How to Share Your Bed with a Cat

As a lifelong cat lover, I feel that I'm just as qualified as anybody else to tell you how to successfully share your bed with your four-footed pal. This is not an easy task, especially if your cat is on the large side (as one of mine is). But with a little effort, and a lot of misdirection, you can convince the fur ball to let you have at least one-third of your bed.

Sometimes I actually don't want to share. I'm selfish like that, you know. Every now and then, I just want to sleep all night without the interruptions: the meowing, the paws in my nose, the annoying squeak of the fur balls' stupid toy mouse. When that's the case, I give these tricks a try.

Trick One: Get into bed before the cat shows up. Keep your bedroom door closed and locked until you're ready to get into your bed. Open the door and run across the room. Remember: you have to beat the cat to your bed. He has four legs. You have only two. You might want to start doing wind sprints in your free time if you expect to beat your feline friend to the mattress.

Trick Two: Convince the kitty that he doesn't want your cruddy, lame old bed anyway. You can do this in a variety of ways. I prefer to eat a large can of pork and beans in the morning and let nature do its thing at night. On days when I do this, the foggy flatulence convinces even the biggest bed lover in the bunch to sleep on my computer chair instead. Sometimes, all three of the fur balls clear the room entirely. That's nice. No meowing, hissing, play fighting or cat farts to deal with at night.

Trick Three: Make the bed a certified Scary Place. I like to set up a cardboard cutout of the family veterinarian. He is, of course, holding a very large syringe in one hand. This is not always a good idea, though, because the cats have been known to attack the cutout. Nothing says "fun" like picking shredded cardboard out of your sheets and blanket for the next week.

Trick Four: Evict the cats. You're bigger than they are, right? Hopefully. Just tuck one under each arm, toss them into the hallway, and close the bedroom door. Oh, sure, they'll shriek at you for half the night. And yeah, they're going to shred your bedroom door. But at least you won't have to wake up to three kitties pinning you to the bed, right?

When getting rid of the cats fails, you have to just accept the fact that they're stubborn little twits. These are my favorite tricks to make sharing my bed a little easier.

Trick One: Be small. If I curl up into a ball when I get into bed, the cats don't have to claw and shove me into the desired shape. Sometimes compliance is just the best way to go.

Trick Two: Spread out. Making myself as large as possible forces the fur babies to fit themselves in around me - like playing Tetris, but with claws and, in some cases, blood loss. This usually ends with cat hair up my nose and at least one paw or tail in my ear, but sometimes it's the best that I can expect.

Trick Three: Reverse psychology. Why is it that, when I try to encourage the cats to sleep on the bed with me, they have better places to be? This is especially true in wintertime, when all I want is a nice pair of fur balls to keep my feet from freezing. Oh, no. We can't have that. All three of them would rather curl up with the stinky dog than with me. Reverse psychology rules.

But ultimately, none of my tricks or tips will actually work if the kitties are determined to hog the bed. They're the lords and masters of all that they see, after all, so they're going to get what they want. Now, I'm off to turn on the electric blanket. Bootstrap's meowing and batting at the controls, so I think that he's getting chilly.