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Comment by esw | Hacker News Reader

I'm right there with you. Thanks to my infant and a merciless cat, it's been a couple of years since I've slept past 4:30am. I try to get to bed early as often as possible, but it's hard to simply 'give up' and go to bed at the end of a long day when you've finally got a moment to yourself.

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I'm in the same boat. Two children both under four and two cats. I used to be a real night owl. Now I'm in bed at 9:30 pm almost every night.

Cats are better now. We have confined them away from our bedroom At night and we used a water spray (fine mist) which put them off scratching at the door. After a week or so of getting wet they stopped scratching.

Tried the old water spary trick on our oldest child when she kept waking me up at 5 am. Didn't work. Made her cry.

Just kidding! :-)

Kick the cat out of the bedroom. Best thing I did to improve sleep quality.

Do you have an automatic feeder for the cat? I use the Crown Majestic (search on Amazon) and it works pretty well--my cat stopped sniffing my face at 6am...

I bought the same feeder in the hopes that this would occur, but it seems my cat just can never get enough. So I run into the trade off between health (my cat's) and sanity (my own). I would still suggest the feeder to everyone to try however, it really is a well made product that could easily fix bad habits in your animals feedings.

My threshold for the number mornings the cat on a diet begins the wake-up call is rapidly approaching the point at which I get around to building some sort of time-release RFID tag access-controlled (two cats, only one on a diet) feeder.

Thanks for the suggestion. We leave food out all night, so it seems to be less about wanting to be fed than wanting (me specifically) to be up and downstairs.

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