I'll sleep when I'm dead (apparently)

I have come to appreciate that greyhounds are very much creatures of routine.

At our house, that means waking up at 6.30 am every morning (regardless of whether it is the weekend or not) for breakfast and a morning walk. After much bustling about, the humans leave at about 8 am (most of the time, anyway – why is it that twice a week they refuse to leave us in peace??), and the dogs to sleep undisturbed for the best part of 9 hours. At 6pm, everyone is home again and it is time for toileting, dinner, another walk and some more sleeping. Somewhere in there is a bit of play time and a few pats – and then it is off to bed for the night at about 10.30 pm.

The hounds know what to do and when to do it – and they love it. They know how long to hold their bladders, when their next meal is coming and when it is time to relax.

You would think that with that kind of timetabling, we might have been able to stay in bed until a reasonable hour on Sunday morning when Daylight Saving ticked over.

Because dogs don’t do daylight savings, I was prepared for the prospect of having the dogs getting up at the regular time (waking me up in the process) and instead of it being 6.30 am, it would be 7.30 am – so I could at least feel like I was getting up at a semi-sensible time for a Sunday morning. I thought that maybe we could run on “lazy Sunday morning” human time instead of “I’m awake – why aren’t you awake? I’m going to poke my nose in your eye to check if you are alive and WHERE is my breakfast??” greyhound time.

But Chris was on to it. He knew that was something was happening with the clocks and that his sleeping patterns were about to change. Worst of all, he knew that the whole thing was just an elaborate scheme by me to try to trick him into staying in bed for longer than he had to.

So, Chris made sure that he didn’t let the clocks get the better of him and decided to make his own mind up about when he would be getting up. And he got it all wrong. At 5.30 am (with my body is telling me it’s 4.30 am but Chris convinced that it was 6.30am), there are noises from the other room as the old man wakes up, stretches his legs and bounces out of bed. On his way past Mila, Chris “accidentally” brushes her leg, causing her to bolt awake and let out a howl – and then there were two of them rearing to go for the day.

And there was no coming back from there. Unfortunately, the latch to our bedroom door doesn’t work properly and is no match for a hound on a mission. In they both come, trotting around either side of the bed, poking noses in eyes, slapping tails against walls, breathing loudly, brushing past each other and generally letting us know that “lazy Sunday morning” human time is off the table as an option. 

When it became evident that we weren’t moving in a hurry (and were still pretending to be asleep), the dogs lay down beside the bed for 0.2 of a second and then get up to try it all over again. They race down the hallway (wooden floors – so I could hear every single foot step) to check if breakfast has magically appeared and then back again to tell me that it hasn’t. They get back on to their beds and spend the next 10 minutes repositioning themselves to get comfortable. One more race up and down the hallway and any chance I thought I had of a sleep-in has disappeared.  At 6 am (body screaming at me that it is only 5 am AND Sunday!!), I am up - reading the paper, feeding the dogs, grumpy, and wondering what to do with myself for the day. Mike seems to have mastered the art of just staying in bed and hoping that someone else deals with the problem. He saunters in to the dining room at 9am (three hours later!!), looking refreshed and ready to face the day. 

And what have the hounds been doing since we got up? Sleeping on the couch, of course.
 

All tuckered out after an early Sunday start. If anyone should be curled up on there - it's me!