Pet Peeves?

Pet Peeves?

My Pet Peeves are not with pets at all.  They are mostly with the humans that are allegedly supposed to care for their pets…. and somehow fall woefully short of demonstrating common sense when given the opportunity.  I share these real-life stories with you so that I am not the only one who is eating TUMS as if they are lifesavers.

The award for “AYKM:  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” goes to last week’s candidate.  There I am schlepping across the parking lot to get into a building and there is a vehicle parked near an area where the traffic flow is pretty consistent.  I didn’t see a person sitting in a car.  What I DID see was a little yorkie that was actually balancing on the open car window ledge and – as dogs do before they make a leap – he seemed to be sizing-up the distance between where he was standing and the ground.  All I could think is:  If that dog jumps and gets run over in front of me, honestly, I will Throw. Right. Up. Here.  On the sidewalk.  So I called out:  “No-no little dog; go back in the car!”  And then I hear the owner:  “I’m right here.”  He was sitting in the front seat, I just could not see him.  The problem with that scenario is he clearly does not have a dog intuition.  When you can see the dog’s gears turning in his head, plotting his next daring escape from captivity, you just DON’T take risks like that.  You just DON’T.  I called out to the man:  “Sorry.  I didn’t see you sitting there!”  So here I am thinking I tried to do someone a favor so their dog won’t get squashed like a pancake, and I end up feeling guilty for saying anything.  The man thought he was in control.  The dog and I know otherwise.  AYKM  Award.

Maybe it’s because I am mid-life that I feel edgy and want to yell at people.  Or maybe, just maybe, some people really NEED to be yelled at.  This weekend I went to a beautiful outdoor farm market & craft venue in the Finger Lakes.  It is comprised of about 20 sheds with crafters and vendors set up in a charming little village of shops.  When I say “sheds,” what I mean is:  SHEDS.  The ones that were bigger than sheds where you park your lawnmower were really only sheds that were hooked together with a common side door.  They are cute, yet they are small.  Frankly, I almost had my “moment” when this woman walked in with her labradoodle on one leash, and Scottish terrier on the other leash.  Lady, please, there is not enough space for PEOPLE in here, much less dogs.  And of course, instead of being able to shop in peace, I have to listen to people fussing over her dogs.  And whose ego was that feeding?  Further, where were my dogs?  Home napping on the couch, as God intended. 

The woman who took my mental space one step farther to the edge was the one who was walking around with a Newfoundland.  If you are not a dog person, and can’t place what that looks like, just picture a dog that is the size of an two year old black bear cub, and then add a few (50) extra pounds.  One of my dear friends owns a Newfoundland and in order to “fill the dog up” at supper, they add a 10 ounce package of frozen/thawed vegetables.  Gracious.  I can’t eat ten ounces of vegetables in a week.  The dog eats it once a night!  So, I get it, that people don’t want to lock their dogs in their hotel room – it’s part of the nation-wide campaign:  “No Dogs Left-Behind.”  But do you really need to bring the dog into a crowd of people to take up space?!  And let me ask, not that people “matter,” but what about people who are deathly afraid, or even deathly allergic to dogs?  Don’t they have a RIGHT to shop in the outdoors without having their space invaded?  I’m just sayin’ because really you’d have to look long and hard to find someone who loves ALL dogs as much as I do – but I just think there’s a time you need to leave them home.  And let’s talk about kids for a minute….

Note:  "Make it easy FOR YOU"

What about these outdoor fall craft shows …. And the mommies that think they need to bring Cranky Baby in his stroller and push him through the craft tents?  What does that poor kid have to look at:  The buns walking in front of him!  Is that fair to the kid?  NO.  If I had to look at redneck buns in front of me at eye level, I’d be cranky too!  Years ago when I was a teenager, and dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were these paid helpers we called “baby sitters.”  No it wasn’t a television.  It was, egads, an actual person that you paid cold hard cash to sit with your kid for a few hours so that you could get a break from the relentlessness of parenting.  It was a win-win for both child and parent.  But today’s human parent, and today’s doggie parent, oftentimes don’t take that opportunity – instead they just bring about the extension of their own persona so they can get complimented.  After all, it’s all about them anyways.  AYKM.

Lastly, a shout out to teenagers.  AYKM.  Teens can be some of the nicest people.  But then again, they are people so they have a dark side too…. It is an insensitive, make-you-pay for your last interface with them that didn’t go their way.  Case in point:  I pulled in my driveway after work and noticed the duck in the pasture next door was sitting in exactly the same place  he was eight hours ago when I left for work.  I was in my good work clothes and cute shoes but walked over to the edge of the fence nonetheless to assess the duck situation.  He barely opened an eye at me as I spoke to him.  I went into the barn and found the young woman that I had met a week ago when she was screaming her lungs out at her little sister.  On that day, I had told her:  “My experience from teaching high school a while ago was that if you have to scream like that, you already lost the war.”  But I am silly to think that she would like advice from a person who has already seen that movie and learned the hard way.  So there I stood before her again asking what was up with the duck.  She said, “I don’t know, maybe it got stepped on or kicked.”  Lovely.  A broken duck and we plan to just leave it there to freeze over night.  I appealed to her sense of kindness:  “Can we bring it into the barn for the night so at least it can die where it is warmer?”  She said, “Sure.  We can put it in the empty stall.  I will turn off the electric fence and you can go get the duck.”  The irony of that didn’t hit me until I was standing next to horse shit, in the mud, talking to the duck and picking it up … while still in my good work clothes and cute shoes.  The duck made no protest and quite uncharacteristically of ducks, didn’t even poop on my shoes when I picked it up and brought it inside the barn.  But the fact that a teenager who was IN barn clothes working somehow got ME to go out in the mud said a lot.  Something was all ducked-up with that situation.  AYKM times a million.

