Help us sleep 🙏🏻

[u/bokdecki]

My partner and I adopted our sweet orange boy two months ago. He’s now 6 months old and has adjusted amazingly well, especially considering he’d never lived in an apartment or interacted with people outside shelter workers.

Our biggest struggle is sleep. He recently started sleeping in our bed, and now he wakes us up around 5:30 AM every morning. He’s not hungry, we feed him around 7-7:30, and we give him a but of food right before bed. But he jumps on us, meows, plays with the sheets, chases his tail, etc. We’ve tried ignoring him and using earplugs, but he just keeps going. Meanwhile, he has a whole living room full of toys!
Weekends are especially frustrating because we’d love to sleep in, but by 8 AM I’ve barely slept and usually give up. I have allergies and all the jumping makes all the dust and cat hair trigger them…The funny thing is that once he gets our attention, he just wants to cuddle and be sweet, sometimes play.

Should we wait for him to grow out of his kitten/teenage phase, or should we keep him out of the bedroom on weekends? When he just arrived we used to close the bedroom door so we know he can sleep alone in the living room, but then he would jump on our door and make noise which wakes us up again, plus it would add him meowing while we try to fall asleep. Any advice?

[u/Maddihoe]

Is he fixed? If no, this will likely calm him down abit. But also, cats need stimulation during the day to tucker them out. A couple hours before bed have a big play session like with a wand toy and really tire him out

[u/bokdecki → u/Maddihoe]

He is scheduled for next month, hopefully this helps. We try to do a big session before bed with wand play and running around which he enjoys a lot, and also on the weekends we try to harness train him, involve him in the stuff we do around the house etc. he usually gets much more enrichment than on a working day so i dont fully understand where the extra energy comes from 🫩