One Night with Snookums

[cimorene]

Just for fun, I decided to record the events of last night live to give an idea of how I sleep this past year or so. Isn't this exciting?


23:00 Snookums is waiting for me in my side of the bed, ready to be a jerk before I even lie down. Neither bowl is empty, but the cats have let them become lukewarm. He demands treats. I give him a cm2 shred of chicken and go to bed.

00:05 He was sleeping peacefully on my thighs (and I was hoping futilely to get sleepy before he woke up) until BB woke him up to make out and then picked a fight and chased him off. He started pacing around the bed, grumbling lowly. He let me catch and hug him, but remained tense. Finally I give in and get up, put on a robe and go in the kitchen. I reheat the half the food they haven't eaten in the microwave and the smell is stronger than usual. I nearly gag. The food is too hot for them now, and they don't even go look at it. I give Snookums another cm of chicken. I'm afraid their pricey canned chicken soup is too adulterated with the cheap food I mixed in and they're going to refuse to finish it at all. 00:18 back to bed.

00:31 Snookums is back, long after BB ate and came to sleep again. He's jumping on and off Wax's pillow and complaining but won't come in arm's reach. He continues getting louder. Wax is stirring and mumbling in response. 00:35 I get up and he leads me to the fridge again, but I ignore that and carry him to the one untouched food bowl (between them they finished the other one) and put his face near it. He starts yodeling loudly in protest in the hall and kitchen. Then he's back on Wax's pillow to reproach me briefly, and groaning mournfully under the bed, but this tapers off.

02:47 Snookums wakes me by yorping from Wax's pillow. I give him a bit of chicken. No change in the food bowl. He is dissatisfied with the quantity of treat and immediately starts complaining, scratching a box (because he knows this noise wakes me up immediately, because it's what he does to alert me when there's poop tracked out of the litter box that he can't clean up himself) and poking Wax in the head. 02:53 I get up and microwave the remaining food again and pour on more boiled water. 02:57 back to bed.
03:02 he's asking to come under my blanket before I've finished lying down. He must've just drunk some of the water off the food. He lets me pet him a minute, then leaves silently. 03:10 he's back on Wax's pillow and biting my hand in 'hunger'. I get up. There's still food in the bowl, but only a few teaspoons. I throw it out and boil the kettle, then heat a new can of the chicken soup. He sits on my lap while we wait for it to get warm. 03:19 back to bed.

07:49 Snookums wants breakfast.

Comments

[torachan]

Yikes, and I thought my cats were bad. :(

[cimorene]

This isn't as bad as before he was getting treatment for his diabetes, and every now and then he accidentally lets me sleep through the night or only wakes me up once, so I still have hope for the future.

[torachan]

Here's hoping!

[krait]

...Welp. You are a far more patient soul than I am!

My cats and I have a routine worked out and everyone mostly adheres to it! Dinner at 6 (or sometimes 5 if I'm home all day and there's too much whining), couch time after dinner, then I cede possession of the sofa to them for the evening and take myself off to the bedroom. Older Boy wakes me with his Shakespearian-Tragedy-Meets-Yodelling-Competition compositions every morning at seven outside the bedroom door (6:30 if I'm really unlucky), but otherwise I am generally left in peace once I go to bed.

[cimorene]

It's not really patience, although I have gradually started to be more despairing than angry. It's that because he's smart enough to target Wax instead of me when he wants my attention, and because she is hard to wake up but needs to sleep, and because she is actually incapable of just lying there and pretending to ignore him, if I actually didn't respond to him at all - which is what you'd have to do in order to train him out of it - the result would just be that neither one of us would get any sleep at all. The only way to prevent him doing that is to lock him up in a separate room from here where I also am, because if we just lock him out of the room we're both in, he is fully capable of yelling at the top of his lungs and flinging himself repeatedly at the door for hours at a time. We tried that years ago. Same if we put him in the bathroom - it isn't far enough away.

So we'd have to have a habitable guest room with a guest bed that I could sleep in and also I'd have to be willing to just give up and sleep in said guest room at least half the time. We don't even have one right now.

Cat behaviorist advice for Party Cats is to keep him awake and thoroughly wear him out in the evening before feeding him a big meal, which admittedly is a tough one for me and I've never fully committed to like, putting him in a hamster wheel or leading him through an obstacle course for an hour, or whatever it would take... but there's also the issue that when Cornish rexes eat too much at a time they tend to just regurgitate it immediately, so trying to feed him enough food before bed to prevent him from getting hungry at night (without the aid of having thoroughly exhausted him through physical exertion that is) could be a tricky target to hit...

[krait]

because he's smart enough to target Wax instead of me when he wants my attention

The smart ones are the worst! I am fortunate that neither of my cats is a feline genius; their usual process seems to be, "Does moaning about it work? If not, can we stand on the human? Okay, guess I'm out of ideas. Hey, what's that over there?" :D The elder boy can be a pretty persistent moaner, but at this point my immunity outlasts his patience.

The eat-fast-throw-up thing seems to be really common in cats; I've definitely met a lot of felines with that issue, including my older kitty. I feed mine with various slow-feeders and puzzle-feeders, which seems to help. (They learn the tricks after a while, though; it used to take them half an hour to get all the food out of The Box Of Many Holes; now it's only a fifteen-minute process. :D I have to keep things fresh, so I rotate out the puzzles and sometimes do a 'treasure hunt' instead where I hide the food in small amounts all around the house and they hunt it out.)

[cimorene]

You can't really use things like that when the food has to still be hot (and always be wet food), I think. At least, a genius could probably invent some kind of puzzle feeder that would dispense piping-hot meat soup gradually, but I'm pretty sure it's not on the market.

[krait]

Yeah, that wouldn't work so well with wet (and/or hot) food!

Now I'm picturing your cat strolling along a buffet table full of tiny silver chafing dishes, lifting the lid to eat a piping-hot bite out of each one. :D

[cimorene]

This is probably what they would prefer, the little bastards. They seem to swap and eat each other's just for fun.

[krait]

Clearly there is an untapped market! Somebody tell a pet supply company, and see if we don't have Tiny Chafing-Dish Food Puzzles available soon. :D (Probably for $199.99, but...)

[laurenthemself]

Oh goodness, what a night. What a beastie!