3:30am wake-up

With 5 of us in the bed, I usually wake-up at some point during the night because I am too "trapped" to move in my sleep. I have learned to accept this. I can generally fall back to sleep in a few minutes, the disturbance usually occurs about 4 hours after I've gone to bed (so I am relatively confident that REM sleep isn't being disturbed) and I have learned that despite the incredibly cuteness of the "puddles" of cat on the bed, my sleep is most definitely more important than theirs. I don't get to nap WHENEVER I want to.

When I fell asleep last night, Stewart was sleeping on my legs. I was in a comfortable position, so no problem. But when I woke up at three o'clock this morning, it was because my legs were falling off the bed! Both he and Nora were sleeping between Rudy's legs and mine, and apparently Stewart had been stretching to the extent that my legs were traveling slowly to and over the edge of the bed...

Along with his need to take up as much space as possible while sleeping, Stewart also likes attention, and lots of it. As soon as he sees that I am at all awake, he comes up to my head for attention. In this particular case it worked out well, because it freed up the lower portion of the bed so my legs had a resting place again. But I did have to direct Stewart a little bit to prevent him from leaning on Effie. And it took a few minutes to convince him that I was done rubbing his head and in need of going back to sleep. After a few minutes of unrewarded finger nibbling he got the hint, put his head down on my chest, and we both went back to sleep.

As far as I am aware, the other 3 in the bed were not disturbed by these rearrangements.