It’s getting colder and colder by the day, and Pumpkin is almost always hiding somewhere warm: In his bed in the living room (where he has a little heating pad), in his bed in the office (which is heated for me too), in my bed upstairs… If he chooses to sleep upstairs, he often cries until I go and tuck him in. This will be important later.
In the evenings around eleven, he does come to me and squeezes himself at the back of my office chair, where he becomes a slightly fluffy, slightly bony, but ever so hot extra cushion. It’s his way of telling me that he wants to go to bed, and my cue to turn on the hot carpet I put underneath my futon. It takes roughly half an hour to heat my bed, and that’s when I go upstairs as well.
And then…. things get complicated. Now that I have closed the office door, Pumpkin has to decide where he wants to sleep – in the living room or upstairs with me. Of course, he’s still cold and now he starts crying again: because the office is closed, because I need to tuck him into his kitty bed, because… I don’t know.
By that time, I’m already in bed, calling out to him while slowly drifting off, and it takes him quite some time to realize that I’m expecting him to settle down or to come upstairs on his own. Which he does, eventually – with a complaining cry when he makes it to my bed, waking me up again… It takes us a while to finally fall asleep.
To be fair, I shouldn’t complain too much. He has now learned to sleep between my thick duvet and the fleece blanket on top of it, and he can manage to slip in there without my help. In other words: At least he’s not waking me up in the middle of the night anymore. Small wins, I guess.