Two’s company, three’s a crowd, five is an international incident

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/09/2017 (3236 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You can probably tell by the vacant look in my eyes that I have not slept in days.

There is a good reason for this — it is difficult to get anything resembling rest when there are five of us squeezed into a single (bad word) bed.

Our bed is crowded when it’s just my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, and me, due to the fact that I personally am the size of a major kitchen appliance.

Mattress space pretty much goes out the window when you factor in our two dogs — a long-haired miniature wiener dog named Zoe and a peanut-brained cross between a cotton swab and a makeup applicator named Bogey (a.k.a. “Mr. X”).

What we didn’t anticipate was adding another dog into the mix, but that’s exactly what happened over the weekend. My brother-in-law flew in from the West Coast for a high-school reunion and brought along a new addition to our family in the form of an eight-year-old ball of tangled fur that goes by the name of Juno.

Technically speaking, I would have to describe Juno as “some manner of dog,” although she seems to be a cross between a small jackrabbit and a kangaroo, which I will explain in a few minutes.

By way of background, I will point out that Juno belonged to our nephew in Vancouver, but he and his wife recently had a baby and they work 10 hours a day and live in a small apartment. It was decided that, all things considered, this furry ball of energy would be much happier living — and sleeping — in my already-dog-intensive house in Winnipeg.

The first thing I noticed about the newest member of my family is that she has the sort of prominent underbite and snaggletooth grin that one normally doesn’t see outside of the British dental system. It almost looks as if she ran face-first into several editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which, for you younger readers, was a series of books we used to settle bar bets before the internet was invented.

If you were casting a doggie version of Oliver Twist, Juno would be a good choice to play the Artful Dodger in the sense she is so scruffy and homely that she would be perfect in the role of Adorable Canine Street Urchin.

When we texted our daughter a photo of Juno’s lopsided grin, her instant reply was this: “She looks like taxidermy!”

When it comes to dogs, however, my view has always been the more, the merrier. We once looked after five dogs for several weeks, which led to our home being coated in a thick layer of hair and turned our living room into a canine version of the famous railway scene in Gone With The Wind wherein you see thousands of wounded Civil War soldiers lying on the ground.

During the day, all three dogs engage in a standard variety of dog activities, including running to the window to bark at invisible but obviously evil things in the front yard, sniffing each other’s nether regions and staring at me with laser-like intensity to convey the notion that they would really like a Milk-Bone.

It’s at night when the three-dog scenario begins to push the envelope, so to speak. Before Juno arrived, my wife bought her a “super cute” fluffy dog bed. What we were not aware of is that Juno is, as I said earlier, part kangaroo, meaning she has the ability — BOING! BOING! — to bounce up onto whatever piece of furniture she likes.

Juno has demonstrated her leaping ability by jumping onto comfy chairs, then leaping across the coffee table onto the leather sofa, then rocketing up into the arms of whichever innocent human happens to be in the area.

Anyway, when bedtime arrived, our original two dogs insisted on being popped into their regular spots in our king-sized bed. Zoe, the wiener dog, sleeps on the pillows between my head and my wife’s, whereas Bogey occupies the middle of the bed.

We assumed Juno would sleep on her brand-new doggie bed, but, no, the second the lights were switched off — BOING! — she literally bounced up and landed on my chest, where she began making contented snuffling noises, until I nudged her down to the foot of the mattress.

The point I am making is that the social dynamics of sleeping with three dogs in a single bed are a lot like the political dynamics among friendly nations in some remote region such as Scandinavia.

If for example, you invited Sweden, as represented by Juno, to sleep in your bed, it is going to threaten the balance of power and cause Denmark (Zoe) and Norway (Bogey) to get their hackles up and make it difficult for the United Nations, as portrayed by myself, to get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Diplomatic tensions are heightened throughout the night whenever, for instance, Sweden wanders too close to Denmark’s border, causing Denmark to retaliate by growling in a menacing manner, which makes Norway fear that its tactical superiority on the pillows is being threatened.

God forbid anyone, especially the UN, has to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, because that sparks a massive dispute over which nation can lay claim to the vacated territory, which sometimes leads to the UN.’s wife becoming so upset that she abandons the peace talks and goes to sleep in our daughter’s vacant room down the hall.

Still, we remain hopeful that, eventually, everyone will settle down and get some (bad word) sleep, because as they say in the high-pressure world of international diplomacy: three’s company, but five in one bed is an international incident.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca