Last year when Tom and I made our Christmas lists, we asked for donations to our bed fund. Our mattress and box springs were around twenty years old, and our been-thirty-five-a-few-times muscles and bones were starting to feel it. In addition, our bed itself, which we loved, had been a trade with Lynne for another piece of furniture. The bed was more than thirty years old, and one day the place where the side rail hooked into the footboard stripped. Since Margot’s favorite place to write her emo poetry is under the bed, to ensure her safety, we propped everything up with bricks with that “fix it when we get around to it” attitude.
As it turned out, 2013 had different financial challenges for us, so the new mattress was put on hold. But this year, thanks to Tom’s super generous parents, we were finally able to purchase our new mattress and box springs. As it turned out, a friend who’s moving also had a bed and nightstand for sale at a fantastic price, so now–YAY!–a new to us bed that doesn’t need bricks under it.
Meanwhile, we had to make another tough decision. We’ve always let the dogs sleep with us if they want to. Tom had built a ladder for the dachshunds Pete and Stevie to get in and out of bed, and Margot and Guinness used that for a while, then they jumped up via the blanket chest we put at the foot of the bed. But with aging dogs come certain problems, and Guinness has occasionally started to “leak” in her sleep. This always wakes her and sends her jumping from the bed, which wakes me, and I take her outside in the middle of the night for a potty break. Of course, this means we have to wash our bedding whenever it happens.
The new bed is much higher than the old one and I don’t want the dogs jumping on and off it anyway and potentially hurting their backs. So the blanket chest has been moved and their crates were put at the foot of the bed on Sunday. Margot slept in one or the other of the crates most of the day, and as you can see in the above photo, Guinness has figured out where the crates are now. I don’t think she’s going to like the new “no big bed” rule at all, so I might have to bribe her a few nights to sleep in the crate until she gets used to it and forgets there was ever another way.
So many of our friends are, like us, having to make allowances for aging dogs. They have earned their gentle old ages of mostly sleeping, and they deserve all the creature comforts we can give them. But if I had it to do all over again, I’d keep them out of the bed from the start. Lesson learned.
