In Which My Cat Takes It Upon Himself To Dictate My Parenting...At 5 AM

I really do not know what is up with this cat lately. For the last month or so, he comes into my room every morning between 5:30 and 5:45 am and meows. And continues to meow until I get out of bed. If I show sign of movement, he'll go out. But if I am not completely out of bed and following him down the hall, he comes back until I am.

I don't have to be awake until 6:45-7:00 so you can imagine how I feel about this early wake up call.

The first time he did this I thought it was one of those "Timmy's in the well" moments and all those stories about cats that had woken their owners and saved them from fires or alerted them to a child in distress, etc ran through  my head. Especially since it was obvious he wanted me to follow him.

So I got up and followed. He went into my son's room and then came right back out, and then went into my daughter's room, jumped up on the bed, and laid down on her pillow (where he sleeps every night).

And that was it....

And now every morning, he does this. Wakes me up. Refuses to stop waking me up until I follow him into each child's room to do a kid check. And then he lays down and goes back to sleep. Why he thinks I need to do this an hour before my alarm goes off, I have no clue. It would be sweet if it wasn't for the whole waking-me-up-an-hour-early thing.

He IS apparently aware of when I'm actually supposed to be awake, because the last two days, when I attempted to sleep in past my usual wake time of 7:00, he came in and meowed until I got up. THAT I wouldn't mind so much since my phone does occasionally crap out on me and the alarm doesn't go off.

But that 5:45 am child check really needs to stop :-)