Temper Tantrums

 When Bailey was a baby, she would sleep in my room at night. This was because as a baby, she:

1. Wanted to sleep at least 20 hours every day
2. Was easily amused, so it was a breeze to play with her and tire her out

I was home a lot during the first few months, and Bailey would spend most of the day like this:

When she wasn't sleeping, she was a ball of energy. But this was okay, because she wanted to play with anything and everything. It was easy to get her attention and then tire her out.

Thanks Katie for this pic!

Usually before we went to bed, we would play with Bailey until she was too exhausted to get up again, and she would just look at us with this expression:

 At this point we would go to bed ourselves and let Bailey wander freely. And by "wander freely" I mean "wander into the bedroom and pass out on the bed."

However, as she got older, it seemed like Bailey's mentality became "I'm too good for these strange objects you dangle in front of my face." She not only required less sleep during the day, it became harder to amuse her.

At first, I still let her in. This proved to be a mistake. I would wake up intermittently in the middle of the night because Bailey clearly did not get enough exercise while we were awake and was pouncing on my legs. Or pawing at my hair. Or chasing invisible mice on my bed.

I decided enough was enough. Bailey was banned from my room at night. For a while, she seemed okay with this new plan. I think it's because she was a little confused and kept expecting that eventually, she would be let back in at night.

But she wasn't...and she did not like that. She started walking between me and the door when I was going to bed, as if saying "HERE I AM, LET'S GO IN THE ROOM TOGETHER!"

But I held my ground and still didn't let her in.

She decided that because she could no longer directly wake me up in the middle of the night, she would make as much noise as possible and wake me up through my closed door by throwing temper tantrums. She crashed around in the living room. She sprinted from one end of the apartment to the other, it seemed, no less than 58 times per minute. Oh, and at around 6AM every single day (including weekends and holidays), she would mew and paw at my door for as long as it took me to give up on getting any more sleep and just get out of bed.

In summary, it sounded like the world was ending outside of my bedroom at night, and I still wasn't getting enough sleep.

So because of my decision to keep Bailey out, I was no longer waking up in the middle of the night to a happy kitten running around on my bed. I was waking up to a likely furious kitten determined to get her way by bringing about the apocalypse.

And so now Bailey is back in my room at night. Because I admit defeat.