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.