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- Aug 13, 2014
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Both of our cats (a one year old and a 4 month old) have taken up the habit of waking us at roughly 6am -every- morning. We're pretty sure they do this because our alarms are set to 6:05am during the workweek and they somehow have an internal watch that tells them it's about time we should wake up.
But sadly, they don't have an internal calendar that tells them that they should leave us be on saturdays and sundays (and during holidays). So we're trying to find a way of teaching them to stop waking us.
At first they start crying and whining for a few minutes and if we don't respond, they start scratching the bottom of the door, as if they were trying to dig a hole to get to us. We managed to prevent (or at the very least lessen) the scratching by putting a doormat under the door, so they can't reach beneath it to scratch, but the crying hasn't stopped (if anything, the lack of scratching-opportunities have made the crying worse, but at least the material damage has been limited).
We play with our cats for about half an hour (and we really wear them out by making them sprint and jump constantly) and then feed them before we go to sleep, but that obviously doesn't help.
I know the most logical response here is "just ignore them, they'll get it eventually and stop doing it".. But we can't. We need to get up, so if they start crying at 6:00, we have no other choice than to get up eventually. We ignore them when we do enter the living room; we just turn the light on and go straight to preparing breakfast and after half an hour or so we feed them and acknowledge their presence, but we've been doing that for a month now and they still cry at 6am.
We also tried taking them by surprise by setting our alarms half an hour earlier, which worked.. for one day. The next day they started crying at 5:30 and then it took a week of ignoring the 5:30am-crying to get them to cry at 6 again.
During the weekends we obviously ignore them and after 5-10 minutes they stop crying for half an hour, but then they try again for 5 minutes, and so on.
We have no idea what else we can do to stop this behaviour. I mean, it's not like they're keeping us awake and turning us into zombies at work, because they pretty much function as a fairly reliable alarm clock, but when we do want to catch some sleep during the weekends, their crying is annoying as hell.
But sadly, they don't have an internal calendar that tells them that they should leave us be on saturdays and sundays (and during holidays). So we're trying to find a way of teaching them to stop waking us.
At first they start crying and whining for a few minutes and if we don't respond, they start scratching the bottom of the door, as if they were trying to dig a hole to get to us. We managed to prevent (or at the very least lessen) the scratching by putting a doormat under the door, so they can't reach beneath it to scratch, but the crying hasn't stopped (if anything, the lack of scratching-opportunities have made the crying worse, but at least the material damage has been limited).
We play with our cats for about half an hour (and we really wear them out by making them sprint and jump constantly) and then feed them before we go to sleep, but that obviously doesn't help.
I know the most logical response here is "just ignore them, they'll get it eventually and stop doing it".. But we can't. We need to get up, so if they start crying at 6:00, we have no other choice than to get up eventually. We ignore them when we do enter the living room; we just turn the light on and go straight to preparing breakfast and after half an hour or so we feed them and acknowledge their presence, but we've been doing that for a month now and they still cry at 6am.
We also tried taking them by surprise by setting our alarms half an hour earlier, which worked.. for one day. The next day they started crying at 5:30 and then it took a week of ignoring the 5:30am-crying to get them to cry at 6 again.
During the weekends we obviously ignore them and after 5-10 minutes they stop crying for half an hour, but then they try again for 5 minutes, and so on.
We have no idea what else we can do to stop this behaviour. I mean, it's not like they're keeping us awake and turning us into zombies at work, because they pretty much function as a fairly reliable alarm clock, but when we do want to catch some sleep during the weekends, their crying is annoying as hell.
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