Pets - They're So Relaxing

If you are a parent, you know how stressful it can be to manage your children, the household, and everything that entails.  When you're finally thinking you might have things under control and the ship is moving along swimmingly, what happens?  Someone decides that it would be a good time to add another pet.  Because we've obviously figured out how to successfully feed and clean up after small humans, so a dumb, furry animal couldn't be much harder, right??? 

You may have already read about our issues with the aquarium of horrors.   In the past we've had successive hamsters, hermit crabs, freshwater fish, and my sweet kitty, Toonces, who lived to be 19 years old (thus outliving his pop-culture name reference).We also currently house two guinea pigs and two dogs, who may or may not scheme to create horrific circumstances that try my sanity.  Those cuddly pets who know when you need a sweet, nonjudgmental, caring friend to stroke?  Yeah, those are not my pets.  These guys put me through the wringer.

Yesterday my 8-month-old dog was doing her usual wind sprints around the house when my younger son encouraged her to jump up on my nicely-made bed to wrestle with him (there are so many things wrong with this, but I'll just move on).  As she's hopping around and prancing all over, he asks "Why does she have redness on her paws?  Ohhhh, she must have gotten into my silly putty!"  What?  Really?  She's been tracking some blood-red goo all over my house?  Yep, sure enough, it's ground into the carpet in a few key places.  She also managed to wear some on her back as a badge of honor for the rest of the day because there was no way it would loosen its grip on her fur.  (By the way, she does not like anyone messing with the pads of her feet, so clean up was super-fun.)

Before we lost our minds and decided to get a puppy, we'd been living a relatively chaos-free life with just one dog for the past 6 months.  And the guinea pigs, but they don't really count so long as you give them some veggies and clean their cage regularly.  They only scream when I walk in the room.  Honest.  Have you ever heard a guinea pig squeal?  Snowfall has some aversion to me so she goes into a full conniption fit when I open the door.  Anyway, our deaf (and dumb) 14-year-old Australian Shepherd had been living the good life as the sole canine.  He thought he had earned a gold-lined walkway to the pearly gates, but now he has to contend with this manic German Shepherd who just wants to get him to play - even if that means she has to surprise tackle his arthritic hips and nip him to make him chase her.  Aww, aren't they cute playing in the backyard?  See how his lips are pulled back and he's frothing?

Just when we thought we'd fixed up the drip system from our last dog (I'm getting to that, bear with me) she has figured out that she likes the taste of PVC.  I saw her running through the yard with a sprinkler head in her mouth, trailing 3 lengths of drip system tubing, looking like a giant furry lobster with its antennae waving in the wind.

She's gotten to 3 of my shoes - from different pairs of course, and is currently working on our leather couches.  Here's my attempt to shame her into better behavior.

I'm sure we are far from the end of it, but I'm hoping to keep the destruction to a minimum. Our last dog, Timber, was the master of ruin.  Unfortunately after he attacked me he could no longer live here anymore.  My kids were more devastated by the fact that he had to go than they were about the fact that I had fatty tissue sticking out of the jagged tooth-shreds in my arm.  Before all of that, though, he worked hard to trash what he could around here.  He ate rose bushes, sago palms, screens, and baseball gloves to name a few items.  He routinely pushed over the trash cans and spread the contents around.  I won't add all of the pictures, just a snapshot of the mayhem he caused.

Didn't want to be outside in the rain

Before it was chewed in half

One of the many times I re-screened the doors

But my most memorable "What the hell just happened here?" was when we came home after spending a full day at an amusement park for my son's birthday.  It had been hot, and we'd left plenty of water and shade coverings for the dogs out back, but Timber apparently decided he'd rather be in the house.  He climbed up onto a hose box, pulled down the window screen, crunched the crap out of our blinds, and tried to get his big fat ass in through our kitchen window - where he would have landed in the sink - if he had been successful.

So here's hoping for some sanity while I wait for the next household tragedy.  It could be lurking right around the chewed-up wall.