I Thought Only Human Children Objected To The Concept Of Bedtime

Cute cats are way more fun than politics, especially these days.  Besides, Laila has a proud grandma (catma?) who requested more posts about her.

When we first brought Laila home, we didn't let her in our bedroom.  Scott is allergic to cats, so we wanted to maintain a relatively allergen-free area of the apartment.  Fortunately, though, Scott has not been having as many problems with allergies as we had feared.  Also, Laila had been meowing loudly at night, and we thought she might be calmer and quieter if we let her into the bedroom at night.  We tried this a couple nights last week.

The first night, she was very excited to explore.  She walked all around the room, sniffed everything, then got up on the bed and stomped around for a while.  Then she decided to leave only to sit outside the bedroom door and meow loudly.  We decided that she must have misunderstood the tacit agreement that bedroom access = no loud meowing.  We closed the door for the rest of the night.

We decided to try again the next night.  Big mistake.  The most restful part of the night for me was when Laila was crowding me on my side of the bed and hitting me with her tail.  The rest of the night was punctuated by loud meows at fairly close range.

As I stumbled around the next morning, a theory came to me:  Laila had spent the night hunting and wanted to let us know.  I found a catnip mouse from the living room on the floor of our bedroom, and one of Scott's socks from the laundry basket in our bedroom had somehow made its way to the living room.

Laila, of course, was feeling perfectly refreshed in the morning, and wanted to further refine her hunting skills by playing fetch with me.  When she got tired, she curled up by the living room window.  No time like early morning for a good nap!

She caught a catnip mouse!

Unfortunately, we have had to ban Laila from the bedroom at night once again.  We have also started using a white noise machine, which we purchased years ago to drown out noisy human neighbors.  We've also tried to be more conscious of her routine.  We try to make sure she gets exercise when we get home from work, somewhat like the parents of young children taking their kids to the park to wear them out before bed.  Later in the evening, before human bedtime, we make sure to have some quiet petting time with her.  We've also started leaving a light on in the living room so that our apartment looks less like a spooky hunting ground for cats.  This is sort of working...some of the time.  It's just too bad that most of us humans don't have so much freedom to nap during the day.