Daisy and the Giant Killer Bird

This is Daisy, our basset / beagle mix:

Although this is how she usually looks at you:

While she is by far the sweetest dog I have ever met, she's a little short on courage. She’s grown more confident over the years, but would still kowtow if a mouse (or this reindeer doll) looked at her the wrong. (Random  – I just learned how to spell “kowtow.” I always thought it was “cowtow” and that it somehow had something to do with real cows. Hmm. Thanks dictionary.com!)  

A couple of nights ago, somewhere around 5 am, an upstairs smoke alarm started chirping for new batteries.

I’m a light sleeper. I heard the smoke alarm, and the ensuing commotion as Daisy came bounding down the stairs and sprinted into our bedroom.

“Mom, there is a giant, deranged bird upstairs and it wants to eat me!! Move over!”

Remember, she is a basset mix and her poor little legs are not made for jumping. It took her three tries to make it into the bed, and she managed to finally wake John up in the process.

(Note – The animals wake me up nightly. They all come to my side of the bed to whine and cry, because even they know that it takes two alarms to wake John. That said, when they do manage to wake him, they are usually in full freak-out mode and it is not good.)

She clambered over both John and I and laid down on the far side of him, crying and shaking. He tried to bear hug her, while she continually tried to burrow underneath him and lick his face, still crying and shaking.

John was having trouble waking all the way up and figuring out what was going on, and there was no calming Daisy down. “What the hell… Are you serious, the smoke alarm?… Daisy, dogs are brave protectors, what is your problem?…What time is it?... Calm down… quit it… get the hell down…”

(Yelling at Daisy when she is like this is risky because she has been known to literally have the pee scared out of her. Not something we wanted to happen in our bed. )

We got her back onto my side of the bed, and I took an extra blanket and covered her up. (This is the most scared that I have ever seen her, but Daisy and I had survived a thunderstorm earlier this week, so I knew what to do.) She was still shaking, but at least the licking and burrowing had subsided.

In the meantime, John went upstairs to slay the giant killer bird. He came back downstairs and threw something on the ground as he crawled back into bed.

“There. I removed the batteries.”
“You know it still chirps without them, right?”
“No way…”
*chirp*
“asjlkdfsalgqlasdflk” (I paraphrase…)

Back up the stairs, put in new batteries (thank goodness we had them), and back to bed with Daisy for another 30 min before we had to get up. The alarm went off, and she hopped down, completely refreshed and happy.

We live to fight another day.

Sleep Tight!
Linds