5400/18320
I thought you got a lot of unasked for opinion when you had a baby, but it’s nothing compared to having a dog. To be fair a lot of it was useful stuff, but letting the world know that my dog had Jackson Pollocked the living room floor led to a lot of unrequested analysis of what we were doing wrong. I am fairly confident that Wolfie’s early-morning excretions were down to the emotional trauma she had suffered.
We had a dog trainer round today and her advice about everything was almost entirely opposite to what the dog’s original owner had told us. We were doing the food wrong, using the wrong kind of lead, should never let the dog off the leash and were wrong to let the dog run around and chase balls. Which seems to take away all the fun of having a dog. We have decided we will do whatever the last person we have talked to has said.
Over night she was a lot better, though because we’re all in one room, a bathroom visit by a continent human led to Wolfie waking up and thinking it was morning, so I had to take her outside where she did a couple of big shits in the garden which I decided I would wait until daylight to discover, in a fun scatological treasure hunt. And once we were back in and I tried to get back to sleep Wolfie was licking my face in gratitude. Which was sort of sweet. She is already the best friend I have in the world and the only living thing that respects me.
Of course even though we didn’t have to clean up dog excrement this was a second very disturbed night and I was exhausted in the morning. This was like being a new dad again. Which I am shortly going to be. I don’t think there will be any time to sleep then.
But the 6am walk was bracing and woke me up and later we would go to the rec in the rain and run around (before we were told we shouldn’t do this) and even though we got soaked, I really enjoyed it. After yesterday’s shit-fest (both in and out of the house) Wolfie seemed to have no excreta remaining and I worried she was just saving it all up to do on the carpet. We had put plastic down, which was lucky because later she did do a wee, but I got her outside in time to do her two shits of the day. And that has to be counted as a triumph. And I think she only did the wee because we’d tried to banish her downstairs when we were getting Phoebe ready for bed and had felt abandoned.
Anyway, even though the countryside is boring I am not going to make this blog a diary of my puppy’s effluent (unless she does some amazing ones, which I am pretty sure she will). Though some people on Twitter seem keen for me to catalogue every movement.
Hopefully Wolfie won’t be quite as time consuming once we’re settled in. And when we have a bit more room she can sleep in the kitchen where we won’t disturb each other. I think it’s going to be fine. You know, eventually.
We came extremely close to hitting the Kickstarter goal in under a week, but were about £2000 shy come 9.30pm. I spent most of the night watching the total creep up. I live in the country now. There is nothing else to do. Any goal-hanging glory-seekers,
your time is nearly here.