Lastly:  My most significant pet peeve.  If I see someone driving a car with a dog hanging its head out the window, I know that I have found an escaped village idiot.  Dogs are like kids in some respects:  they will do what feels good without thinking of consequences. Their welfare relies on the people that own them. In this case, the consequences, namely, eye injuries…. could be sustained by any piece of debris that is hitting a dog’s eye at 60 miles per hour.  I really don’t care about that person’s veterinary bills.  I am solely concerned for the dog that will sustain an excruciating injury – have you ever scratched your cornea before?  I accidentally got something in my eye once and the pain of even a slight scratch to the cornea made me put my head on my steering wheel and WAIL out loud three minutes after the drugstore clerk said, “Oh, the pain medicine for that isn’t in stock.  But they have it at our Other Store (eight miles down the road).”  I believe I said something like:  “You’ve got to be kidding me.  In a rural community where getting ‘stuff’ in your eye could be part of regular farm life and you don’t have the pain medication for this….”  That’s all I remember that I can repeat in polite company.  Based on that experience plus a shred of common sense I implore dog owners everywhere to get the dog’s head back in the car where it belongs.  That I have to say this at all makes me again say Are You Kidding Me?!

##############

Where Dogs Go

The small red collar with white dog bones printed on it felt so empty in my hand.  I did not anticipate how easily it made me cry to drop it into the basin of soapy water with the long leash.  It reminded me of everything my heart really wants to forget about last Wednesday.

Writers are supposed to pay attention to what their readers ask for.  My favorite reader remarked that after reading “Losing Connery,” it brought a tear to her eye … and that perhaps I should write happier things.  With a wistful sense of resignation, I told her I could only write what I knew.  And that, after all, is the writer’s #1 rule:  write what you know.  So I reach into my heart and pull out this new sorrow that has been graciously shared by so many dear friends and family.

I wrote a sort of obituary for my beloved Bethany Darlin’ Pearl and posted it to Facebook.  I did write it that same night but had to sit a few hours with the newly rendered grief in my heart to be able to make it sacred, to do her justice.  The two dogs left behind with me, her daughter Madeline Grace Pearl from her first litter and her grandson Valor Prince of Morning Glory Acres, didn’t immediately seem to get it, that she had not been dropped off at the groomers for a bath and cut like I had so many times before.  I returned from the veterinary office with the collar and leash clutched in my trembling hand.  My heart felt like one big bruise and I was holding emotions that I could only “sit with” to be able to let them ripen so I could understand them.  My soul was sitting shiva for my dog.

The facebook post said:

Tonight I said thank you and goodbye to my precious Bethany Darlin’ Pearl who was such a great dog.  So many of us have the gift of one of her puppies in our lives.  She was truly a beautiful soul.  She came from Arkansas and was the first puppy I raised from 8 weeks.  So many great memories…. She had health issues at the end … I miss her already.  I hope I did good by her all these 13 years …. The house isn’t the same without her following me from room to room.  May her legacy live on in her puppies and grand pups.

So many, many people weighed in to express condolences.  My appreciation for those comments is deep.  At the time of this loss, it reminded me of the question someone once raised at an adult Bible study about where dogs go to when they die.  I was surprised at the calloused presumption behind the question and now I think I can tell them a real answer.  My initial response amidst a grief so great would be that most dogs go where most humans have not earned a right to enter either by faith, works, or even grace ...  but I will call on a greater charity and answer nicely.

I am not a philosopher.  I have NO idea how I passed Philosophy 101 because the professor, having taught the class a hundred million times to those obliged by pre-requisite standards to take it, had perfected the art of droning.  No, I do not reference robotic flight.  I mean the Original kind of droning, the kind that puts listeners into a stupor without joy.  I believe I got a B- or a C in that class.  He was boring.  The book was boring.  The class was boring.  If there were a fee to be charged students relative to the Boredom Scale, it would have been quite the sum. 

As an adult 30 years later, I realize that the gravest of injustices was done to the gift of Philosophy in that very class.  Philosophy teaches you how to think about life and its bigger questions.  It also teaches you how other people think about the same.  And hopefully in the process you are able to sort out the difference between bull crap and rational processing of ideas.  That in itself is a critical life skill.  The word philosophy means “love of wisdom.”  Anyone who does not love wisdom is, by implicit definition, a fool.  The bible echoes that sentiment many times in the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures.  I am sure other religious traditions feel the same about the pre-eminence of wisdom and the result when people spurn it.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest Catholic philosopher ever, was practically leagues-deep in the wisdom that comes from study, pondering and a life of deep prayer.  I want to share, in my kindergarten level version of Aquinas’ thought, what I told the Bible study people about what we could surmise about where dogs go.  I turn to his writings on The Soul where he says that since a soul is the spirit of life in a thing, that everything that lives has “soul” in some sense.  He divided the kingdoms into:  plant souls, animal souls, and people souls.

I further posit that anything lovely, beautiful, and good shares in those qualities because God in His Mercy extended them to that thing or creature.  Therefore, if there are roses in heaven, they will be the most beautiful, fragrant, amazing roses ever – beyond the imagination of the human, and honed to perfection by His Majesty.  If there are animals in heaven, they have the disposition of the first animals before The Fall of creation … they are peaceful, joyful, and reflect no evil or negligence that their counterparts on earth may have suffered at the hands of mankind.  (This is also my hope to greet two of my dogs in Glory who will then be perfectly “house trained,” unlike their life on earth with me.)

So how do I give hard data that this actually happens?  How is it that this is not just pious, dog-loving rambling pouring out of the dreams of my heart?  This is how:  if what I believe about the destiny of people has been proven over time through the returns of both saints and sinners, then what I believe about dogs must be true by extension.  I can tell of the return of Jesus after death, or Catholic saints but those stories have been told already by many, and perhaps better regaled than I could.  I can tell the story from within my own family: 

A week before my grandmother died, she was sleeping in bed and woke up in the night.  She poked my grandfather, “Staszek, look.   Babcia (her mother, my great-grandmother) is standing at the foot of the bed.”  My grandfather did not see her and told her to go back to sleep.  A week later, my grandmother rose from bed in the middle of the night and tried to go down the hallway to get a glass of water.  She collapsed in the hallway and passed away. 

The Polish people have both legends and stories of those who have come back to educate, warn, or make a way for someone.  These things I believe without effort because it is in my bones – not just my culture – to do so.  Yet it has also been my experience that dogs sometimes linger after their bodies give way.

