Bella's Bad Behavior

Animals are a lot smarter than people give them credit for...our cat Bella is a great example of this. Every night, she sleeps at the foot of our bed, and every morning between 6:00 - 7:00 she tries to get us out of bed by meowing incessantly. I don't know why she has decided that this is the perfect time to get up, no matter what day of the week it is or how much/little sleep we got that night. Most of the time, we are not quite ready to get up at 6:00 a.m. - OK, we are NEVER ready to get up that early - so we take turns getting up and locking her in the other half of the house (extra bedroom, TV room and office). That's where her food/water and cat tree perch are, so she usually settles back down and goes to sleep until we actually do get up and let her out. Lately her methods have been evolving in her quest to get us up early, and this is why I say that animals are quite clever. When we first moved into the house, she would jump onto bed with us (usually with a toy like her fuzzy mice or a hair elastic stolen from the bathroom) and meow in our faces. It was easy to just grab her and take her to "her room" for the rest of the night. Then, several months later, she started sitting in the doorway or at the foot of the bed to meow. So then we would get out of bed, grab her and put her up. WELL, she figured out quickly that every time we got out of bed to come to her, it wasn't to praise/pet/play with her, so she began sitting outside the bedroom doorway and meowing until we got up to come find her. She would make sure that we saw her as we came around the corner before taking off running down the hall, where she would either hide behind the couch or under the dining room table. I guess she thought that if she could keep us at bay for longer, we might just give up stay awake with her for good. She quickly realized that it was still pretty easy for us to reach under the table or behind the couch, so now she has figured out the BEST morning wake-up routine. What she has recently started doing is positioning herself UNDERNEATH our bed in the very center where neither of us can reach and then meowing as we stumble around in the dark and try to figure out where she is. She did this to me a few days ago, and when I could not find her after looking in all the rooms, I went back to bed. She waited about 10 minutes and then started up with the meowing again from under the bed!!!! So now when she does this, I have to go sit on the living room couch until she decides that maybe I actually did get up, at which point she saunters in to say good morning and I grab her and send her to her room!! I just have to wonder...what will she come up with next??