To Dog

As an unintentional follow up to Melissa’s summer post, I offer you the following as a means of explaining my lack of writing the last two months.

I blame it on the dog.

Our beloved 14 year old blind beagle, Fred, went to the great dog park in the sky last March, and we quickly realized that our family just felt incomplete without a canine companion. So, July came and we went ahead and got ourselves a puppy. She’s a golden retriever, and the girls have named her Korra.

When we picked her up she was soft, warm and squishy, and by the grace of God, didn’t pee or puke in the car on the three hour drive home.  Other than stinking like a pack of Marlboro Lights (the breeders smoked), all was good.

Within the first 24 hours, however, we were reminded that there is a huge difference between caring for a dog, and caring for a puppy.  Older dogs eat, sleep, poop, and play. Puppies are an entirely different animal. Luckily we’ve had children since the last time we did the puppy thing, and puppies and babies aren’t really that different. How, you may ask?

• You might lose some sleep in the beginning.
  Most puppies need to pee in the middle of the night for a few weeks, and there are no puppy diapers to help you along. (ok, they probably do exist, but just sound like a bad idea…) Some dogs master the whole bladder control thing during the first few days, but not mine. After a week of sleeping on the sofa and doing all of the night-time training myself (and me turning into a zombie..), my family has worked out a system – I do the 3am shift , and hubby gets up at 5:30, and then at 7:30 he drops Korra on the head of our 10-year-old and she takes over.

• All of your attention will be on the furry baby.
  It will be hard to do any work that requires attention or concentration (like writing…) during those first few weeks because you need to watch them every second. Every. Single. Second. (Unlike babies, however, you can put them in the crate if you need to step out.) You might think that they just peed outside and they’re fine, but somehow there’s always more in there. We decided to just roll up all the carpets for a while. Easier clean up, because the moment you decide to get a drink, or go get the mail, or whatever, you will return to find a warm puddle. Just learn to look before you walk, and buy a LOT of paper towels.

• You might want to rethink what you wear.
  With babies I knew it wasn’t a good idea to wear earrings that dangled unless I wanted a toddler to rip them out of my ear in a fit of glee. I also gave up on anything that required dry cleaning for obvious reasons. With puppies, the issue is socks. Just don’t bother wearing them unless you are wearing shoes. Urine soaked socks are gross, and if you remove them during the day, the puppy will steal them. We’ve had a 100% increase in unmatched socks in our house.

• Teething affects the whole family.
  Like babies, puppies lose their teeth and get new ones. It sounds cute until you step on something sharp and remove a bloody puppy tooth from the pad of your foot. And clearly, this involves some chewing. We got lucky with the beagle because he was never a big chewer, but he did enjoy burying his bones. As a puppy he just buried them in all of the house plants, but as an adult, he buried them all over the yard. There are probably 500 bones buried under the kids’ tree house. I’m waiting for the day Korra discovers this little jackpot, because she LOVES to chew. Electrical wires, shoes, the hem of your jeans, your toes, the floor molding, Legos, crumbs under the couch, any and all stuffed animals, any kind of rug, and every possible stick, leaf or mulch she can get her mouth on.

• All babies get upset stomachs now and then.
  I won’t go into disgusting details here, but there is a very long list of plants that are toxic to dogs. Like I said, the last one never chewed, so it wasn’t an issue, but I watched Korra gnaw on the leaves of our tomato plant one morning, and then paid for it dearly when she had the equivalent of a diaper blow out all over my kitchen floor at 10pm.

And lastly, all I can say is that the hardest part passes all too quickly, and it’s all so very worth it!