My first dog that I adopted shortly after I graduated from college lived about 20 years.  She was a part of everything that was great in my life – my first job out of college was in youth ministry and she accompanied me on camping trips with the kids.  When I taught high school, I brought her to the lock-in to hang out with the kids also.  I promised her that I would soon get out of renting apartments and move into a house with her.  When I moved to the Bridgeport house, I brought her with me, but her age and her health were against us.  Within a few short years, I took her to the final veterinary visit because of her cancer, yet I was unable to bring her home to be laid to rest until I got a hole dug at the house.  That meant her body was at the clinic for 4 days.  As I drove home without her, I sensed her with me – everywhere – walking on the grass outside, lingering in the kitchen, just being nearby somehow.  The following Saturday, I retrieved her body, gave her a proper burial and returned to my routine.  I could no longer sense her around.  Her tired frame was laid to rest, and that is when her soul was free to go further.

Over two years ago, I laid to rest my lab mix Timbyr.  I have no unusual stories to tell about that. I awoke that morning to find she had a stroke and I knew what the right, but always difficult, next-step for me the human, was.  I told her as she passed who to look for, and to expect macaroni and cheese.  (Hey, your idea of perfect heaven doesn’t have to be the same as hers!)  Last Wednesday, when my Bethany Pearl was passing, I had told her to go to Timbyr.  There was no feeling of her lingering at the clinic that afternoon.  The vet didn’t need to tell me when she was gone, I knew first because my hand was on her and I felt her soul dissipate from her body.  She is good now.  But I am not.

As the days pass, the other two dogs stick with me loyally, and I am aware that I am not worthy of this dedication.  Also, I am not the most pleasant of company since I sometimes struck with the grief again and can’t pull back from crying.  My friends think I am great with dogs.  But that is not entirely true.  I love my dogs fiercely, but I do not always put them first.  I am not always aware of their needs if I am too focused on other more demanding – or distracting - things.  More than once, Madeline has flipped an empty dog dish down the cellar stairs to call attention to an important thing I forgot to do.  My heart is heavy for the ways I wish I could give to them with the zeal and dedication that they give to me.  I am a flawed human being, and while I chose each of them initially to be with me on this part of my journey, I am ever grateful for their continued choosing to give love, joy and fellowship to me so freely.  Only a good, very good, God could have made dogs for the likes of mankind.  And it stands to reason if we, who behave at times with such less dignity and grace than them, are destined for His eternal company, then so too must they be destined.

You can, of course, choose to disagree with me.  But you will be wrong.  And some day, I’ve got at least five dogs who are going to prove that to you.  As for me, perhaps they will share their mac & cheese with me.

##################

 

Momentary Joy

I feel like I am being punished.  Sometimes.  Punished, not by God (who I am told has a particular liking for me), but by my circumstances of life that are beyond my control.  Last year I had a moment of enlightenment where I realized what it means when they say, “Into every life a little rain must fall.”  It seemed that with every experience that I hoped would be at least a moment of pure and lasting joy, something less-than-stellar was happening at the same time.  Initially I resented the intrusion on my moment of happiness.  Then I wondered if I got it backwards – maybe it was really a moment of joy that was happening in the middle of a life that is, unfortunately, periodically challenging for all of us. 

Anyone who knows me knows that raising puppies has brought me the greatest joy.  It is an immense amount of work, but I am confident that I am raising awesome family dogs and bringing so much happiness to many people.  Last night I held Mariette Joy in my hands – she is barely over 4 pounds – and she smiled and blinked at me.  It was a golden moment.  I watched Bandit and Gordie grab a small white towel that had been on the floor and tug, tumble, and bunch it up.  Sebastian was pestering his doggy grammie Bethany Pearl by head-butting her as she situated herself calmly on the floor to watch all the antics.  I think even Grammies of dogs have gained the perspective that Mommies do not have.  Namely, you don’t have to correct everything, sometimes you can just watch as things sort themselves out.

Having the puppies means eventually “not-having” them.  Which, even when you keep one, it grows up and is a different kind of experience than 5-week-old doggy babies are.  A forgetful friend keeps asking me, “Now when can they go to their new homes?”  And I keep replying: “thanks for asking that painful question.”  After living through the vigilant state of the first four weeks, the joys of weeks 5-8 are a reward indeed.  The last four weeks before they go to new homes are lots of fun.  Well, yes, and lots of poo and potty, too.

 

“When you’re raising dogs, that’s ALL you’re doing is raising dogs,” I once said.  I reference the amount of attention and care I pay toward keeping them warm, well fed, and growing.  I weigh them twice a day.  I feed their mother 4 times a day.  If you do the math, that includes a 4 a.m. or thereabouts feeding.  The first week I take off from work because normal human sleep is just not possible. 

But this litter experience was different.  First of all, I was rewarded by God with GOOD BABIES.  I mean it.  This litter is quieter at night and sweeter during the day than I ever could have dreamed.  That is a reward, because sometimes it might not have been easy…. Not that I remember any other thing.  Here’s the counter-point:  all of the Other Things that kept happening relentlessly through these past five weeks are noteworthy.  In fact, they seemed at times to be the short road to the insane asylum.

Ø  A week before they were due to be whelped (born), my furnace began to make this incredible noise like a monster in the basement.  I knew to jump on that immediately because I would in short order be SLEEPING in the basement on the other side of the wall from the monster soon enough.  I had one guy come and quote me $770 for the new part.  He charged me $150 for a two minute diagnosis.  I asked him, “Are you going to do a cleaning today?  He said, Nah, I’ll do it when I come back with the part.”  Reeling from sticker-shock, I did not call him back to do that.  I had another guy come and give me a re-purposed part for $40 plus labor charge.  THAT is the guy I will call back to do the cleaning and any other maintenance in the future.  AND I will give referrals to him as well.  I like helping nice people move their business forward.

Ø  I’m sarcastically lifting my glass to toast the end of online dating.  I’m not ending it because of success, mind you.  I’m ending because I didn’t go online for a few months to see that they had locked me into a monthly renewal fee and just kept pulling it out of a rarely-used checkbook.  You find that out when the bank sends you a letter telling you that a check bounced but they put it through for you anyways.  I had authorized a charge for one period of dating service access (which gained me a few friends and no dates).  The company had a revolving clause.  So I had to actually “fight” the online dating people to give back money for a service I had not USED in months.  THEN they actually wanted to know if I was satisfied with their customer service?!  It was a charitable act on my part that I did NOT fill out the survey.

