A couple weeks ago, our oldest son asked if Sophie, the dog, could sleep in his room.<\/p>\n
My wife and I were fine with that, of course, but with one proviso. “She can stay there if she wants to,” I said. “But I’m not locking her in your room.”<\/p>\n
“Okay.”<\/p>\n
We\u00a0decided that\u00a0Sophie would go to his room when he went to bed, and when I went to bed, I would check in on her.<\/p>\n
The first night didn’t go so well. As soon as I opened the door, she stood up and trotted out of his room. She’s an old dog, and very set in her ways.<\/p>\n
The next night went a little better. She still came out, but she didn’t seem quite so eager to leave. The third night, I heard soft music playing after\u00a0he went to bed. I poked my head into his room and found him sitting on the floor, with her head in his lap.<\/p>\n
“She likes the music,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Okay. Don’t stay up\u00a0too late, though.”<\/p>\n
When I\u00a0checked on them later, he was fast asleep. Sophie lifted her head to look at me, then put it back down and closed her eyes.<\/p>\n
Since then, she\u00a0has become a regular fixture in his room.<\/p>\n
The other afternoon, a violent\u00a0thunderstorms arrived at the house.\u00a0It was a classic\u00a0end-of-the-world kind of storm – dark skies, booming thunder, and flashing lightning. Sophie\u00a0was frantic. She’s always been scared of thunder, and this one had her wide-eyes and whining.<\/p>\n
“I’ve got this.” My oldest son ran to his room and put on her music. “Sophie,” he called. “Here, girl.”<\/p>\n
She bolted into his room and curled up on her blanket next to his bed.<\/p>\n
“Are you sure?” I asked. “She has a bad habit of peeing when she’s scared.”<\/p>\n
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be fine.”<\/p>\n
He emerged from his room five minutes later. “She’s fast asleep.”<\/p>\n
She was indeed. She\u00a0slept through the storm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s something magical about the relationship between a boy and his dog. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-Gt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}