Cat will not let me sleep

by A
(Virginia)

Hello, I have a Siamese cat named Ramona. She is five years old. My wife and I have two girls under 4, and a great little 20 pound dog. The dog and Ramona love each other and rough-house all the time.

Ramona is very affectionate, and unfortunately she has begun a habit in the last two years that is causing some real problems.

She starts trying to wake me up (about 70% of mornings) at 5:00-5:30. That's no problem during the week since I normally get up between 4:30 and 5:15. But on weekends, sometimes I like to get up that early, and sometimes I don't. I am a tired and busy man and I need my energy to be a dad, a husband, a handy man, a yard maintenance guy, etc, etc.

I cannot afford on weekends to be walkin' around half dead because I couldn't get some sleep.

She starts around 5:15. She presses her paws into me, she purrs loudly, and begins meowing. She tickles my nose with her whiskers. This persists from 2 to 10 minutes. Then she goes away for a while. A lot of times I am able to go back to sleep.

In about ten more minutes, she starts round two. This is when she really starts the full court press. I usually can't go back to sleep after this because there is always a LOT of meowing during "round two" and heavy duty paw-pressing. If I manage to go back to sleep after this, there's no way I can stay asleep during "round three."

I wouldn't mind if she would just curl up next to me and lay still, but this is a very active and obvious attempt to wake me up.

I know part of this is that Ramona wants to go outside in our fenced back yard, which I allow her to do about 20% of mornings. The other part is that she is just plain affectionate. I love that about her but she's driving me NUTS!!!! And I don't want to shut the door on her at night (although that's probably my answer). And it's not like she's a dog and she's "trainable." And I sure don't want to get rid of her, she's part of the family. Does anyone have any tricks to stop this behavior?

Tired on Saturday again (and I can't afford to be!!)