Ø  Six months ago, I stepped on something.  I didn’t want to deal with it.  I thought it was a splinter and I hoped it would go away.  Six months ago was wintertime.  I didn’t have the slightest desire to be pulling a pained foot in and out of a winter boot that wasn’t pulling on easy as it was by design.  I do not know why I thought it would be more painful to remove the thing than to keep walking on it and getting that more-than-occasional pinching sensation. Sometimes I would look at my foot – which required the flexibility of a circus contortionist to get it bent up to my other knee – and choose again to do nothing.  Week one after the new dogs were on board all of a sudden I had a window of time to sit at my kitchen table with:  my reading glasses, a magnifying glass, a flashlight for increased, increased, increased visibility, and a sterilized needle.  I could not move the thing embedded in the pad of my foot.  Finally, I broke down and went to a podiatrist who removed …. a teeny, tiny WIRE from my foot.  It was thinner than a wire from a Brillo pad or staple and heaven only knows where I stepped on it … or why I could walk on it for six months.

Ø  His name was Rustle.  He was a snake that decided he would hang out near my back doorway just to freak me out any time he could.  And, no, he wasn’t a gardener snake. I don’t know what he did for a living; I didn’t ask.  I do know he was a PITA snake.  (PITA= Pain in the you-get-the-idea).  Saturday morning, Rustle met Mr. Shovel in the backyard as I channeled all my rage, frustration, and disgust into his core.  I told him twice not to hang around near where my dogs would be.  I meant it.

Ø  Laundry.  Man, is there ever laundry when you are raising pups.  The first two weeks all the old towels your friends and your mother gave you come into play…  that, and when the mother dog jumps on your bed and hurls her breakfast on the comforter, you now have more laundry.

Ø  The rains from Spain did NOT stay mainly on the plain. In the last decade, the springtime in Central New York has become increasingly rainy – to a fault. The first deluge during this litter, I stood at the doorway to the back yard and watched the water pooling around the drain.  It should not have been pooling.  It needed to be swirling.  Pooling, if left long enough, becomes flowing-towards … the back door.  I waited for a break in the rain and walked out there to see an easy fix: remove grass clippings so that the water would drain away.  It did.  Ahhh.

Ø  The strange types of ground cover, three exactly, that began to spread around the perimeter of my house all of a sudden went wild.  The rains did nothing for the hanging pot of petunias, but the stupid ground cover was giving critters like Rustle and Mini Mouse places to hang out.  This is unacceptable.  Finally, after work yesterday, I had a brief window of opportunity to weed-whack so that my house no longer appeared ram shackled. 

Ø  All of a sudden my perfectly good deck has two boards that have unacceptable “give” in them.  That will be next on the fix-it list.

Ø  Then one of my friends told me she "has" six months.  Yeah, that kind of six months. 

If you think about the concept of “emotional load,” and read these things all at once, you understand why it is not just people in 12-step programs have to live ONE DAY AT A TIME.  If you manage what you have immediately in front of you, you survive it.  If you absorb it all simultaneously, you don’t.  I am now thinking that the bad stuff doesn’t happen because the good stuff is present.  The good stuff happens so that you have some inner joy, albeit momentary, to survive the bad stuff that would have happened anyways. 

Will I raise puppies again?  I sure hope so.  I wouldn’t trade those kisses at 4 am for anything in the world!

#########

*Subsequent litter, perhaps in 4 years?  I need to scout a new female for the job in a year or so.

Losing Connery

Losing Connery

I am an absolute humiliation to teenagers when we go to the movies.  I warned my two buddies in advance:  “I am going to cry.”  I brought a little old lady packet of Kleenex so I was ready; but I knew I was going to cry because the movie is about dogs.  Particularly, dogs dying.  Oh, the movie isn’t billed that way.  They make it seem like it is going to be a fun, reincarnation theme of how dogs are dedicated and loyal, and keep helping us even when we think we’ve lost them to crossing the proverbial Rainbow Bridge.  Yes the dog kept his promise to care for “his human.”  And yes there is pathos and action and conflict and love in the movie.  The guy on the radio who gives you the heads-up on the movies that are family-friendly even gave it 3 stars (out of 4, I think).  And as I sat there coping with the second dog death, I mean reincarnation, I had that painful pressure in my lungs that you get from holding back Outright Sobbing and tears streaming down my face, I thought to myself:  What IDIOT thought this was a good movie for small children?!

Having a conversation about “reincarnation and who believes in it and who does not and why” after the movie does not justify the family tension and dysfunctional relationships they drag you through to get there.  This could have been a LifeTime movie, only the man was not the bad guy in this movie, and nobody gets killed by a vengeful ex-wife.  But it was a tribute to the dog, that’s for sure.  If I was a dog, I’m not sure I’d keep running back to the same family drama.

And that leads me to the other side of dogs.  I don’t talk about this on Facebook, so if you are a loyal reader (JB and JGS) and you’ve gotten this far, you may know what is coming.  I want to talk about the hardest part of dog breeding.

In the dog-breeding zone, I have come to wrap my entire arms and soul around the phrase, “out-of-the-woods.”  When you are birthing puppies at home – whether it’s your first litter or fifth – you are always waiting for the day when you yourself start breathing differently and you look at them and think to yourself:  “we are out of the woods now.  They will all make it.”  I long for that day, because the first few hours, days, and weeks of the new puppy’s life is all so tentative.  For the first week, the thought of leaving my home even for an hour makes me slightly nauseous.  I have those weird feelings of, “if I get in an accident and can’t make it home, who will care for my babies?  Who knows them better than I do?  Who knows what they need besides me and their dog-Momma?”  That is not the description of being out of the woods yet, is it?  It is the feeling some human mothers have when they are separated from their babies in the early stages of their relationship.  If a woman did not feel this, I would have other questions to ask.

So this last litter, having assisted Madeline Grace with birthing five quite solid pups, I thought we might be good and not have a lot to worry about.  She birthed on Thursday, and I knew that if we could keep the whelping room toasty for them, and she kept nursing them, most likely things would go well.  But in the back of my mind, I was still aware of the legendary 2-day window:  on Saturday afternoon, I noticed S. Connery moving away from the litter to the corner instead of towards them. I thought he was just confused.  I picked him up and even though the area was about 77 degrees, he felt clammy.

