Sleeping With Dachshunds

Every night around here is a Three Dog Night

I know many of you already know this, but sleeping with dachshunds is no easy task. For such small dogs (assuming you have a mini or tweenie), they sure have a big impact at bedtime.

It’s not just that they spend half the night moving around, stomping across your body looking for that perfect spot to burrow and settle down with precisely zero concern for your comfort. It’s once they have settled down and you’re finally able to drift off to sleep, every creak or random noise in the house becomes a reason to set off a full four alarm alert that can take anywhere from 30 seconds to fifteen minutes to call off.

Not our best look, but at least we’re comfortable

Make it three dachshunds and you’ve got a full Chinese fire drill, complete with 120 decibel howling, barking and twelve tiny feet thundering back and forth across your mattress at least once an hour throughout the night.

Thank goodness my spouse is willing to put up with it (he kind of has to. I’ve already told him the doxies aren’t going anywhere) and has taken to a sleeping strategy that involves lots of pillows and 18 horizontal inches of defensible bed space.

Still, sometimes I wonder how we got to this point.

When I got my first dachshund, Rommel, he was so small I was worried that if I left him on the floor our other two dogs – a German Shepard mutt and an English Mastiff — would roll over on him and accidentally crunch him. So rather than risk a squished doxie I put in my bed to sleep with me, promising my husband it would only be until he was big enough to sleep with “the boys” on the floor.

Nine years later he still sleeps with me and he’s been joined by two other pack members, Franzi and Montgomery, in what has become a nightly challenge for the best blankets to burrow under and best knee space to cuddle up to.

I don’t think any of us (husband excluded) would have it any other way.