The one thing that I have learned about Chantelle over the years is that she loves to sleep. No matter what time of day it is, she can fall asleep on a moments notice. This is a complete opposite to myself, where, I do fall asleep lying on the couch every night, but no matter what even like this morning when I’m on vacation, I still wake up after 8 hours of sleep. Now Chantelle, with her love of sleep has one of the most comical routines every morning. You see, her alarm clock is on her bedside table, but inbetween her and the alarm clock, she places as much stuff as she possibly can to attempt her from actually waking up and hitting her snooze button… and falling back asleep. I’ve determined this is the sequence of events that flows through her mind each and every morning:

1. Place as much crap on your night side table in order to fool your mind of where the actual alarm clock actually is. This may include such things as a fan, tylenol bottles, cell phones, glasses, cups, etc. The more objects on the actual table will help in fooling your mind to where the alarm clock is and then you hear the actual alarm longer, which might fool your mind into waking up.
2. Change the actual time on your alarm clock to be 20min later than the actual time in order to fool your mind that it is actually later then it really is in order to get yourself up to go to work.
3. Set your alarm to go off multiple times, the first at 5:45am, the second at 6:15am. Both times do not actually correspond to the time that you actually wake up, but it’s safer to set it off twice in order to fool your mind to start trying to wake up. Regardless of sleeping beside anybody else, who even though does wake up at 6:00am, the alarm is obviously set to a frequency that you can hear, and the other person sleeping next to you won’t hear this anyways.
4. When the alarm does go off, navigating through all the crap on your bedside table, repeating the word ‘damn it’ after each individual object falls is manditory, as at that point you begin to have some sort of idea the person next to you may hear these objects falling and wake up.
5. After knocking over all the crap from your bedside table, it is then understood that your cat will at that point realize that you are up and come over to investigate said objects on the ground. If any of these objects are small enough or loud enough when played with, this may fool your brain into waking up from the repetitive playing of said objects.
6. At this point your cat becomes bored and then begins to walk over your face, meow in your ear and walk up and down your stomach in order to gain attention, because it naturally thinks you are awake and you must give it attention. After 5 minutes, it will get bored and either walk away or sleep on your stomach, side or head.. which ever it feels is necessary at that particular time.
7. It is now your brain has been fooled enough and survived the onslaught of attempts to be woken up and then drifts back into a peaceful sleep. For atleast 10 minutes.
8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 until it is 5 minutes before you actually have to wake up and throw some clothes on to meet your fellow car pooler in the driveway. This is the most important step, as delaying the inevitable as long as you possibly can will produce the maximum amount of sleep.

Whether or not this is actually going through Chantelle’s head, it sure seems funny enough from my perspective. My alarm clock usually seems to be Chantelle’s, followed by Chuki. The other morning I guess I didn’t wake up soon enough, as I awoke to him with 2 paws on my head, 2 paws on the bed and his tummy fur tickling my nose and him crying. He’s sort of a natural alarm clock.

So if you feel the need to fool your brain into sleeping, please consult the list above for guidance and direction.

Filed under: Life on June 20th, 2008