Cats spend most of their time sleeping, and Felicity the Sewing Cat has definite opinions about sleeping – especially the sleeping hours she shares with us.
If I’m sleeping, she should be sleeping.
If I take a nap, Felicity will join me. It doesn’t matter what else is going on: her favourite person might be here, the back door might be open on the perfect day for sleeping in the garden, the heater might be on… nope. Her job is to sleep with me.
Our family sleeps in the big bed, Felicity is part of our family, thus she sleeps in the big bed.
If we have guests she’ll go and visit them in the morning, but even if they are housesitting and we aren’t home, she sleeps in our bed.
The only exception is if one of the big family members is sick, and I move to the guest bed so we can both sleep. Then she comes with me. Because apparently her job is to sleep with me.
Bedtime should be 10pm
Bedtime is rarely 10pm in our house, but Felicity lives in hope. At about 9:45 she gets up from the couch or the rug in front of the heater, and takes up her station in the hall between the lounge and the bedroom. Pass through that hallway, and she’ll try to herd you into the bedroom with encouraging meeps.
She’ll do this for an hour, and then give up at 10:45, and retreat to the bed, where she will glare at us with accusatory and disappointing looks as we come in and get ready.
There is a proper way to get into and out of bed
Bed should be entered via my (very large) bedside table.
Bed should be exited via the foot at Mr D’s side.
If I’m a bad person and pile so much stuff on my table that she can’t hop up on to it and then to the bed she’ll hop on the bed, carefully pick her way on to my bedside table, sit down, stand up, and then go back to the bed.
If I’m a worse person and pick her up and put her on the bed, she’ll immediately walk across the bed, jump off it at the proper exit space, walk around the bed, and get back on via the bedside table.
When Mr D wakes up, it’s cuddle time
I know when Mr D has begun to wake up in the morning, because when it happens I can feel Felicity uncurl herself from where she sleeps at my feet, walk up the bed, sit on Mr D’s chest, and start purring.
Her ability to sense his rise into consciousness is pretty uncanny. And pretty adorable. Nothing beats Saturday morning purrs and cuddles in bed with Miss Fiss and Mr D.
It’s the perfect balm for the soul.
Felicity is a constant delight. I still miss my beloved cat Daisy, who slept on my shoulder every night of her dear life. When it was bedtime (in her judgement) she would parade up and down on the windowsill of the living room, staring all the while to encourage action. My friend used to say that Daisy was ‘winding up the clock’, which was what her father used to do when he thought her boyfriend was outstaying his welcome! xx
We have a similar routine in our house only I am under the paw and do as I am told. My purry, furry girlies get moochy around 9 o’clock and do the wait in the hallway and try to herd me to bed. They make such a fuss that I tend to give in just to get them settled. Cwtch (pronounced ‘Cutch’ and meaning ‘cuddle’ in Welsh) likes to see me to bed before finding her napping spot for the night. She doesn’t like to share the bed with her sister Cariad (Welsh for ‘love’). Cariad tends to sleep cuddled into my legs. On cold evenings or when they are particularly clingy with me, they both sleep on our California king size bed and stretch out so that my poor husband often has to go and sleep in the guest bedroom because they don’t leave him any room. (Yes, even on a California king size bed). Cwtch seems to sleep for 16 hours a day but they both, like Felicity, seem to agree that when I sleep, they sleep too. Cwtch also has Felicity’s super feline sense for when I am semi conscious in the morning for she will come and kiss my nose or gently paw my face to ensure I am fully awake. I usually wake up nose to nose with her,
Cats. Living with them is a beautiful thing.
Sounds wonderful.
Our Zola often likes to sleep with us, but not always. He often settles in to nap with my husband. And sometimes, he comes to bed after we get in, to knead one or both of us for at least 10 minutes, before dashing off to do something before he comes back to sleep.
As a cat mommy of currently 6, I am the one who is mostly covered in felines as my husband moves around too much for their taste. We have to lock every other cat out for our shyest kitty once in a while, she then sleeps between us trying to be petted by both at the same time. As I write…my oldest one is on my chest while I wait until dinner cooks . I have owned cats since I was four and can’t imagine life without at least one.
