My alarm goes off at 4:45 this morning, but this was after a few hours of unsuccessful sleep. The disruptions came from my precious baby girl, Peyton, wanting to snuggle with me. As stated before, she loves to sleep sprawled across my neck, resting her chin on my face somewhere, normally my eye socket.

Last night, in an effort to get more sleep without her accosting me, I hid under the covers. Poor choice. I have learned that if you try to deny her, she will do everything in her power to achieve her goal. She bats and digs at the covers and proceed to bitch slap me with her fluffy little paw until she gets to her spot. Don’t get me wrong, I love cuddling her, she is so soft and warm, but her purring keeps me awake.

So back to 4:45…alarm goes off, I head to the kitchen to make protein pancakes for my 8 mile run I am about to embark on. I sit at the kitchen table, syrupy pancakes waiting for me, and start to think about how tired I am; I feel like I need an adrenaline needle to the heart to make it through this run.

Peyton, in typical form, jumps up on my lap to bless me with her presence as I eat my breakfast. She nestles in, but within moments decides she needs to stand up to readjust. Something I should note here about Peyton is that she is long-haired, and about 60% of her body mass comes from her tail. I could almost see this all happening in slow motion; she stands up, turns around, sways her tail in happy cat fashion, and bam…tail lands on my plate and sways back LOADED full of syrup.

“PEYTON ELIZABETH!” (yes, she has a middle name, after her God Mother, one of my best friends). I yell at her and grab her immediately before she has a chance to run off. I clutch her to my chest and we walk over to the sink. As soon as we get there, her whole body tenses up. She only weighs 6 pounds, and I’m pretty sure is a midget cat, but her back claws become the lethal weapons of a jungle cat when something she doesn’t like is happening.

The faucet turns on, and her body immediately starts to violently thrash. I’m holding her away from my body, dunking her into the stream of water in an attempt to protect my internal organs, as she flips and shrieks, and is all but audibly screaming, “Fuck You Mom!”.

Tail rinsed, I wrangle her back to my chest, still trying to calm her down, as I reach for the paper towels with my other hand, frantically trying to rip one off, while unsuccessfully unraveling half of the roll.

I dry off her tail, and set her free. You would have to know her, but she is a typical cat I guess, with a loving, but super bratty personality. She doesn’t run. She takes two steps, turns and looks at me as if to say, “if I could kill one person with my mind…”

I look at the clock, it’s 5:15…welp, now I’m awake. People have always said that God works in mysterious ways.

I was out the door a half hour later, and as I turned to shut it, the last image I had in my apartment was the icy cold glare of Peyton, being sure to let me know I was not yet forgiven for my actions.

Yup… totally worth the allergies and asthma.