 

A puppy’s natural temperature regulation system is not that great the first week so you really have to keep the area where they are being housed up to the high 70’s.  I was relentlessly monitoring the heating pad, the heating disk, and the portable space heater.  My gosh, it was warm … to Me, who weighs scores more pounds than they do.  Let me tell you quite frankly, this heat-vigilance period is one of the tougher factors about raising puppies.  I sleep on a futon in the room adjacent to them so I can hear every squeak and check them every few hours.  I do not begrudge them the care; I’m just saying again, “When you’re raising dogs, that’s ALL you’re doing is raising dogs.”  They have 100% of my attention.

So at that point I’m holding S. Connery and talking to him and trying to buff him dry with a towel.  I'm wishing his black coat and adorable tan front "boots" would be tucked happily under his mother as I’m holding him near the heater to see if that helps – near, but not too near.  Everything is an exact science.  Madeline is looking at him differently.  I try to read her and pretend that I can’t hear her saying:  “Good luck with that one.”  I promise her I am going to get him warm.  I tuck him under her for a meal and a nap and run out the door to church and to grab Chinese take-out for me.  (I haven’t had a balanced meal or a vegetable in days.)  I am counting on Mother Nature to kick in and for all to be well with our little guy. 

I returned home and I was seeing the same thing with him:  not quite behaving like part of the litter.  Madeline seems to have an emotional wall up.  Something in my brain kicks into gear and I realize he is fading out, albeit slowly.  She had come to terms with it, but I had not.  I call my friend who owns the daddy dog of this litter to tell her and get some input.

“Put him in your bra.  You can save him.”  I don’t know if I was asking her or just remarking, but I responded:  “He’s pooing.”  She replied:  “Good.  Put him in your shirt.”  I wrapped him in a paper towel and tucked him between the mountains.  She walked me through the process of getting a bit of Karo syrup on my fingertip and giving it to him so he would get a boost.  Then, the dreaded words:  “you’re going to have to hand feed him.”  The one thing I stink at.  I believe I uttered the profanity that almost sounds like “ship.”  So with one hand I’m measuring dry puppy formula and mixing it with warm water; with the other hand I’m holding him in place in my shirt.  Periodically, I remove the paper towel he is half-swaddled in and change it.  I talk to him.  I tell him I love him and I need him to make it.  I tell him someone wants him to make their life better.  I tell him how hard I’m trying to do this right, and please don’t inhale the milk.  I am wondering why a country with so many bleeping engineers can’t make a decent hand feeding instrument for puppies – why the little baby bottles that dispense it only with a tight squeeze, or the eye droppers that splash too much in their baby faces make me, an adult woman, want to break down and cry.  The pressure in my head is enormous.  I am regretting the nap I did not take that day because in no way do I feel ready for this endurance exercise. 

I think for a minute of the first litter in my home over seven years ago – this puppy’s grammie dog had a litter of eight and two of them were only four and four-point-five ounces.  They were half the normal weight they should have been.  Comparably, this puppy was nine ounces and had a good start.  I had sat at the same kitchen table and grit my teeth at hand feeding and reviving the other two twice.  They finally passed and I let them go.  It was different, and yet the same, all at once.  Connery had a fighting chance I thought.

The bag of Chinese take-out sat on the counter un-opened for a couple of hours.  My mentor next advised me to get some special nutritional gel for puppies that helps them perk-up.  I sent one of my good friends out to Petco and promised him he could eat Chinese with me when he gets back.  (It would also be stone cold by then… 8 feet away from me on the counter and my brain screaming at how hungry I am, and I am choosing that discomfort so that I can focus on saving this baby.)  He returned with the product, I put a little on my finger tip and gave it to the puppy and try to hand-feed him again.  We began to eat Chinese food.  I became aware of my friend not looking at me while he was eating.  I remarked “I realize it’s weird to eat dinner with a woman who has a dog stuffed down her shirt.”  He smiled politely and continued to eat.  He could see the stress on my face, and left with some sense of having helped me.

I spoke again with my mentor.  She advised me that I would have to feed this little guy every two hours into the night and probably should consider taking him to work on Monday.  My brain began to reel.  I couldn’t imagine how I could try to sleep for a block of time and wake up to try to hand feed him again with this tremendous stress in my head.  I closed my eyes for a moment, I was aware that he was warm – no longer clammy.  I had succeeded in warming him.  He was calm.  I looked down at him with his little chin tucked down so quietly.

He had passed without a whisper.  I thought if I started to cry I would never stop.  So I just never started.  He had given me a gift – he had let me warm him.  He had passed quietly without terror or drama.  Only he and God and Mother Nature knew if just perhaps he had something more serious wrong with him that sent him on this unwanted path.  But for a while, he was loved and he was mine and that was enough.

##############

The Bee Gees and Me

The Bee Gees and Me

Seriously, all I think about the first 48 hours of caring for puppies is the song from the Bee Gee’s, “Stayin’ Alive, Staying Alive…”  Everything I’ve read and lived in the world of dog breeding emphasizes how the first week is absolutely critical to the foundation of healthy dogs.

Our first pup in this litter, Sebastian Cabot, I named him due to his black overcoat and white ruffle down the front, had an important role in helping his brothers and sisters being born.  Namely, nursing from his Momma.  Scientifically, that action on his part stimulates contractions for her to continue birthing the rest.  If it wasn’t that way, she’d just hunker down with him and nap.  And that ain’t the time for napping, let me tell you.

In my last entry which actually was written on Friday April 26, the day after the whelping, when I had two brain cells left, I explained how Artemus Gordon came at 2:05 pm.  The next boy, Sean Connery came around 3:30 pm.  Remember his outfit in the movie about King Arthur, the shiny silver boots?  My Connery has actually tannish-markings on his front paws.  I found out the next day when the black dogs all had dried off from birth (yes I did towel dry them Day One, but for them to fully dry took Madeline’s attention), that three of the boys have nice tan markings that I couldn’t see when the black color was wet and shiny at birth.  They are going to be handsome dogs.

