pans are still in the drying rack.
When playtime is over, they all slink back into the bedroom and crawl under the bed to catch a few hours of sleep and rest up for the following morning’s activities. This is about the time I can finally fall asleep.
The following day, they sneak out from beneath the bed and plan their morning chaos. I’m not sure if one cat is tasked with watching the clock and waking the others at the assigned time, or if they simply have an innate sense of the best time to startle me awake to guarantee I will be groggy and in a foul mood the rest of the morning, but about an hour before my alarm normally goes off, they are on the prowl again.
Willow and Scout run circles in the bedroom that include constant laps across the top of the bed and over my head. They occasionally pause to claw at the carpet or jump on top of each other. Sukoshi bolts for the litter box to remove all the sand that I had to replace the night before.
When I finally give up trying to sleep and crawl out of bed, all three cats will look at me, yawn, then decide that it really is too early to be up. They make their morning migration to the living room to curl up and snooze the day away.
Resting up for their fifteen minutes of crazy later that night.
It apparently takes a lot of energy to empty a litter box.
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On the mark!! 🙂