Sleepercise

If an eighteen pound dog curls up on your abdomen to sleep for the entire night, does that count as seven hours of weight lifting or cardio?

Darling Rosie dog has always needed to touch or lay across some part of me (or the husband) during the night.  Mostly it’s a behind up on one person’s leg and a head and front paws on another. 

Or my favorite, when it’s girlie time of month for me – she will sprawl from hip bone to hip bone – head off one end, butt off the other – acting like a hot water bag for my alien ovaries.  She’s a girl dog, apparently she just knows…

But lately, there has been no sharing of the dog weight with the husband, just an18 pound little Doxie curled up in a ball on my belly for the night.  I can fidget and move around all I want and she just stays there, stuck like a piece of Velcro.

I was complaining that my sides hurt from a particularly rough session of yoga the other day – but I bet it’s not the yoga at all!  Because really, eighteen pounds of dead sleeping weight on any part of your body for seven straight hours is bound to use muscles you never have before. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah – you non dog owners would just tell me to move her - and we have.  After a while you just get cold and tired from sitting up all the time to drag her dead weight off you, where she then just crawls right back up before you are settled back in under the covers.  Again – another sleepercise program – midnight sit ups, with a touch of medicine ball like weight lifting – but really, you get a better night’s sleep just leaving her on your being. 

Anyone else own a Dachshund?  There’s pretty much no telling them what to do.  Yes, kind of like a cat – which oftentimes we think she is imitating.

So, does my overnight sleepercize program count?  Can I stop going to yoga? 

Oh and if I add in the vibration from her snoring – does that burn even more calories in the seven hour program I am now participating in?  Talk about a great use of time!!

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** Picture borrowed from dognotebook.com.  Not really possible to take a picture of a dog sleeping on you in the middle of the night unless someone helps – and someone is sound asleep next to me, if I woke him – he definitely would not be up for snapping cute pictures of doggies on bellies in the dead of night.