The Huffington Post’s Healthy Living site recently posted an article on the importance of sleep … and the lessons our cats can teach us about the joys of sleep.
I knew almost from the outset that Thomas would be an “awwww-some” sleeper. I captured this photo on a beautiful spring day in 2004, about three months after I adopted him. Yes, he is awake in this picture, but he’d been napping in that very position for the last hour. I have no idea how this crazy leg drape can be comfortable; maybe he was being his own chiropractor and adjusting a wayward vertebra back into place!
Over the next few years, I took tons of photos of my beautiful feline overlords (hooray for digital cameras!) in their most elegant, serene, and ridiculous moments.
Alas, I lost almost all of them when my old computer and my old camera died, at virtually the same time. The only remnants of my experiment — and the vast majority of the pictures I took of my beautiful soulmate, Sinad O’Kitty, who crossed the rainbow bridge far too soon — were a few low-resolution versions I posted on my old LiveJournal account. I was crushed.
But I bravely soldiered on. In 2006, with a new camera in hand and a new computer humming happily on, I relaunched my crazy-cat-lady/photographer hobby.
Thomas, meanwhile, had been growing ever more proficient at his bizarre and incredibly cute sleeping poses. Cats, after all, never stop developing their snoozing skills.
When I moved back to the old family homestead in 2005, Thomas immediately fell in love with the eastward-facing picture windows that adorned my place — and the vast sun puddles that made perfect napping spots. The tummy-up leg spread became Thomas’s favorite summer sleeping pose.
But the oddest thing about Thomas’s snooze poses is that if he’s not snuggling with his best girl, Dahlia and he’s not tummy-up on the floor, he always has one leg sticking out. I haven’t the faintest idea why; he’s just always done that. He is, of course, ridiculously cute when he’s in the Reverse Comma (or Modified Croissant) pose, and when I behold a sight like this, I have all I can do not to snorgle him silly:
The only reason I don’t fall upon him with kisses and petting when he’s “in a comma,” so to speak, is that I love him enough not to freak him out in the midst of a good, solid nap. Some cats would respond to that kind of treatment with teeth and claws at the ready, but I doubt Thomas would. He’s a sweet-natured soul and would most likely run away and hide miserably behind the nearest piece of furniture.
The Huffington Post article lauds cats as the ultimate teachers of the art of sleeping and encourages readers to learn from their feline friends. It includes a slide show of reader-submitted pictures of cats in cute sleeping poses. Of course, I had to enter my champion sleeper because … well, why not? Check it out, and give Thomas and Dahlia a five-star rating because they are, after all, Too Cute for Words.
How about you? Do your cats’ sleeping poses make you melt into a lump of senseless goo? Are you going to submit your own slides to HuffPo’s sleeping cat slideshow? If you do, post the link to your slide in a comment so your fellow Catsters can vote for you.
