I Sleep With Dogs

There is dog hair on the bed!  I thought I had it licked, but here it is again.  No self-respecting dog trainer would admit to such a thing ... actually, that's not true.  Many of us have enjoyed years of furry cuddling in our inner-most sanctuary of rest, no harm done.  I gave up dogs-in-bed for a luxurious 18 months or so after moving the pack to Northeastern Connecticut.  There were very practical reasons.  The ticks -- God, so many ticks, more than I had ever had to deal with!  Lyme Disease was named for Lyme, CT, after all.  The swamps and pond where the dogs liked to chill off daily did not help their case for bed-rights of an evening.  In the summer of 2008, I declared the bedroom off-limits.  That's right:  the bedroom, not just the bed.  Who can train a bed-dog not to jump up when the trainer is snoozing?  Forsaking tethers, a gate was added to the bedroom door, and hounds were not permitted beyond it.

Dakota, the spoiled-rotten Lab, did not take well to this at all.  For maybe a month, she tested the gate, ramming it with her chocolate nose, whining her disapproval, and generally disrupting restfulness in the inner sanctum.  But after a spell, she resigned herself to the spare bedroom and plentiful dog beds, bedtime Kongs stuffed with yummy food, and the other highlights of her exciting life, and gave up on bedroom snuggling.  Forrest was resigned, and Lily always slept in a crate, so that was simply moved out of the bedroom, no fuss.

Ah, it was heaven!  The one room in the house where one could go without dog hair, ticks, dander, dog drool...I could go a month without vacuuming and no one would ever suspect!

   

In June, I began traveling to DC to work for 2 weeks out of every three, leaving Steve, my dog-loving and long-suffering guy, alone with two of the three dogs.  The bedroom remained pristine until two weeks ago.  "It was 45 degrees last night," he told me sheepishly when trying to break the news.  "Forrest and Dakota really needed some warmth."  Yeah, right!  The house is heated by a wood stove, you see, and it warrants temperatures much more extreme than 45 degrees to build a big fire.  Needless to say, it was Steve who needed the warmth of a two-dog, if not a three-dog night.

I came back for my weeklong visit this past week, and brought along my new foster dog, Luke.  Snuggling with anyone, human or canine, is Luke's great pleasure.  Steve accepted the little 25-pound guy and the 85 million tiny white hairs that magically fall off the dog in an 8-hour span of lounging.  All over our pillows.  Luke is special, you see:  he spent three months in a shelter without one night of bed-snuggling, and he is trying to catch up.  He spent the past week wedged between me and Steve, and forget getting your pillow back if you get up to visit the bathrom in the middle of the night -- he takes your spot and has to be lifted away and deposited back down to the foot of the bed.  Of course, he creeps back up to wedge himself against any living being soon after.

By the end of the week, first Forrest, then Dakota and Forrest, wormed their way back into the bedroom.  Last night, I could not move my legs due to any one of three immobile sleeping canines pressing its weight upon me.  At 3 a.m. I declared enough was enough.  The two big ones had to go back to the spare room!  All it took was a few dog snacks from the kitchen (the dogs are trained with food, after all) and they settled back down.  And so did I.  Luke seemed so comfy in his 25 pound suit.

I am sure Steve is, right now, sleeping in the queen-sized bed with two hairy, possibly swampy, possibly ticky 60-pounders, and I'll have to deal with that when I get back.  How can I complain?  It's cold up in Connecticut.  I am here in Takoma Park with Luke, and he's not swampy but he's snuggly.  Lily, the odd-dog-out, is in her crate, as she chooses.  I'll clean up the dog hair later.