Morning people choose violence

I have discovered that the older I get the less of a morning person I become. As I stare down the rapidly approaching decade of my life with a 5 in front of it I suspect by the time I'm 60 I might have become nocturnal.

Weirdly the cats have worked out how much of a non morning person I am and have developed a strange respect for it. At the appointed universal feline breakfast time they will check for proof of life, establish that I am still breathing but unconscious, and then... wait? As in they give up and go back to sleep to wait for me to rise. I swear I didn't train them, I apparently just slept through the cat alarm enough times they gave up? And then they taught the kitten when she arrived, and now she accepts that breakfast gets served on my schedule, not hers?

My ability to sleep through the cat alarm was verified when a friend stayed with me once and crept into my room to wake me for breakfast. He gently patted my hand to wake me softly, and instead of waking up I apparently stroked his arm in my sleep as if he were one of the cats and KEPT SLEEPING. He apparently amused himself with this experiment for a good 15 mins before giving up and waking me properly so he could tell me about this hilarious thing I do in my sleep.

The other thing I do to forestall the cat alarm is feed them before I go to bed. So they get breakfast when I wake up, dinner when I get home from work, and what I have mentally termed "supper" when I go to bed, so they get kibble and a snack to sustain them through the night. Breakfast is a much more relaxed affair when they've been snacking overnight. Not sure how this would work in a household with dogs, but in an exclusively cat household where they don't compete for food it's been a game changer in eliminating the urgency of the 3am alarm for breakfast, enabling me to sleep through it 😻