Dog Days..and Nights

I awoke this morning to the most atrocious bags under my eyes, a fact which repulsed yet did not surprise me, as my sleeping habits of late have been rather disrupted. Why, do you ask would someone with such a fondness for her mattress find herself sleepless night after night? One word...Winnie. She is currently the bane of my existence and the love of Sweetpotato's life. He just had to have a puppy and I consented, under protest, because I have found that providing him with playthings makes my life so much easier. Now I have never really had a dog before, so of course I am trying to communicate with her as I would a human, which is considerably less effective than screaming and throwing things, actions which have become common around my house these days. You see somehow I have managed to adopt a 4-legged version of myself. There cannot be a single occurrence in our apartment that does not center around her. If, for some reason, she is not the center of everyone's attention, she will shit on the floor and smile at you while she's doing it. If she even so much as thinks Sweetpotato and I are about to kiss, she will run from the farthest corner of the apartment and stick her nose directly between our faces. This has made the past few months exhausting, so we usually fall into bed at an obscenely early hour.

Somewhere between 1 and 3 am, I am awoken by the whinings of an impatient puppy, who for no reason other than she wants me to suffer, has decided that she will need to be awake now. At first I let her out thinking she needed to use the bathroom or didn't feel well, but now I realize she just wants to be in the bed. Unfortunately, we live in an apartment complex and can't just allow her to bark herself back to sleep, so I open her crate, whereupon she immediately leaps on to my side of the bed and proceeds to make herself quite comfortable, leaving me with approximately 4 inches of mattress. I spend the next 4 hours fluctuating between sleeping with her face on my mouth or being jolted awake by her paws climbing on my head. Then, when she is ready for me to be up for good, she slaps at my cheek with her front paw and sloshes her tongue all over my face. Truly, the apartment can only handle one high maintenance bitch at the time, and I thought I'd cornered that market. I had thought dogs were just supposed to fetch things and lay on your lap, not use your body as a jungle gym and destroy every shoe in your closet. To avoid any more unpleasantness, I leave Sweetpotato's sneakers on floor to distract her from my Prada's, lest I have to shoot her and leave the bloody carcass in his bed, Godfather-style.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the double bed, sleeps the one who actually bought the damn dog, oblivious to the war being waged a few inches away between a mutt, a Queen, and her much-needed beauty sleep.