forgetful

Some of us in this house are not sleeping through the night.  Thankfully, it isn’t Jaia I’m referring to.  After a few rough months, she has gone back to being a kid who happily goes to bed at night and doesn’t wake up until morning.  Sometimes very early morning, but that’s a fine compromise for me.

No, those not sleeping through the night are me and my husband.  Me, for obvious reasons.  Anyone who peacefully sleeps all night at this point in a pregnancy is my hero.  It’s just plain uncomfortable, and, ugggghhhh, the countless bathroom trips.

But all that aside, it’s not the real reason we are awake.  It’s our cat.  Julius.  Though normally the least annoying of the two we have, he has taken to meowing – LOUDLY – every morning,  And when I say morning, I mean 4:30 am.  And it’s so predictable, you can set your watch to it.  And he doesn’t skip a day.  Ever.

He’ll wander up and down the hall meowing in front of our door and then, worse, in front of Jaia’s.  If she wakes and hears him, she screams bloody murder thinking he’s somehow made it into her room, something she does not allow.

If you’ve ever had a cat or have spent any time around cats, you know that they do not listen to a word you say.  It’s not that they don’t hear you, it’s that they don’t care.  And all the shhhushing in the world does not quiet him.  In fact, I think it just makes him meow louder.

We’ve tried feeding them at night thinking that it may just be hunger, but it didn’t help at all.

We can’t lock him in the basement – we have cat doors set up so the cats can use the litter box down there and there’s no way to lock/block them.  We can’t lock him in the garage – he wreaks havoc and destroys what he can.  We can’t put him outside overnight, or we can, but I don’t like to.  I once had an orange cat that met its demise overnight outside and I just can’t do that…YET.

Our current plan of action is Dan springing out of bed and ushering Julius outside every day in the wee hours.  I don’t know about you, but racing through the house and then trying to crawl back in bed knowing you only have about an hour left before you have to wake up does not make for a good sleep.  Especially when you are angry at having to deal with something so ridiculous that at that hour.

So, right there between a rock and a hard place is us.  What to do?  I worry about this continuing when we have a new baby in the house (the worry is mostly for the cat’s sake, because if he wakes Frank up with his stupidity, he may not survive).

Any cat experts with advice?  Or with an extra spot in their family for a loud but otherwise loveable orange cat?