Dog bedtime rituals

If you're new here, check out these posts straight from the mouths the dogs: 

Ain't no shame, ladies do your thing. Just make sure you ahead of the game (Mae)

From the Desk of Augustus Gloop (Gus)

Meet Geege (Geege)

As we were about to board a cruise ship years ago, I texted my brother Stephen who was watching the dogs and asked him how it was going. He replied, "Gus is awful to sleep with, he thinks this is his bed." I asked if he was sleeping in our bed. He was. I texted back, "That IS his bed."

When we first got Gus as a puppy almost 10 years ago, he was meant to sleep in his crate. I passed out after Michelle's block party and woke up in the middle of the night to an empty crate and puppy Gus sleeping on MFD's chest. The next few nights, I tried to put Gus back in the crate but it never worked. He slept in our bed and as the other dogs joined the family, they did too.

Before we go any further, this is not the place to comment about how you don't agree with dogs on the bed. No one currr for that opinion here.

That being said, dog bedtime at our house is absolutely a circus of our own creation.

They know what bed means, and when I say it Mae cannot launch herself up the stairs fast enough. Geege is slow going and Gus needs a little help getting onto the landing sometimes.

Once upstairs, Geege needs to be told to get up up. Mae and Gus go nuts with bones for a while as soon as they get on the bed. If there are bones on bedside tables or under furniture, they will want those bones and not the zillions of bones they have scattered all over the bed. Mae growls like crazy at anyone who comes near her bone and has to be told to stop eleventy billion times.

Geege has no time for bones, but he has plenty of time to lay facing the door so he can stare at it and guard the rest of us, barking out of a dead sleep when appropriate.

Gus typically gets down to investigate something downstairs or get some water. When he comes back up, he needs to be picked up from the side of the bed, always a precarious situation but one that enables me to do it without actually getting out of bed. He's ready to settle in for the night and will assume his position at the bottom of the bed in between my feet. Geege will lay on the other side.

When Mae is finished growling at Gus, Geege, and MFD, she lays down by her brothers until Gus moves to get her off of him, then she comes and licks my face to say goodnight before retreating under the covers for a while. She inevitably emerges to lay on one of our pillows so she can stare at me like a little creep. She can move around, but when other dogs or humans move, she barks ferociously.

The dogs rotate positions throughout the night, and sometimes I wake up with the two boy dogs laying next to my left leg and Mae laying next to my right, all stretched out. It's like the freaking dogs are a chalk outline of my body.

And of course if you've read this blog for a while, you know that Gus is the President of the A-hole Wakeup Committee on weekends but none of them can be bothered to be up and out of bed on weekdays. Must be nice, suckers.

Mother, we don't get up on Tuesday mornings. Leave us be.

And those are the dog bedtime rituals at our house.

You might also like: Ain't no shame, ladies do your thing. Just make sure you ahead of the game (Mae), From the Desk of Augustus Gloop (Gus), and Meet Geege (Geege).



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