I Was Evicted From My Own Bed By A 8 lb Dog 🐶

Look, I need to ask you something. Do you think dogs should sleep in the bed with their owners?

Before you answer, I should tell you that I absolutely think they should. In fact, I was so committed to this belief that I went ahead and bought my dog a set of pet stairs. Not because I was being fancy, but because the dog in question is a thirteen year old sausage of pure muscle with legs the length of a soup can. One day I watched her try to leap onto my bed and it looked less like a graceful jump and more like a bowling ball trying to clear a curb. So, out of pure self preservation for both of us, I bought these stupid little carpeted steps and plopped them next to my bed.

Oh boy. What a choice that was.

I thought I was setting up a nice little system. She'd trot up, hop in, and we'd both snuggle into the kind of peaceful sleep people write about in those calendars with puppies on them. I did not, not once, consider that I had just installed a dog escalator with no off switch.

For the first couple nights she actually used them like a normal creature. I was so proud of us. That hubris lasted about five days.

At 10:30 on the dot every night, I started hearing it. Clink, clink, clink. Sixteen tiny claws on step one, then two, then three. And then a dense, warm, absolutely immovable loaf of dog would come barreling onto the mattress with all the momentum of someone who had just remembered an incredibly important thing to do, which turned out to be taking over my entire bed.

This dog does not pick a spot. She auditions for all of them. First she plops at the foot of the bed like she's settling in for the night. Then, in the span of about fifteen minutes, she slowly shimmies her entire backend up until it's planted directly on top of my thighs. Cut off from the waist down, I can only lay there and accept my fate. From there she'll rotate ninety degrees so her head is on my pillow and her butt is pointed directly at my ribs. Finally, the pièce de résistance: she flops onto her back, all four legs sticking straight up in the air like she's been deflated, taking up what I can only describe as a flagrant abuse of square footage.

And the noises! This dog has a whole one dog orchestra going on while she's asleep. It starts with these teeny wheezy puffs, builds into a rattling sound that could pass for an old air conditioner from 2003, and then, with zero warning whatsoever, erupts into one long, wet, honking snort that startles the both of us every single time. She'll lift her head up, look around the room in absolute confusion, as though some stranger snuck in and did that, then immediately pass right back out and do it again two minutes later.

I have tried to move her. It never works. If I so much as nudge that dog, she lets out the longest, most theatrical, Oscar worthy sigh any living thing has ever produced. The kind of sigh a person would let loose after being told they had to get up from the couch to answer the door. So of course I freeze. What am I supposed to do after that? Fight a dog for being too committed to her own bit?

And those stairs are completely corrupted now. Before, there was at least a little effort required to get up here. Now it's an all access pass. At two in the morning, if she hears the ice machine in the fridge down the hall, up the stairs she goes with the grim determination of someone on a top secret mission. At four in the morning, if she decides she needs to shift six inches to the left for reasons known only to her, those claws are clinking up those steps again. I timed it once and she went up and down three separate times in one night. Just because she could.

I wake up every morning looking like I got into a tussle with a sentient dryer full of fluff. There's dog hair on my pillowcase, on the wall next to my bed, and I suspect in one of my socks from three weeks ago. My sheets have a permanent butt shaped dent in them. If she decides to sleep horizontally across a full size bed, I wake up curled into the tiniest comma known to man, clinging to about four inches of mattress while a thirty five pound dog sprawls out like she's on a cruise ship.

And you know what? It's ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.

I still think dogs should sleep with their owners. I just also think that if you buy your dog stairs, you should know with absolute certainty that you are no longer buying them for the dog. You are buying them for the dog to more efficiently annex your bed. And at 10:30 tonight, without fail, those little claws are going to clink their way up step one, step two, step three... and I'm going to laugh at how stupidly funny this whole thing is while I lift the blanket up and let her in anyway. Because I've already accepted that I lost the second I brought those stairs home.