The crib tent, revisited.

When one has four cats, the nocturnal activity in one's house can be considerable. Nevermind that most of our cats have had the instincts cuddled out of them and prefer to sleep either wedged between us, at our feet, or on top of one or the other of us. As I might have mentioned, once or twice, my sleep has been a wee bit compromised lately. But despite this, I haven't witnessed too much nighttime cat activity, except for them jumping out of bed to follow me back and forth from the bathroom, and then demanding affection while I'm trying to reposition myself in amongst my considerable number of pillows.

And Pace, who is probably the most well rested dog on the planet (credit the prozac), doesn't usually contribute to the nighttime antics at all. But he had a rough evening last night (preparing us for parenthood by throwing up all over the house), and for some reason, he decided to sleep in the living room - usually he has to be in whatever room we're in. At around midnight, he started barking. Since this is very unlike him, it woke me up. As I struggled to get out of bed and into the living room, my brain slowly processed something strange about the crib, which sits about three feet from my side of the bed. A big dark lump in the crib, under the tent.

Pax. The biggest of our cats, the one we're most concerned with having not crush the baby, sleeping curled up in his crib. Under the tent.

I evicted him and told myself I would deal with figuring out how to prevent recurrences of this in the morning. An hour later, I woke up again, this time as Pax was hauling himself up the side of the crib and under the edge of the tent. At five am, he woke me up as he was balanced on top of the tent. At least we know it holds his weight.

When we were setting up the tent, we made some modifications to it; originally, it had a screen that was designed to go under the mattress and inside the slats of the crib, as well as forming a dome over the crib. Morgan and I weren't happy with that, as it felt a little too much like we were putting the baby in jail. So we snipped off the bottom portion and just left the top, dome part. It attaches flush to the sides of the crib and is held in place with velcro, but the ends have a gap of a couple inches. Which is apparently just enough space for a sixteen pound cat to get in through.

Sigh.