My 4:30 boy came in with a cute pink nose.  His name is Bandit.  I fully expect him to steal someone’s heart pretty quickly.  Our final pup entered the scene around 5:30 pm, Mariette Joy.  It was the only time I ever really noticed Madeline Grace gobble an entire placenta.  It was a sight that made me feel like I got punched in the stomach, but I got over it.  Earlier in the day I actually grabbed a placenta off the lawn to get it out of her view.  While dogs, for health reasons, tend to eat them, also for health reasons, they should not eat ALL of them.  To quote St. Thomas Aquinas, “All good things in moderation.”  If the dogs eat too many of them, I will just say that like an encyclopedia salesman who thinks you are an easy sell, you WILL be seeing them again. 

So inside the world of puppy raising the next phase involves food, temperature, cleanliness and complete freedom from any other important responsibilities on my part.  As I said to a co-worker once, “When you’re raising puppies, that’s ALL your doing is raising puppies.”  I believe that this week I have already lost three pounds from running up and down the stairs and back and forth across the lawn.  I sleep in the finished basement with the dogs – it is quiet and den-like, but the futon is not a study in comfortable sleeping…. Especially the pipe that tends to run afoul with my spine. 

Madeline’s food intake has tripled, which means I have to feed her more frequently.  She needs protein, and her body needs to be able to regulate its use of calcium in producing milk for them.  I have to keep an eye on her that all of her systems are working properly.  Then, the temperature of the pups for the first week or two needs to be like, oh, BERMUDA.  Because the little space heaters are not a safe, full time solution, I only use them when I am home to babysit the process; otherwise, I turn the house heat up. Don’t ask how high.  Just think:  short sleeve shirts and flip flops.  In a couple of weeks, when their little bodies’ engines can regulate their own temperature efficiently, I won’t have to worry so much about a few more degrees.  Its ironic how my two big “basement interests” compete for temperature:  the puppies need to be toasty but in the next section of the basement, the wine needs to be stable and cool.  I worry less about the wine than I do my little guys though.

In case you were wondering:  Puppies’ cries are not generic.  When Madeline hops out of the kennel to get a drink – more often than not, I kneel in to bring her a drink – if they are not in a deep sleep they are CRANKY for her leaving them.  Even though they are yet without sight, they know her feel and her warmth and that their lives depend on her presence.  Just recently, little Connery was making his ornery wailing as his body produced one of its first Big Jobs.  He needed a bit of cleaning in the process so I took a paper towel and gently assisted him.  On the other end of business, If they are hungry, they have a particular noise they make to her.  And if they are chilly they whimper…. Trust me when I say, I do my best to prevent that from happening even momentarily.  My friend gave me an incredible disc that you heat in a microwave and it holds and evenly disperses warmth for hours on end.  This will be my god-send when I go back to work.  All of these details of care I have accumulated by reading, by consulting with other breeders, and by journaling my process with each litter so it is less of a shock to my system the next time I need to use it. It’s not exactly like riding a bike – you do need to refresh your memory on the particulars in order to be prepared.

I will honestly say:  This enterprise is not easy and it is not for the faint-hearted.  Things can go awry and get both financially and emotionally costly.  When I talk to potential buyers and they trigger something in me that makes me suspect they are going to re-sell my baby to make a profit (“Puppy Brokers”) or they are nit-wits that won’t take proper care to give the dog a happy, healthy life, it really jacks my blood pressure up. 

I had a woman call me about one of my boys in a previous litter.  I advised her that because his tail was tipped with white like a paintbrush I elected not to doc it.  It was so beautiful.  Consequently, he would have a full-length dog tail instead of an official cocker spaniel sporting look.  He was six weeks old at the time.  She said, and I quote, “I don’t want a dog WITH A TAIL.  Can you get rid of it?”   It would have been excruciatingly painful for him.  Her lack of insight was a level of ignorance that was inexcusably stupid.  Wanna know what I got rid of?  Her business as a potential buyer.  I said, “No.  I can’t doc the tail at this stage.  It would hurt him immensely.”  She said, “well, then I guess I will take Monte Carlo.”  (one of my other pups)  I replied:  “No actually he is not available.  So I guess I can’t help you.  Have a nice day.”  I turfed her.

Another guy called me from a nearby city.  He said, “yeah, I’ve got five kids so I guess I should probably get a dog.”  HUH?!  Since when is having a full house of kids the reason by which you choose to add a dog to your chaos?  I asked if he had looked at other dogs.  He listed off a variety of breeds that were so diverse it made no sense:  terriers (toy breed), spaniels (hunting breed), labs (sporting breed), you get the idea.  I said to him:  “What’s the age range of your kids?”  He had a hard time conjuring up believable figures for me.  I replied:  “I’m thinking that what you need is a golden retriever.  They are much better dogs with big families and active kids.  He got defensive and said he had to call me back.  I called him back a few minutes later and when he finally answered, he snapped and said:  “I told you I’d call YOU tomorrow!”  No need.  Jerk.  At that point you can safely surmise he was on the other line with the person he was trying to sell one of MY pups to as a broker.  He knew he was not securing the sale from either direction and thus the frustration.   

I remember the day Tiffany called me from Puppy Paradise.  That’s what it said on caller ID.  I asked her what that was.  She said, “We HELP YOU to find good homes for your puppies by matching the perfect buyer to your puppy.”  Guess what?  No need.  I told her straight-out:  “I don’t fly or ship puppies.  I want to meet the potential buyers face-to-face.  I want them to see that I am NOT a puppy mill, but a hobby breeder.”  I want to decide if the particular interested person is the right fit for my puppy that I put so much work and love into.  I will settle for no less.  Every ad I place going forward says:  “No Puppy Brokers, please.” 

Are these episodes with people reason to not get into dog breeding?  Not really, because any business has its quirky people and scheisters.   And every breeder I know will tell you that you don’t do it for the money because if you actually factored in the cost of the TIME you spend in addition to supplies and vetting etc., you don’t break even.  We don’t price our dogs to make a big profit margin.  We price them so that the average family that deserves a healthy, quality dog can afford one.  We have our buyers in mind as much as the best interest of our dogs when we decide who to accept as a potential customer.  I will say that given the amount of energy I put into it, and my particular sense of “partnering with God” in the process of birth and nurturing, I also believe that each of my dogs has a ministry. 

