Picture a Day - Day 257

ka thunk!

Huh zu? Wha? Oh, oops sorry. Fell asleep onto the keyboard again. What was I doing again? Oh right gonna tell you about our first weekend with the little girl.

*yawn* Okay to set the stage it was a Saturday night and on top of having a puppy dropped off we had a put up a kennel run project in front of us. It started out on a high note, being able to jam the box into the car but then took a turn of biblical disaster proportions.

Because we now seem to live in some exotic jungle it thuderstormed and thrashed about the night before and kept sprinkling through most of the day. In this muddy, wet, and about 99.9% humidity atmosphere we drug the purchased kennel kit and in the process of putting it together discovered the thinnest door I've ever seen.

You know when you visit old Victorian homes and your always surprised at just how skinny and short the say closet or bathroom doors are? Cut that in half. That was about how small the kennel door was. There was a very good chance when our puppy is the size of a full grown lab she wouldn't have been able to fit in.

So that kennel was out, and another trip to Menards and hauling another dog kennel was in front of us.
Despondent about the kennel being 6' high but only really fitting a rabbit my husband and I curled up on the couch and played the waiting game, twiddling our thumbs until our little girl showed up. Puppies should make everything better, right?

We were excited to see her, but she wasn't so sure about seeing us. The entire two hour trip down all she managed was a high pitched wail, whining because she just left her siblings behind and was stuck in this little cage.

That little whine was pretty much constant for the first three hours or so we had her. She'd whine if you held her, whine if you put her down, and really whine if you stopped petting her. Thank god for the little ducky:She really wasn't sure how to play with people, shunning the squeaky toy I bought for her a while back (Mr. Fry) and not really sure about the black squirrel. But ducky, with his flapping, his fuzzy wings, and especially his manufacturing tags caught her eye.

Soon the whine became more of a background noise just when something was bothering her or she wasn't getting enough attention (and the same whine when she had to go potty, that was a fun discovery).We have a deck with about 6 stairs before one can get to the backyard. I figured this would be a source of contention for a little while as we'd have to carry her down the stairs so she could run around outside. It always seemed to take puppies at least a week or so to really feel comfortable with going up and down the stairs.

But not our girl. She practiced in our house, with its split level double set of stairs. Braving gravity, she'd plunge her head downward bouncing up and down on the stairs til scoring a secure place on the bottom. Up was a bit more of a challenge, and she's just about long enough to stretch over that incline. There were a few attempts at trying two stairs at once, but she'd rebound and try again.

Soon that was transferred outside and in under a day she races us up and down the stairs, making sure to get right under our feet.There's still a lot of feeling each other out, adjusting to the going out to potty every couple of hours schedule, having a little fuzz ball permanently anchored to your ankles, and not trusting those sharp teeth about as far as you can throw her (which she rather enjoys, especially if you toss her over and rub her tummy).

The big challenges will come this week as we both head back to work and she gets used to being in a kennel all by her lonesome for the day. Crossing our fingers she doesn't have too much trouble with separation anxieties, but judging by the howling we face every time we leave her alone we may have quite an uphill battle in front of us.

My poor husband seems to be getting the biggest brunt of the waking up every couple of hours to go out and potty. She likes me okay but she's obviously madly in love with him, so when it comes time to go out she's whining and clawing on his arms to go out. But they do make an adorable picture when they take little naps on the floor:If I'm a little sleepy, take a little longer to get back to you, or you get e-mail's/comments from me that half way through turn into my admonishing you for daring to eat out of the garbage and get your nose down off the counter please just smile, nod, and give us a few weeks to adjust.

All good preparation for having a baby at some point, but man it sure would be nice to have some canineteriny leave (well it'd be nice to have any other countries canineteriny leave, the US is just horrible). At least until we can get her to sleep for longer than 3 hours.