When we first got Gemelli, he slept in his crate, next to our bed. His bladder still small, he’d wake up every few hours, needing to pee. So I’d carry him down the hall to the kitchen, let him unleash on the wee wee pads we’d laid out in the corner, then carry him back to his crate where he’d promptly pass out.

As he grew, the time between pee excursions extended. Soon, he could hold it all the way from bedtime to six in the morning. On the plus side, that meant I could sleep many more hours interrupted; on the negative, it also meant that his single nighttime pee excursion took place when the sun had already started to come up. So Gem wouldn’t go back to sleep. Instead, he’d cry pitifully and bang the side of the crate until Jess would kick me out of bed, and he and I would head to the living room to half-heartedly play very sleepy games of fetch.

One morning, out of frustration, I came back from his 6:00am pee excursion, and put Gem on our bed, instead of back in his crate. And he rejoiced. He ran a small circle on the covers, licked Jess’ sleeping face a few times to make sure she was alive, and then happily conked out at the foot of the bed.

So a new ritual was born. Each night, Gemelli would sleep in the crate until sunrise or so, then in our bed for the next hour or two.

A few weeks back, however, after we’d dragged him out for a long and particularly stressful day, we let Gem sleep the whole night up with us. Which, in short, was the beginning of the end. He made it back crate-side perhaps twice over the next week, and then has been sleeping with us ever since.

Like in a new relationship, it was initially tough to sleep while sharing a bed. We kicked him onto the floor one night by mistake, then spent the next few nights uncomfortably curled in balls to avoid doing it again. Each time one of us moved, it would set of a chain reaction waking up all three of us.

But, eventually, we got in our groove. Gem has found his primary spots: at the foot of the bed between the two of us, or up at the top of the bed, burrowed in a little cave between our pillows and the headboard.

At 6:30am on the dot every morning, he comes over and starts cleaning my face and hair. Not yet, I tell him. Still time to sleep.

Then, at 7:00am, he comes over and starts chewing on my hands, trying to tug me upright. Still not time to wake up, I say. Thirty more minutes.

And then, at 7:30am, and I mean exactly at 7:30am, he’s back and standing over me, ready to go out. And this time, he means business. If I ignore him for more than a minute or so, he starts to repeatedly punch me in the head until I get up, put both of our jackets on, and take him out.

I resolve each year that I’m going to start waking up earlier, and this year, for the first time in memory, that resolution has stuck for more than a week. If nothing else, Gem’s the best alarm clock I’ve ever owned.