The ministry of each dog is different.  Each disposition has been created by God to help someone and bring joy to them in a way to which they can relate.  Remember the dog with the tail?  Guess who he lives with now?  (Me.)  And even though I have, by all sane estimations, “enough” dogs just by owning his mother and grandmother dogs, he completes the package.  He is full of joy and fun in a way that they are not.  Each dog brings something new to the table. 

And so as I hover over the little brood of five puppies, I wonder whose life they will fulfill.  I wonder what their gift is and how they will make the world a better place.  Sometimes I think dogs have a better shot of accomplishing that then we people.  But I’m biased:  I am in love.

###########################

The Fun Begins at 12:15

The Fun Begins at 12:15

Sequel to the Sock in My Left Pocket

I am now on Dog Time.  Yesterday seems like it is a million miles away.  Today is for napping and eating and getting my head together (good luck to me) and going to the dump…. Every dog in this house is napping right now.  Well, except for the one that just squeaked, but maybe he is napping while squeaking.  The smartest two things I did this week were:  (1) I bought a nanny cam so I can actually see the Puppy Room from anywhere else in the house besides standing right there.  This is a huge advantage.  I can now go up to the kitchen table and eat without wondering what is going on down there and who is squeaking and why.  If you want to understand a portion of this maternal anxiety for my puppies, download a You Tube of the episode of I Love Lucy where their son Little Ricky is a baby in the crib and Lucy hovers over the crib to make sure he is still breathing.  Finally, she can’t stand it and she pinches him.  That’s the maternal psychosis that starts to take over if you are not careful, or supported by people who can say, “Let me be your helicopter; you need to drive out somewhere and get a cheeseburger.”  Which leads me to the second smartest thing (I believe) that I did this week.

In my last entry you remember me talking about watching the sunrise with the dog who just couldn’t seem to let her puppies get born.  She was panting and walking and doing all the other routine, earthly things dogs do to cooperate with whelping.  Perhaps she was making progress internally, but externally, I was starting to wear around the edges of sanity.  She was at least one, maybe two, days beyond her due date.  I actually put a lawn chair on the grass at 6:45 am and sat there in my fleece-lined coat looking at the morning MOON.  Madeline Grace ambled over to me and put two paws up on my knees.  This, too, was more than a friendly gesture.  It would help the pups move down into position for their Journey.  She did this when she was still talking to me.  At present, 24+ hours later, she has not really forgiven me.  In the haze of the late morning I decided to ask the question WWTVD?  “What would the Vet Do?” 

My experience has been that if you panic and run to the vet, you end up with a caesarean section.  I was trying to avoid that.  I KNOW that Madeline is physically capable of birthing a litter of puppies without intervention because she did it the first time she was bred.  It was the second time she did not … because she had only one pup and he was a hefty 10 ounce guy who didn’t want to let go of the grapevine and jump into the lake of life.  So the vet had to go in and get him via c-section… four days after his due date.  He made it, and grew up to be a spunky little rascal now in a great home with a little boy who loves him. 

In this case, I just washed my hands and put two fingers in the back door to see if anyone was stuck in the birth canal.  And like most non-veterinarians or brand new ones, I said, “I don’t know what the heck I’m feeling.”  Needless to say, Madeline was non-plussed by this intrusion.  I put her in her kennel so we could just continue waiting until I had a better idea, grabbed a can of spray paint and went and painted my milkcan that my mailbox sticks out of.  I painted it red, mostly because I’m tired of the plow hitting it in the winter.  Fifteen minutes later, I went in to check on Madeline and there she was cleaning up her first born puppy.  12:15 pm, the fun had begun.

Text exchange between my friend who owns the litter’s daddy continued.  She said, “I start to panic if a second one isn’t born within 40 minutes.”  I remembered the first litter I attended where I waited ten hours for the second one to come and that required a shot of oxytocin by the vet.  About five minutes before 2pm, I picked up the phone to at least talk to the veterinary technician.  In the middle of me explaining progress or lack thereof and her talking over her shoulder to a nearby vet in the office, Madeline pushed the door to go outside – I let her onto the grass and as she spun in smaller and smaller circles, I saw the tip of legs begin to protrude.  I went to her and eased him out.  Whopping boy #2 whom I named Artemus Gordon because although he was an important character, he always seemed to follow James West on the show The Wild, Wild West. 

From this point we had a 3:30 pm and 4:30 pm delivery of boys, boys, boys.  A vague idea of a house full of boy puppies crossed my mental grid.  I’m going to have my hands full when these guys reach 8 weeks.  At this point, my Puppy Socialization Specialist came home from her day at high school.  She visited with me over the back fence for a while and then went home for a bite to eat.  She came back around 5:30 pm, and again Madeline wanted to go to the back yard, and birthed our beautiful girl Mariette Joy.  Our final birth count being five puppies, my attention now shifts to, as the song said, “Stayin’ Alive, stayin’ alive….”

#################

The Sock in My Left Pocket

I’m drinking my coffee left-handed this morning.  The dog in labor is making small circles in the living room alternately with sitting at the kitchen table at my knee panting her brains out.  The waiting is not easy when it gets to this point.  At 4:30 am I was standing outside watching her sit and stare up at the morning stars, again, panting.  After two days of NOT panting like this, I recognize this as progress.  My mantra all along has been, “We sell no wine before its time.”  But the reality is, my heart has been ready for this litter for a while. 

I can’t explain why I long for this series of events, and yet when it comes, I am sometimes “sore afraid.”  The one place I do not want this journey to take us today is the veterinary office.  It seems that when a dog in labor gets to the veterinary office something has gone awry and it ends up in a caesarean section.  It’s not that it is pricey, which it is, that takes my breath away at the thought of it.  It’s that the dog looks like HELL when the surgery is done and they give her zero pain killers and then pop a bunch of puppies in my willow basket with the heating disk and tell me, “call us,” or the equivalent thereof.  I’ve seen that movie twice and didn’t enjoy it either time.  It takes a dramatic labor and turns it into a medical event.  The dog has to nurse her puppies to get them to stay with us – or they won’t make it because I absolutely stink at hand-feeding anything.  I’m lucky I am able to feed my ownself.

