Sleeping with man's best friend
Have you ever woke up hugging the wrong end of the dog? Sounds like a bad country song, doesn't it? I guess that's the chance we take if we allow a canine friend to share our bed.
When our dog, Maggie, was a pup I thought it was great to let her sleep on our bed. I also thought it was safer — at least if I knew where she was I wasn't worrying about what she was chewing up.
She's a bit "vertically challenged" so I had to pick her up and place her on the bed each night. She could jump off, she just couldn't jump up. So I faithfully (because I was well-trained from an early age) lifted her up and placed her between the sheet and bedspread at the foot of the bed.
As she got older she practiced her jumping skills and, with the help of a small stool learned to find her own way to bed each night. I'm no longer convinced that's a good thing.
As she's gotten older, she's taken over. We begin each bedtime the same routine. It takes four or five tries before she's ready to settle down for the whole night. This is partly due to the fact that she has such sensitive hearing. If the neighbors three blocks down the street open their back door, Maggie is off the bed and down the stairs before I can draw the next breath.
For a small dog, she's a bed hog. She may be vertically challenged but once she's in bed it's like sleeping with a Great Dane. She'll still humor me by crawling to the foot of the bed. However, after I fall asleep she inches her way up my side until she's curled under my arm.
That's not so bad. Some nights it's the snoring and whistling that drives me crazy. If she were a big dog and spent her days pulling sleds through Alaska I could understand all the snoring, whistling, and sighing she does. But she's just a lazy dog that lies in the sun all day and waits for bedtime and breakfast!
It's been said that dogs can take on human-like behavior. It's also been said (by me) that how a person wakes in the morning can be an indication of how the rest of the day will proceed. Maggie is living proof. Some mornings I wake to see her lying beside me on her back, head on the pillow, covered up and front paws stretched out on top of the blanket. Some mornings I wake to feel her breathing on my cheek. Other mornings I wake to a pair of staring, beautiful brown eyes. These are ordinary days. Those days when I wake hugging the wrong end of the dog
— DONNA BERNHARDT
