I have a secret to tell you. My dog talks. No, really he does. He possesses my body and he talks. The family loves it when it happens. When nothing else works, it leaves the oldest in stitches. The rolling on the floor, begging you to stop kind of stitches. The kind we don't see so much anymore now that he's a "cool" middle school-er who is way smarter than we are. Anyway, this entry isn't about oldest, so let's forget that little side note.
So the other thing you need to know is that Shane loves to sleep. He really, really loves it. He has ever since I have known him. To sleep until 11 or even into early afternoon before children was not uncommon. After children, well, it was survival of the fittest. After I had been up with said children at 5 or 6 in the morning (especially in the horror of uncontrolled reflux years), the whole sleeping in thing didn't happen anymore (at least in Shane's world, personally, if I get to sleep until 9:00 am, I consider that sleeping in.) Now that the children are older, sleeping in happens again, but at times we get tired of it and it is just time to get up. So we try to come up with creative ways to wake him up (generally unappreciated, I might add.)
The other thing you need to know before I start this story is that we have 2 animals. I know that will come as a shock to you since the cat is a myth to most of you. Anyhow, the cat is getting on in years and doesn't like to put up with young upstarts of dogs with boundless energy. So, in order to keep everyone happy, the cat lives upstairs and the dog lives downstairs. The dog has only, in the last few months, discovered that we have a cat. He is very curious.
Saturday was a day we just needed to get life started. It was already 10:30 and the husband was still asleep. So, I gave the dog a rare privilege. I let him go upstairs. Now this is Shane's least favorite way to wake up. The dog heads up at a run, slides into the doorway and takes a tremendous jump usually landing on Shane's groin. Shane than groans, turns over, and hides his head under the pillow. The dog then spends the next several minutes, trying to lick his face, while nosing and digging with his paws under said pillow to get at Shane's face. On this day, there weren't the usual muffled groans, so I headed up to see what was going on. In a rare show of I'm not sure what, the dog was laying quietly being petted. So I crawled into bed to help love on the dog. At one point the dog had managed to squirm under the sheet and shove Shane over to share his pillow. Goofy beast.
As will happen, the dog got bored with us and jumped off the bed and began nosing around. I guess when I sent the dog up, it sent the cat into Shane's closet. The dog stuck his nose in the closet and almost before we could blink, a cat came out hissing and batting (an aside, the cat has no claws.) There was a brief stand-off. One more bat by the cat and the dog went back onto the bed, tail between his legs and the cat went under. Now the dog was standing on the bed with his mom and dad and suddenly got a dose of courage. He began barking and then trying to see the cat under the bed (but never getting on the floor--hey, she's a tough old lady.) We were ready to leave the room, but the dog would not get off the bed. It took a rather stern word from Shane to get the dog to follow us downstairs. The dog is not nearly as interested in going upstairs anymore. After all, he (who weighs 65 lbs) was beat up and scared into submission by a 7 pound, elderly ball of fur with no claws.