Ahhhhh, at last, Pumba sprawled across me while I was watching television the other day and snoozed with his bearded little chin pointed to the ceiling.
It was a rare occurrence that he should do that without the ulterior motive of. sucking on my earlobe until passing out from exhaustion with his nose pink and wet from the workout.
Yes, he seems to be calming down a little in his old age (he should be year old next month) and doesn’t feel quite the obsessive oral fixation that he did as a kitten. Although he hasn’t stopped that ear sucking thing completely and I still have a sore spot on the back of my ear from his teeth.
Powder too, decided to take a snooze on top of me the other day, eyes squinted shut, slow soft breaths on my ear, and he didn’t even use his claws to knead my head like a loaf of bread.
I guess cats go through stages just like children. Those first few months are like the terrible twos when children can’t stay out of anything and must be running all of the time. Now my boys are hitting adolescence. They still enjoy acting like kids, but they also take time to act like adults and slow down to smell the cat food and reflect on the purrrrrpose of life.
But ya know … it seems like all cats get rowdier in the morning than any other time. Maybe it’s because morning isn’t really morning for them. It’s just a time after one of 15 or 20 naps they have taken that day.
But for me, morning is just what is sounds like … “mourning.” It’s time to mourn the end of another wonderful night of sleep. It’s like being a newborn baby suddenly dropped out of that nice warm enveloping liquid into a cold and wicked world and then smacked on the behind to add insult to injury.
All of the cats I’ve had in my life have found their own unique way to wake me in the morning, but I must admit, all of these methods seem much more preferable to the sound of that infernal buzzing alarm clock.
Pudha, my first cat, used to pat my eyelids with her paws, then, that failing, would gently pick at the tip of my nose with her claws. Duphous, my true love for 15 years after Pudha passed away, had a more subtle method of lying on the pillow above my head and casually tossing her tail onto my face. Although, a few times she knocked the water glass of the bureau beside my bed and drenched me. One time she was so upset because I was too tired to wake up and feed her that she peed on my leg. She brought a very literal meaning to the term. pissed off.
Now Powder will do that kneading thing when really desperate, but usually leaves it all up to Pumba. And since I’ve gotten a slow-leaking waterbed – a source of endless fascination for him-Pumba has invented the Waterbed Prance to wake me in the morning. It’s new dance to the squish, squish rhythm of the sloshing water. Pumba will crouch and stare intently at a spot on the bed, then suddenly dive for it, lunging into the mattress then riding the waves like a surfer. Then he’ll turn around, set his sights on another spot, run across the bed and pounce again.
I’ve never been awake enough to count, but I’d estimate that Pumba does at least 15 laps back and forth across the bed each morning.
The other morning after his little workout, he followed me into the bathroom and jumped from the window sill onto the shower curtain rod. He was hanging by his front paws until I reached up and saved him. Why can’t I wake up in the morning with an incredible desire to bounce all over my bed and make little chirp-like purring sounds?
Why is it that I drag myself into the bathroom and sit on the bathroom floor in front of the heater while slurping down my first cup of coffee before I can even drag my body over the edge of the tub to bathe, when Pumba has already done 15 laps across the bed and is ready to swing from the shower rod?
Maybe I need to take more cat naps.
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