Felicity is sooo fluffy! I see she subscribes to the theory of a consistent bedtime and maintaining one’s bedtime rituals in order to get a good night’s sleep. 🙂
Thank you. This post is a delight in a dark time.
So needed this Leimomi…… beautiful post
I miss cats cuddles. 🙁 I’ll have to go visit father soon-ish and have a cuddle with Viisi; she’s similarly fluffy to Miss Fiss but black-and-greyish-black. Our cats have always been outdoors cats, so the sleeping schedule is different, especially now: when father goes to bed, she sits on the windowsill, a black silhouette in the darkness. When father wakes up, she sits on the windowsill, hypnotising him into feeding time. In between, she probably does mysterious nocturnal cat stuff…
(Also, our cats have mostly been black over the years. I was pretty surprised when I learned from Simon’s Cats relatively recently that there’s still a lot of prejudice against black cats. That was rather difficult to imagine, with all the black cats we’ve had I’ve always thought them extremely elegant and therefore obviously most desirable… huh. Viisi is a bit more on the scruffy featherduster side, though, especially when her fur gets extra fluffy in winter. :D)
Both our cats are black as well, we have Star (black with a white patch on her chest and another on her tummy), she’s our huntress and Ray (short for Ray of Sunshine), she doesn’t hunt much, but in the right light her colour changes from solid black to a Dark Ghana chocolate, she’s our shy gal too.
Comparing cat colours to Whittakers chocolate bars may be the most Kiwi thing possible… Probably not super helpful to those outside of NZ, but definitely made me smile!
Viisi has brown in there, too – no idea how that translates to NZ chocolate bars. 😀 It changes season to season… in winter she gets quite a grey ruff (I find it adorable, together with the fluffy tail), which is less noticeable in summer, but summer sun makes her browner, I think.
Viisi means Five in Finnish. Some time ago, we started numbering our cats in Finnish (which was modelled after the wild geese in Nils Holgersson). The thread of that has been lost again, but Viisi is still Viisi to me. She’s a lot shier than her forbears, and I think also smaller; it feels like half of her is fluff. When I pick her up, she gets a bit ragdolly limp, which is also something I was not used to from our previous cats… especially in comparison to Kaksi whose favourite pastime was butting people with her head, and who would always extend her claws when kneading you, for some reason. Kaksi wasn’t a cuddly cat. Kaksi required rubbing instead of petting.
They totally all have their own personalities. Which isn’t something you learn until you become a cat person.
And as far as I’m concerned, the only shortcoming black cats have is that they’re harder to photograph! 😀
I just adopted two black sister kittens, Luna & Layla. Even though they were in the adoption section of a very busy pet supplies store for two months as well as their website and Facebook, they got no attention from prospective adopters while others were adopted right away.
They are the sweetest little kitties. My husband and I went to meet two other cats but fell in love with them. As soon as they saw us, we got squinty love eyes and kneady paws. We thought kittens would be adopted quickly and wanted to adopt kitties that weren’t getting attention, like older cats.
We love our black beauties who both have a patch of white on their chests and a little on their tummies along with the most darling little white socks. Their front socks look like old fashioned ladies gloves that just cover their paws. Layla has more white on her belly and a white stripe above her right back sock.
It is a bit weird to get used to seeing them in the dark. Just inky shadows slinking around.
Oh my gosh, everything about this is beyond adorable. I love that Felicity also seems to be a bit on the neurotic side. My Divina also has her rituals, and it’s sooo cute. Cats are the best.
I just want to pet that fluffy tummy! I am hoping to have my inside cat, very soon. Our neighbor across the street threw her cat outside, because she was scratching on her new leather furniture. I began feeding her, because the owner seemed never to be home. I think the kitty has adopted me. I have been calling her “Little Friend”, because I forgot her real name. My other neighbor has been calling her “Princess”. When I am able, I want to adopt her, but I want to make sure the previous owner doesn’t mind. I also want to find out her medical history. She may be in need of a rabies vac, we have raccoons around here. I have two other genuine ferals that I feed also, they have been fixed.
Oh Felicity is beautiful, so fluffy. She always cheers me up with her antics. She reminds me of a fluffy tortie and white where I live who is a bit of a local Internet sensation round our way, because she is a very social cat.
