Chaplin has decided that on some mornings, I don’t get to sleep in.
He bats at my glasses on the table next to my bed, making a loud clatter when he knocks them down or forcing me to get up and chase him if he manages to pick them up with his teeth. He stares out the window, yowling at anything that walks by.
I know why he does it – he wants me to feed him. But half the time I’ll get up to feed him and he’ll still have plenty of food left. Since I put him on the super-expensive prescription wet food, I generally don’t give him any more food until he’s finished what he’s got.
Sometimes if I just move to the couch to sleep (which I’ve been doing a fair amount lately anyway to relieve the back pain caused by my craptastic mattress), he’ll leave me alone. But sometimes he’ll just jump up on the coffee table and start knocking things off of it instead.
And of course, once I’m actually up and at ’em, even if I haven’t fed him, he’ll stop being a little shit. He just wants to play. I would understand a bit more if I were working, because he’d be home alone all day. But being unemployed he’s got me to play with all damn day most of the time, and he generally just sleeps in the bedroom.
Of course, not working it’s more of an annoyance than anything else, since whatever sleep I lose I’ll almost definitely make up with a nap. Probably with him sleeping on my chest.
We used to have the same problem with our cats. They even started turning on the TV or radio in the bedroom so that we would get up and feed them. So we switched to feeding them once a day, at night, and now they don’t wake us up anymore. (Well, sometimes Smokey sleeps on my head, and that wakes me up, but she’s not trying to wake me up!) It only took a day or two for the switch to work, but the cats were still fairly young when we did it.
Given Chaplin’s fascination with the TiVo menus, it’s a good thing he hasn’t figured out how to turn the TV on. And I think part of the reason he doesn’t usually wake me up when I’m working is that I usually feed him right when I get home, so he’s got plenty of food for overnight.