Experiments in Life

It sounds like Jon had an interesting time getting ready with said neurotic puppy basically attached to his leg…and when we say attached to a leg, we literally mean it. If she could physically sit on our foot and wrap her little paws around our leg like some screaming 3-year old throwing a tantrum, she would totally do it! Anyway, let me set the scene for those of you who are not fortunate enough to have a neurotic puppy in your life.

Friday morning, 5:30 am:
Snobbers: Mom’s alarm goes off, she’s not moving fast enough, maybe she needs help. I’ll get right up in her face, breath on her and paw the bed. Maybe that will get her moving. Yep, that worked!

5:35 am:
Snobbers: Mom finally fed us and now I want to go outside, hurry up mom.

5:45 am:
Mom gets tired of waiting to see if they want back in. Goes and gets in the shower.

6:00 am:
Out of the shower and putting on her makeup, no noise from the dogs yet. Is this good or bad?

6:15 am:
Done with makeup. Time to let the dogs in and eat breakfast. During breakfast, watch the news and see massive thunderstorm coming our way. Time to hit madison, 6:50 am. Look down at dog who is already beginning to huddle under my feet that are propped up on the coffee table. Other puppy is completely fine at this point.

6:30 am:
Wake up husband for morning workout. Try not to step on either puppy as I’m entering an extremely dark room since the sun is not up. They tried to help wake up sleeping husband. Not a good idea!

6:35 am:
It starts raining. Of course, the Gutless Wonder decides now is a great time to go outside and look around. Decide to go ahead and take out the other puppy as well. However, said puppy will only go outside if Mom goes too. Apparently, girls always go to the bathroom in herds, no matter the species. Huge pile of leaves blows in through the open door as the dogs are fighting each other to see who can get in first. Crap, now I have a huge pile of leaves in the house. Can’t leave them, otherwise there will be thousands of leaf bits scattered around the house by the time I get home from work. Pick up all 6 million leaves.

6:40 am:
Brush teeth and start to dry hair. Neurotic puppy is now beginning to get warmed up. The panting begins.

6:55 am:
Through with hair, time to get dressed. Hear strange noise as I am debating on what to wear. Suddenly, neurotic puppy appears in bedroom. How did she get past the box? Oh, she moved it out of the way! Smart puppy. Puppy attachment now in place.

7:00 am:
Wow, putting on pants, socks, and shoes is difficult with puppy attachment in place. Must remember to remove it first next time. Meanwhile, other puppy is roaming our semi-finished bedroom eating whatever random wood pieces are on the floor. I hope he gets a splinter. Maybe that will teach him. Oops, apparently not!

7:05 am:
Husband appears for his shower. Neurotic puppy proceeds to run into our bathroom and refuse to come out. In order to get her out, we all must leave the room, I have to grab her, and Jon runs to the bathroom and shuts the door. She is now pawing and scratching at the door. She is determined to get in there.

7:10 am:
Finished dressing and would like to kiss husband good-bye. Oh wait the dog, shut her up in the hall bathroom just so I can get into mine and talk to Jon. Decision is made to dope the dog. Okay, I’ll do it and then leave. Let dog out of bathroom and proceed to kitchen for peanut butter and benadryl.

7:15 am:
Doping this stupid dog is impossible. She is now huddling at the door leading into the garage refusing to take her pill that is wrapped in peanut butter. In the background:
The Gutless Wonder: Ooooh, peanut butter. I smell peanut butter. Gimme some peanut butter mommy! Please, please, please! Peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…mommy, I’ll take whatever you’re ginving to her. PEANUT BUTTER!!! (all the time, he is dancing around trying to be cute so that he can have some stupid peanut butter!)

Meanwhile, trying to get a neurotic dog to take a peanut butter-covered pill is extremely difficult seeing as the pill is now very sticky and she has lots of hair. thus, I pick the pill up off the floor once, pull it out of her face twice, and then somehow manage to get it stuck somewhere out of sight, thinking she has actually swallowed the dang thing.

The Gutless Wonder: Peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…PEANUT BUTTER!!!

Next pill. In the process of prying her jaws open, shoving my finger as far as I can get it into her mouth, then wiping my finger along her tongue in order to get the pill into her mouth, and holding her mouth shut until she swallows, I find the first pill. Is this what kids are like?!

The Gutless Wonder: Peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…PEANUT BUTTER!!!

Repeat process with original pill.

The Gutless Wonder: Peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…peanut butter…PEANUT BUTTER!!!

Gave the other dog some dang peanut butter!

7:20 am:
Dog is now doped but still huddling by the door I need to go out of. Start trying to coax her out. Nope, not gonna work.

At this point, sanity leaves me and I start yelling and trying to reason with the dog….the dog! They don’t understand reasoning, what am I doing.

7:21 am:
I finally lose it and am now yelling at poor neurotic puppy. Suddenly, I hear whistling. Husband is out of the shower and here to save the day! He rounds the corner with hair dripping and a towel around his waist. He must have heard my yelling. Wow, does my voice really carry that far?

Husband goes to the door and very sweetly coaxes her, half drags her out of the way so that I can leave. Other puppy now decides he wants her spot and tries to follow me out. I manage to get the door shut.