Felicity looks sooo strokeable…..
Cats are so funny! 🙂 They think they run the house. We have a gray tabby named, Murphy. And he and I are locked in constant battle. He believes he owns my studio and has the unchallengable right to sit on anything I am working on, be it a dress in progress, or a pile of books and papers for a research project.
His favorite place to sit, though, is on the ironing board, especially if it is by the window in the sun.
Karel ÄŒapek wrote a lovely book about cats (well, more like pieces collected into a book), like he did for many “ordinary” things. Here’s an excerpt that goes well with the “they think they run the house”:
https://reblogthiscrapkay.wordpress.com/tag/from-the-point-of-view-of-a-cat/
(The collection I mention is called “I Had a Dog and a Cat”.)
I wish my cats would sit on my chest and purr! They do like to sleep around my legs but they do not climb on us at all. My youngest cat likes to be on my cutting table when I’m working on something, then she purrs like crazy and wants all the attention! I love my cats… thanks for posting pics of your furry baby.
Awww!
Our cats have very specific views about dinner time. Unfortunately their inner clocks are almost always about an hour fast. The younger cat will climb onto my husband’s desk (he’s the one who feeds them) and head-butt his computer monitor into a tilt in hopes of getting dinner under way sooner.
Our younger cat is also the one who comes to listen to my husband brushing his teeth with the electric toothbrush. Come bedtime he will pop up the stairs and wait on the top stair for the appropriate bathroom ritual to begin. He also believes in sleeping in our bedroom doorway, to be certain of tripping anyone who gets up in the night. Weirdly, his mother often sleeps in the same doorway during the day – although there are few places in this house she doesn’t sleep, now that I think of it.
The way to enter and exit the bed is so funny! Miss Ma’at has not just ways to enter and exit the bed, but to traverse the entire household with the least amount of paws-on-the-ground she can manage. Some days this is incredibly important, other days she not so important, in a random (to me, the human) pattern.
My old cat had slept on my bed every single night of her life, and trained me to not kick her by using liberal application of tooth and claw.
When she died and Miss Ma’at entered my life, Ma’at never really got into sleeping on my bed.
Anyway she decides a few times a year to join me on the bed. Shes all of 4kg, I’d like to add, and this morning I woke up to find she had a full half of the bed, leaving me, well trained by my old cat to not move a sleeping cat on my bed, with all of the other half.
So today I’m not feeling quite so melancholy at missing sleeping with a cat. I remember very clearly today the half-awake touch of fur and hurried retreat so I don’t get bitten 😀 I did it all morning!
I have new 8 month old kittens that I adopted a month ago after my 18 year old cat died. They’re still working out their rituals, but I noticed that they either sleep under my bed or beside me whenever I sleep.
I’m still having to train them not to walk on my bedside table (they kept knocking over my bottles of meds and glasses) or scratch the boxspring. I can tell that their foster moms allowed them to sleep right on thei chests because they want to be right under my chin. Except they’ve gotten quite long to fit. So we’re coming up with compromises.
They curl up against my chest and under my arm when I’m on the sofa and sleep stretched out on my husband’s legs while he sleeps on our reclining sofa. He’s in the middle of a huge work project and sleeps really well on the sofa.
I have a similar duvet cover! https://pin.it/lmvnvxkwc6kigr along with a flax colored linen one.
I have new 8 month old kittens that I adopted a month ago after my 18 year old cat died. They’re still working out their rituals, but I noticed that they either sleep under my bed or beside me whenever I sleep.
I’m still having to train them not to walk on my bedside table (they kept knocking over my bottles of meds and glasses) or scratch the boxspring. I can tell that their foster moms allowed them to sleep right on thei chests because they want to be right under my chin. Except they’ve gotten quite long to fit. So we’re coming up with compromises.
They curl up against my chest and under my arm when I’m on the sofa and sleep stretched out on my husband’s legs while he sleeps on our reclining sofa. He’s in the middle of a huge work project and sleeps really well on the sofa.
I have a similar duvet cover! https://pin.it/lmvnvxkwc6kigr along with a flax colored linen one.
What a beauty Felicity is!