This particular labor has been an exercise in patience no more than the rest.  The one thing that is different is I feel older and due to lack of sufficient Vitamin D in me, I started this game exhausted.  Two days before today, when I thought the original due date was, I was lying on the futon I had made up for myself downstairs near the whelping room trying to take a nap.  My whole body hurt.  Not like flu-ish.  Like my arms particularly were just tired of being arms.  Thankfully at late morning the temperature that day was moving up towards a beautiful mid-day 70 degrees.  I put my sneakers on, clipped a lead on Madeline Grace and headed out to walk the track at the farm next door.  The next day (which was yesterday but feels like last year somehow, again courtesy of my Vitamin D level being in the toilet) it was in the 40’s with a cold, biting wind driving across the pastures and paddocks.  I put on my fleece lined winter coat and brought Madeline on a Labor March again.  In my right pocket was the cell phone in case of emergency…. But I’m not sure who I would call on a work day.  In my left pocket was a sock.  Not just any sock.  This is an extra soft, something like terry cloth sock, with a loose-fitting band.  It is not a lucky sock; that’s not why it was in my pocket.  It just bears the distinction of being the perfect size to pop a 7-ounce newborn puppy into should she decide to drop one on the track as we walked.  And, no, that wouldn’t alarm me. 

I like dogs.  Dogs tend to like me.  But I draw the line at letting the dog birth puppies on the futon WHILE I’m sleeping in it.  I snuggled with Madeline Grace and helped her feel more comfortable, giving her a back massage and stroking her face.  She has done this labor-thing before and clearly doesn’t remember the doula mantra of “pain-with-a-purpose.”  She only knows in her sweet dog brain that she is uncomfortable and something is pushing inside her that feels out-of-sorts.  Actually, this time it will be a few somethings, or rather, someones.  This time, she is clingy like Velcro-dog to me.  But getting her OFF the futon, where she finds it comfortable isn’t something I can convince her to do.  I have given myself over to the idea – which is essential for dog breeders – that there is a lot of laundry in my near future.  So, I leave my place of rest and go upstairs to proceed to get dressed for this day.  The time of that maneuver was 4:30 am or thereabouts.  This is a time frame I am completely unfamiliar with, except for cases where I needed to go to the airport.  I am surprisingly un-tired now, despite watching an episode of Bull and one of Blue Bloods last night back-to-back until maybe 11 pm. 

I moved my activity upstairs toward the goal of getting dressed for the day at this prehistoric hour.  Then knowing that where this day would take me was uncertain, I toasted two slices of apple strudel bread and booted-up the Keurig with a cup of Hazelnut coffee.  Tiny bits of dry dog food are littered around the dishes of the three dogs.  Apparently when I fed them rice and scrambled eggs last night, they were less interested in the kibble so they just sorted it out on my floor.  I knelt with a dustpan in hand to begin the clean-up.  Even I am surprised at how un-stiff I am today at this time of the morning.  My brain, typically close to comatose on any other day at this hour, wants to write.  Madeline Grace is making small circles on my living room floor.  She meanders into the dining room area and begins walking lonnnnngggggg until she has stretched out her body to the floor.  It must be hard to get comfortable lying on your belly when it’s the size of a typical summer watermelon.  She repositions herself again.  I am almost running out of words and it is 5:33 am.  All I hear is the steady panting of an amazing dog in labor.  I swig the coffee that is now rapidly approaching room temperature.  Its bitterness makes me wonder how I was too lazy to open the new container of creamer with amaretto in the refrigerator.  Then I remember what time it is and how foreign operating this side of daylight is to me.

She has moved back to the dining room table area just to be near me.  The other two dogs are not far away from us.  She rises again to begin the pacing.  She now sits at my knee.  Valor has woken up and stands for a moment with two front paws on my knee.  He has learned to talk this year.  As he yawns, he makes the distinct sound of “hellll-oooooo.”   I get up and look at the low-lying horizontal stretch of clouds over the house diagonally across the street from mine.  It is breaking and the sun is rising a purple-pinkish color in streaks of glory and I am grateful.  Madeline begins up and pacing in the living room, I don’t have the heart to move this downstairs.  She is ready and soon she will drop a sweet little bundle of fur on my floor.  All the clean up will be mine, but so will all of the love.  My stomach feels nervous for these last few moments.  My eyes have tears stinging at the corners – I live for this – and she continues the relentless panting. 

I realize that a breath of fresh, crisp morning air would do us all good.  The three dogs and I bound down the basement steps and out the door.  Madeline circles and circles and I wait.  I find myself clenching my jaw a bit.  At 5:55 am the sun may be rising on the one side of the house, but on this the back side facing south, the moon hangs boldly in the center sky.  It is sliced decisively in half against a soft blue backdrop.  Madeline sits to watch the moon.  I observe my breath, her breath, Valor’s huffings of mist from our lungs into the cool air.  We sit.  We wait.  I drag her inside because my nose is cold. 

We return to circling and pacing.  It is now 6:35 am and she sits at the door giving me, her Village Idiot, the message – let’s go out again.  I rise, the slave of her morning activities. 

An unproductive hour passes outside.  I attempt blowing “smoke rings” with my breath.  It does not work.  Her efforts buy her more time in the process.  I wonder what is the hold up inside her.? At one point I thought she was minutes away from just pushing the next Lion King out her back door.  The next minute she is sitting to provide herself counter-pressure.  Inside only a few minutes, she is sitting by the door asking to go out again.  I am reluctant to step back into the chilled air with her.  Other dogs it seems do their business in the whelping box and all is right with the world.  My dogs seem to need to pace throughout the house like an expectant mother in the maternity ward hallway. 

I relent; we return outside.  The morning has warmed up and I go inside to snag a cup of vanilla ice cream for her … which she politely refuses.  Don’t lose your faith in me, I took a spoonful for myself before I offered her a portion.  I got the bright idea of putting a lawn chair outside and sat there sunning my face as she … did very little.  So more time elapsed with little visible progress.  But birthing, like all other mysteries, involves interior work that can go on for an extended period of time before the fruit of labor is born.  I brought her inside to narrow our area of work a bit.  And we wait.  Still.  10:45 am.

#############