7:25 am:
Poor husband is left to fend for himself as I am pulling out into the driveway. A few minutes later, immense guilt sets in because I was yelling at my poor neurotic puppy who cannot help but be who she is, a neurotic puppy. It’s not her fault that she’s this way. How could I have yelled at her. I am going to be a horrible mom. I am unfit to have children if I cannot even handle one rough morning with a neurotic puppy.

7:45 am:
Arrive for work, still feeling guilty. Thought of a way to make it up to her, I’ll give her a big treat and some TLC when I get home. Said puppy will probably be surrounded in a puddle of drool (think Odie). Clean up mess and go on with life.

There are several reasons why having a neurotic dog during a thunderstorm can be bad:

• Getting ready for work with a 50 lb. dog surgically attached to one’s leg is harder than it sounds.
• While sitting down to eat breakfast, said dog proceeded to pant and drool all over and in my shoes that were not yet on my feet.
• It is especially hard to leave Rosie at the house when she looks so darn pitiful.

With the renovations to our room still unfinished, the dog crates are collapsed and under our bed to keep them out of the way. Now, the lack of accessible crates posed a bit of a problem on Tuesday morning when Ashley and I had to return to work. Since our room is a mess and crowded, I did not want to set the crates back up in there, nor did I want to junk up the living room with them. Our solution was to let the dogs run free in the house during the workday.

This was a pretty big milestone in puppy development. We had left the dogs out on their own at night in the past when we had gone out; however, that has always been a much shorter amount of time than a normal workday. Would the Rosie and Dante be able to control themselves for ten hours (7:30 – 5:30) straight? So far, everything has worked out ok. Over the past four days, the dogs have had the run of the house and everything is still intact with no puddles or messes. As a plus, since I normally get home first, I get the traditional excited puppy dance from the two of them when I walk in the door. We will likely continue to leave them out during the day even after I get the room finished since they are being so good.

While killing time on the site, I decided to create a parent category for the two dog categories, Snobbers and The Gutless Wonder. My choice was Canine Commandos. While checking the spelling, I realized just how appropriate my choice of commandos was: A small fighting force specially trained for making quick destructive raids against enemy-held areas. Some days that description seems to fit our dogs exactly.

Deep in the night, a mournful cry is lifted to the heavens. Is it a lonesome coyote, searching for a mate? Or perhaps a solitary wolf, finding the scent of a quickly fleeing rabbit and gearing up for a mighty chase? Or could it be a majestic hound detecting a fox nearby and alerting everyone that the hunt has begun? Who can know what goes on in the mind of a slumbering pup to cause him to lift his mournful cry in the wee hours of the morning…

So, this morning, I decided to put some ice cubes in the water bowl for the dogs. It’s been pretty hot and they had been running around outside for a while. Well, while they were eating, I fixed my own breakfast and sat down to watch the news . As I did so, I kept hearing this kind of dunking sound. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was until I noticed Rosie standing over the water bowl. As I watched in fascinated amazement, Rosie looked at the bowl, spotted an ice cube, and then proceeded to dunk her head into the bowl and grab the ice cube. Then she would happily munch the ice and go after another piece. She was almost done when her luck ran out. As she dunked her face into the bowl, I guess she chose that exact moment to take a breath because she came up snorting and sneezing water everywhere. Then she turned to look at me with water running off her face, and formed a puddle on the kitchen floor. Of course I was laughing hysterically. I’m surprised I didn’t wake Jon up. She just stood their, dripping, and looking at me like “Mama, why are you laughing at me…and why did I get water up my nose?” Needless to say, it was very entertaining. And poor Dante didn’t get any ice. His piggy sister ended up eating it all.

I have never before seen a dog bobbing for ice cubes…but upon telling Jon this story, he hopes to reproduce these events tonight for our evening entertainment. Who knew dogs could be this much fun

You know, there is nothing like cleaning up dog yak first thing in the morning. What a way to start the day! (And if you can’t figure out from the context what yak is referring to, you probably really don’t want to know. Anyone with kids or pets will probably know what I’m talking about )

I guess I should take a moment and explain who Snobbers is to those of you who don’t know. Snobbers is the alias we have assigned to our dog Rosie. It really is an accurate description of her. We chose that name because all she does is sneeze and slobber on everything. Put those two words together and snobbers is what you get. Snobbers is also considered to be a smoofism, but I’ll save that for another post. Anyway, Snobbers has a brother named Dante who will be hence forth dubbed the Gutless Wonder! This name originated when he was just a puppy. He was afraid of everything, and being the good mother that I am, I of course made fun of him and we’ve been calling him that ever since Both of our dogs are australian shepherd mixes and from the same litter. They constantly keep us on our toes (refer to beginning of post!) Hopefully we will have pictures of them in our gallery soon. However, that would mean we would have to actually set up the gallery and download pictures off the camera. At the moment, that is beyond us. Perhaps over the weekend.

I’ll stop boring you with tales of our dear little ones, even though they are the cutest, most sweetest, bestest dogs in the whole world (no, I’m not biased at all ) However, I’m not so sure Jonathan would agree with that. More than likely he’d say they have faces only a mother could love

Toodles