Bedtime, Doggie Style

I absolutely love and worship my bed. It is a beautiful queen-sized sleigh bed made of a golden wood and equipped with a mattress about seven feet high which requires a small step ladder to access their pillowed top, somewhat princess-and-the-pea-like. This suits me nicely.

But alas my relationship with my bed is fated for a sorrowful end, thanks to the dog.

My dog, Theo, is the best dog in the whole world. You probably think your dog is the best dog in the whole world, but you are wrong. A 15-pound lap dog, Theo has developed a strange medical condition that causes her to expand to about three times her size during the night, thus relegating my boyfriend and me to the very edge of the mattress where we cling for dear life because it’s a long way down to the floor. Theo has also cultivated a strange old-man habit of smacking her lips incessantly as if anticipating the imminent delivery of a juicy steak, or as if she has finally, after all these years of snacking on excrement, discovered that she has “icky mouth.” This combination of smacking and expanding has resulted in many sleepless nights, punctuated by expletives, for us humans.

We have tried several ways to solve this problem without buying a larger bed. First we built a little fortress of pillows all around the edge so Theo could not jump up. But Theo assumed this was unintentional, and would kindly call attention to our error by sitting at the foot of the bed and whimpering all night.

We tried shutting her out of the bedroom entirely, which resulted in tireless scratching interspersed with panicked barking that translates as, “You’ve accidentally locked me out of the bedroom! I CANNOT ADEQUATELY PROTECT YOU FROM OUT HERE! You could be getting robbed AT THIS VERY MINUTE and there is nobody in there to lick the thief to death! And more importantly – are those cookies I smell?!?”

Next, we disassembled the couch, her second favorite sleeping place, and put one of the cushions on the floor, covered with a blanket she particularly favors, to create a little nest of bedding that would have made Marie Antoinette jealous. We then pointed to it and cried exuberantly, “Ooooh! We wish WE had such a luxurious bed!” and even crawled into it ourselves, curling up into tight little knots, exclaiming and producing little moans of pleasure. Theo sat and stared at us unblinking, clearly thinking, “My humans have some pretty bizarre habits – like voluntarily getting into that cube filled with water every morning - but this is particularly weird, even for them.” She then hopped up on the bed to watch the show from a better vantage point.

For several nights we stuck rigidly to the idea of her separate bed. It became a game of chicken, between the dog and us, to see who would weaken and give in first. Since Theo sleeps roughly 16 hours a day, she was the most rested at bedtime, and therefore had the most endurance. Our evenings quickly established a pattern:

Us: Arrive in bedroom to find dog already established in precise middle of bed, despite having no measuring tools available. Exclaim to dog in extremely chipper voice that it is time to go to her bed – accompany with arm flapping and gesticulating to indicate exciting nature of this suggestion - at which point dog flattens and plasters herself to mattress, expanding to the mass of a sumo wrestler. Using an intricate pulley system and grunting, transfer dog to her bed. Administer enormous quantities of praise while tucking 400-thread-count blankets around her and carefully arranging twenty-seven of her favorite toys in semi-circle. Retreat from dog bed - genuflecting is not inappropriate – while maintaining constant stream of enthusiastic “good girls” at the octave of a 6-year-old.

Dog: Wait five seconds. Leap back onto bed. Assume Uncomprehending, Extremely Cute expression when humans indicate displeasure. Repeat process roughly 15 times until people give up and go to sleep in the approximately 3 inches of bed space you’ve generously allotted them.

So I guess it can be said we’ve all arrived at something resembling a solution, in that we humans, the breadwinners with triple-digit IQ’s and opposable thumbs, have given in completely to a four-legged animal with a brain the size of a hamster poop. In the meantime we are all saving up for a king size bed, although at the rate Theo is going, given her inability to hold down a job, she’s definitely not going to have her share ready any time soon.

Valentine's Day Messacre

Like the majority of the population, I spent the month of December cramming Christmas cookies down my gullet as if afraid a gang of pterodactyls would swoop down out of nowhere and snatch them away from me before I could get them safely in my mouth. So I am now faced, in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, with the challenge of losing those extra five pounds so my boyfriend will find me sexy and alluring enough to buy me a refrigerator-sized box of chocolates - which will slap those five pounds right back where they were.

But like every other woman I don’t want to actually go on a diet. So I spend a lot of time seeking alternative methods of weight-loss that do not a) cost thousands of dollars or b) have side-effects resulting in a tiny layer of hair growing all over my body. But then what?

Exercise? Don’t be silly. For one thing, the gym is too crowded with all the New Year’s Resolutioners. Plus, if you’re like me, you make only a half-hearted attempt at a “work-out” involving a treadmill you wouldn’t touch any other time of the year with a toilet bowl plunger. You have to claw your way through the crowds and fight for the machine in order to proceed with your 30 minute walk at the pace of, approximately, 0.017 miles per hour, before treating yourself to a McFlurry on the way home as a reward for your efforts. So forget the gym, because that kind of weight-loss regimen will only make your pants tighter.

Those miracle weight-loss pills they advertise on TV seem like a great idea, but you know if you’ve tried them that the effect is not so much turning you into a svelte supermodel, as turning you into an overweight psychotic on speed. Although I would not recommend them for weight-loss, I would recommend them if you have an urgent need to paint your entire house in one evening, or if you feel your moods are just too darn smooth and predictable for your taste.

So this year I tried, albeit not on purpose, a new form of weight-loss guaranteed to work: the stomach flu. The stomach flu serves two unintentional purposes: one, it causes you to violently remove from your body everything you have ever eaten, or thought about eating, in an efficient twenty-four-hour period; and, two, it tests, just before Valentine’s Day when you really need to know, how much your boyfriend really does love you.

Forget a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover’s. Any guy can do that. But will he hold your hair while you puke with great gusto into a trash can, even getting a little on his socks, and then, instead of crying “OH MY GOD THAT’S GROSS!” and fleeing from the room with his hand over his mouth (which is what I would have done), reach over and tenderly wipe a string of vomit from your chin? I mean, that is love, my friends.

And who needs a dozen roses when you’re lying in a pool of fevered sweat and sobbing because you’re, frankly, just a big fat baby when it comes to being sick, and he pokes his head in and says, “Can the towels go in with the sheets?” Because he is actually, unprovoked and out of respect for your inability to move even your pinky finger, tackling tasks that heretofore he has always categorized as Needless Chores Women Make Up Just to Torture Themselves.

But the best thing, better than a fancy dinner or a piece of jewelry, is when you are finally able to crawl out of bed, just in time for Valentine’s Day, and hobble weakly straight to the scale to discover that the trauma of the past few days was not for nothing: you have lost five pounds. And you tremble your way back to the bedroom and cry with a watery smile, “I’ve lost five pounds!” and he looks at you, the memories of fever and chills and throwing up and passing out with your head half in the toilet still fresh in his mind and says, “You were already perfect.”

What better Valentine is there?

Happy Valentine’s Day, SC! And thanks for washing out the trash can. That had to be pretty disgusting.

© Karen Bertiger 2005. No changes may be made without permission from the author.