Experiments in Life

Whenever we go out of town over night, we take the dogs to a place we lovingly call Puppy Camp. Our first Valentine’s Day after we got married, Ashley and I gave the pups to each other. The first few times we went back to Columbus after that, the dogs came with us; they were puppies and were still relatively small. At this time, Ashley was writing her thesis. As a reward for finishing it, I was going to take her on a trip to the mountains. Well, by mid-July, Ashley had finished her final edits and we turned in the thesis and were ready to go. Obviously, we could not take the dogs with us this time, so we decided that we would have to board them.

Ashley looked around at several boarding facilities in Huntsville, but we finally decided that it was more cost-effective to just board them at the vet’s office. Now, at the time, our vet’s office was a good half-hour drive into town from our home. That seems silly in retrospect, but it was the vet that the dogs were used to from the time they were sick before we got them. So, the morning that we were leaving for the mountains, we loaded the dogs into the car and dropped them off at the vet. On the half-hour drive back to the house, Ashley was simply heart-broken that she was having to leave her babies. Until this point, the dogs had never been away from us at night. She was worried how they would get along without her and how she would get along without them. She was afraid that they would be miserable at the vet with no one to play with or love them. So, I came up with a brilliant idea that has stuck ever since. “Do not worry about the dogs — I am sure that they are going to have a great time at Puppy Camp this weekend,” I said. Amazingly, those few simple words seemed to help her get through the weekend without the dogs. After all, if she had a great time at camp when she was a kid, then the puppies must be having a great time at Puppy Camp!

It has been two and a half years since the concept of Puppy Camp was born and we will use it whenever we talk about boarding the dogs. However, this does make me wonder what we will come up with to get through leaving The Little Monster at daycare or with a babysitter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 10:12 am and is filed under Canine Commandos, Wayback Machine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.