I was between jobs for four months and every day my dog (am I allowed to talk about dogs here ?) would bark at me to tell me when it was time for me to pick up my daughter from school.
I actually make a concerted effort not to let my two cats decide my schedule. When I go to bed they come and sleep on the bed with me, but they don’t try to talk me into it. One of my cats will occasionally get into a mood where he wants to lick my face until I wake up. I just put the covers over my head or something. Whatever I do though, I don’t get up. They also don’t get fed as soon as I get up. They know they’ll eat, but they know that I’m going to make coffee and brush my teeth and whatever before they’re getting served. I’ll do it on my schedule, and I’ll not be bullied by my beloved pets.
You can’t let them have the upper hand!
I haven’t really had my puppies long enough to form any habits. But, the girls did seem kind of used to getting up around 10am and going to bed after midnight.
The last couple of nights I’ve been going to bed between 8:30 and 10:00 because I’ve been having to get up at 5am in order to get my boyfriend up on time for work, then I’d have to drive him there (an hour). So, I’ve been tired.
Anyway, the first day I had to get up at 5am, I came out into the living room expecting to be greeted by happy puppies wanting loving from their mommy.
What I got instead, was a pair of fuzzy faces asking me what the hell I was doing up so early as they turned their backs on me and went back to sleep.
My last cat was conditioned to the time my alarm clock was set to. 10 minutes before the alarm went off, he would sit on my pillow, above my head, lean over, and touch his nose to mine. Cold, wet cat nose and cat breath is not my favorite way to wake up.
Morgan knows that bedtime for us means a little evening snack for her, so she starts in on us around 10:45 and ramps up to full freak-out mode by 11pm.
She also wakes me up around 7:30am for her breakfast. Thankfully, she’s stopped trying to dig me out from under the covers, which was really really hard to ignore… now she just runs up and down the hall between the bedroom and the stairs, wailing pitifully about how hungry she is.
She’s been like this since we got her as a kitten, and the only change I’ve noticed now that she’s 5 years old is that breakfast has shifted to a reasonable time of day (when she was little, she was convinced the appropriate time for breakfast was 5am, no matter how much I tried to convince her otherwise)
Ariel, on the other, doesn’t give a damn about what we do, so long as she gets fed once in a while.
He tried to wake us up early when he was still a kitten, then we started locking him out of the bedroom whenever he woke us up. Now he’s good about it.
The cats don’t sleep with us, but they get fed before we go to bed and they know all the clues. After about 10, every time I get up to get another glass of wine or something I have a three kitty escort. If I close my laptop, heaven forbid, it’s pandemonium. It took two days of having our new TV before they learned the new “TV’s turning off” sound and started stampeding.
Our new guy, Marley, doesn’t care - as long as he gets to sleep in the bed, he doesn’t care when we go, he just follows us in. He won’t usually wake us up, unless we’re in bed particularly late & he has no food. Mostly, his thing is that he wants to be with us all the time, but it’s not always necessary for us to be awake, either.
Mimi, on the other hand, is an early riser. She couldn’t care less about the food - she’ll eat about two bites then come running back. She just wants us awake. She sits on the bed and watches for signs that one of us is waking up, then assault-cuddles whoever looks awake first. Then, once we’re thoroughly awake, she goes back to sleep somewhere else.
ETA: We lock her out of the room if she starts up too early, and that usually keeps her calm for awhile. She tries to control herself until just before my alarm goes off, but I know she lays in wait because I see her when I get up at 3am to go to the bathroom.
Oh joy. As of this morning, Morgan has added french kissing to her list of wake-me-up tactics.
She was so pleased by the reaction she got out of me the first time that she waited 15 minutes and then did it again.
EEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew.