Sleep. Or not.

Everyone wants to fire their cat when they have a baby; some people even fire their dogs.

I’ve had Kitty for 10 years and I like to think that we’ve still got the old magic between us. Except. Except when it’s 3am and I need more sleep. Or, you know, 4 or 5.

Like a baby I know, the tireder I get, the less likely I am to get a good night of sleep. So when it’s late and things aren’t going well, sleepwise, and I start to think about how tired I’m going to be, I start to panic. And as you likely know, panicking wards off sleep like mirrors ward off Draculas.

So when husband and I stayed out til 1:something the other night, I was a little worried, since I am up at 5:something for a feeding, and sometimes in between if someone is cold or needs a drink of water, and then at 7:something for the day. To be fair, I have it really good, with husband getting up early with the baby plenty of the time. But when he’s sick and it’s the weekend and it’s my event that kept us out late . . . it should be me.

So when dear, coldy husband began snoring like a farmer, and even the baby’s whitenoise machine and earplugs couldn’t save me, I reviewed my options: where could I go?

We live in a comparatively huge apartment. I mean, for New Yorkers. Our bedrooms are in the back WING of a house, for crying out loud. (There may be only two wings, but two wings is standard, right? At least for birds. At least for standard birds.) Anyhow the other bedroom is taken up by the baby. It has a full-sized futon in it, which I sometimes doze on in the early morning with him after he drinks some milk, but I’ve tried to sleep in there at night. And no matter how silent and possumy I am, he wakes up, and he knows I am there, and he stands up to point out, in a yelling tone of voice, that it’s creepy to sneak into someone else’s room and sleep and pretend you are not there. I actually agree with him on this point.

So I rule that option out. Bathroom, no, and that is the only other part of the house in the back wing. So it’s out to the front of the house, to the couch, the abode of the Rejoicing Nocturnal Cat. She doesn’t rejoice all day, but perhaps she’s happy at night because no one is enthusiastically trying to hang things off of her whiskers, or snuggle to her actual eyeball.

Kitty during the day.

In anticipation of her “reading,” which is what we call it when she claws the books off the shelf for attention when she wants to be fed, I get her a bowl of kibble. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Then vomit, vomit, vomit, as kibble that’s almost as good as new rains down in front of the front door. Because it’s on wood and not the rug or the furniture, because it is 4:30am, I decide not to clean it up. I even figure that it might clean itself if I leave it there, if you know what I mean.

Then, presumably because she’s excited to have the barfing portion of the night behind her, Kitty finds some sort of paper bag to scrounch in. Scrounch, scrounch, scrounch. Then comes a run over to her Alpine Scratching Device.  Scratch, scratch, scratch. At which point I freak (freak, freak, freak) and put her into the bathroom, which is in the back of the house, actually adjacent to the baby’s room.

Where she presumably meows and meows and meows, because though I can’t hear her, moments later I hear the baby, and he is barking through the monitor. Woof, woof, woof. (Baby is VERY excited in re: animal noises these days. He’s mastered meowing so his main response to anything animal related these days is barking.)

Then Baby falls back to sleep, and I fall back to sleep, and who cares what the cat is doing, and I am in the midst of dreaming vividly of fighting with Husband about whether we need a new VCR. He is maintaining that we do need one and I am putting forth the position that we do not need one when I am woken up by Husband letting the cat back into my wing.

If I wasn’t afraid to sleep in my car, I’d do it. Oh, I’d do it.