Sleeping In

When you wake up to find it's 16 degrees outside and the wind chill is a number you'd rather not think about, there's only one thing to do. You sleep in.

Now that it's nearly noon, we're well-rested and moving around just a bit. But, the big headline for us today isn't the weather. It's our boy kitty. You see, the real news is that he slept in, too.

Cats have amazing internal clocks. For years, our two kitties have known exactly when the clock strikes six. Whether it's AM or PM, that's when they've been fed. And, these kitties need feeding times. If we let them free-feed they'd eat us out of house and home and each weigh 30 pounds. After years of clockwork feeding, our boy kitty recently got out of sync.

We don't remember exactly when it happened, but it may have been back in October or November. We were crossing time zones and came off Daylight Savings Time. And, if that wasn't enough to screw up the poor boy, we spent four nights in a strange hotel where he never really slept. By the time we landed in familiar Kansas City, our boy kitty thought it was completely normal to wake up in the wee hours of the morning and demand to be fed.

When a cat wants to be fed at 3:00 in the morning, they can get pretty creative, and loud. Call us enablers, but after several sleep-deprived nights we caved. We decided that satisfying an out-of-sync feline was worth the risk. Of course, before we knew it, we were feeding the beast at 2:30!

Some quick research revealed that this is not an unique problem. We found some common sense instructions for resetting our boy's internal clock. The basic idea is that when the kitty makes a meow in the wee hours, he gets put into isolation. Our problem, of course, is we don't have a separate room to isolate a cat. The bathroom was a candidate. But, it's too close to our sleeping quarters. And, an isolated kitty tends to cry. Besides, there are times when we need to use that room in the middle of the night!

We chose his crate as the place for solitary confinement. As tempted as we were to park it in the Jeep, we placed it in our rolling home as far away from our bed as possible. At his first peep, one of us scooped him up and into the crate he went. Over the last few weeks, we made steady progress. Yesterday morning the cat was practically putting himself in his crate around 5:00. We could almost hear him say, "Yeah. I know the drill!"

This morning, our boy kitty started to stir around 4:30. We remained motionless (The cat isn't the only one being trained here!) as I said a silent prayer to the patron saint of out-of-sync felines. With the pre-dawn chill providing added incentive for everyone to stay under the covers, he walked up to the head of the bed and sat silently next to me. With my eyes still closed, I reached out to pet him and he laid down. He started to purr.

Next thing I knew, Paul was asking a question.

"Mary, did you feed the cats?"

"Uh, no..." was my groggy reply as I felt the fur of our still sleeping boy.

Paul glanced at the clock.

"It's 7:30!" he exclaimed.

At last! Weeks of training and an Arctic blast have started to pay off. Setbacks may still lie ahead. But, it looks like we are on the right track.

At the very least, we just had our best night's sleep in weeks!