Tate (aka The Tater-tot, aka The Tate-inater) has me pretty well trained. Not for bedtime, he doesn’t really care when I go to bed, but he does have a routine in which he’ll come and spend some time purring by my head when I first get into bed. I have to have a pillow perpendicular to the one I’m sleeping on, and his spot is the one created at the top of the perpendicular pillow.
I have to be turned facing him (or he’ll try to come over to the other side) and he’ll kneed and purr (and give me a kiss on the nose) for about 10-15 minutes and then he’s gone, doing who knows what.
However, getting up in another story - I feed him at about 5 am during the week, so the weekend, that’s when he wants to be fed. By the time 6am rolls around he’ll be in the bedroom clawing at the drapes, or chewing on something he shouldn’t chew on, anything to get my attention so I’ll feed him. He doesn’t mess with the drapes or chewing at any other time, which is how I know it’s done to get me out of bed and in the kitchen fixing his breakfast where I belong!
He also (my fault, I know) thinks that anytime I leave the house he’s getting a treat of freeze-dried tuna flakes. He does get them during the weekday mornings when I’m going to be gone all day. But on the weekends when I leave in the morning to go to tennis clinic as soon as I walk out of my bedroom with my shoes on, he races to his window perch and waits expectantly for his tuna flakes the same way he does every morning before work. He doesn’t get them though, it’s only when I’m going to be gone for a significant period of time.
