I have 4 cats and none of them sleep with us or are allowed in the room at night, except for one, Egypt since she never wakes anyone up or plays in bed. I suggest just locking your cat out at night. Yes, during the first night, she will meow, and particularly now since you reinforced that behavior already by caving when she cried. Let her meow until she gets tired, and don't open the door. She will get the message after the first night or two...trust me. I do agree that trying to get her as tired as possible before bed is a good tactic, and you should continue that, but you will need to let her know that the door will not open simply because she meows.

 

The best thing you can do is ignore your cat. If she wants attention, even negative attention is a reward. Whether you decide to do it while she's in your room or locked out, is up to you. When I first got Lola she would do the same thing, around 3-4 am she would start licking my face, nuzzling, kneading, etc. I would tap my alarm clock, then roll over and pull the covers over my head. It honestly took around two weeks, but she finally got that the alarm clock was key and that I would NOT wake up until it went off. Cats have great internal clocks, and she picked up on when the alarm clock went off. Now sometimes she bothers me around 5:50 (I get up at 6:00), but she usually just waits, sitting next to the alarm clock and as soon as it goes off, will start meowing like crazy. If I hit snooze though... unacceptable. She did her part waiting until the alarm clock went off, and will bother me until I do mine and get out of bed.

 

Thanks guys!

Dweagoil, it may come to that, but I really hope she and I can come to peaceable terms over this. When she's just snoozing away, it's really so nice! And from now on I'll throw in some earplugs and let her meow away.

Applesparks, you just gave me such hope! Blankets are going over the head. I'll try it for like 2 weeks and if I can't get her trained on my alarm clock, I'll have to keep her out of the room at night.

 

Cherry used to do that for about the first week or two. It didn't really help much that I had school and had to get up early. But after a little while she stopped bugging me. Now she doesn't even sleep on my bed with me, she just sleep by the window and jumps on the bed when she sees that I'm awake.

 

I dunno if it was the 'she finally gets it' thing or a fluke, I was trying to teach Miu the 'Sleep' command on and off. Last night, she came over and tried to get some cuddles. I said 'Sleep, sleep Miu'. For some reason, she just turned tail and went back out of the room.

When I was training her, I would say 'Sleep, sleep'. Then I'd just throw on my covers, turn my back and ignore her.

 

i was like you when we first got our kittens..there were a couple weeks where we kept getting woken up in the middle of the night cause they wanted to play and have some attention and i was incredibly sleep deprived. i would get pawed and jumped on at random hours. i think it just got to the point where we were so tired we were just out and slept thru the night. i think they started to get the idea that we were asleep and no fun to play with and they eventually got the idea to just wait til we wake up. now they usually climb into bed with us at maybe 5-6am and cuddle and even sleep with us too if we are lucky, or just wait til we wake up to give them breakfast.

maybe we lucked out, but they wound up figuring out that we have a sleep routine and any time between midnight and 6am they won't be getting much attention from us.