Who Lives Like This?

Today is the next to the last day for the Countdown to Dog Daycare™. On Thursday they will be thrown into a big building with many outdoor fenced areas to romp around with other dogs who are as much of a pain in the ass to their owners as ours are to us lately.

For almost a month now our dogs have been chewing on our house. And when I mean for the past month, I mean every single day that we aren't in the house and even when we dare to leave the house for 2 or 3 hours during the weekend. They have chewed, let me count now, 6 doors. They've dug into the kitchen walls, ripped off wallpaper and hit the drywall. They've also scratched wide wooden plank floors that have probably been in that house unmolested for 200 years. Let's just say we're glad we rent. And let's also say we're not holding our breath on the deposit.

We're not sure what the problem is. We assumed that it was a loose creature because we have loose creatures in our house. We think they're squirrels. We hope they're squirrels. And, you know, if I was a dog that was part greyhound I'd probably lose my beans if I knew a furry something-or-other was just underneath my feet or on the other side of the wall or outside on the porch leafing through the recyclables. I get that. But this behavior has since exploded exponentially into something that is a whole other deck of cards. We know that Lula is the chewer and Sammy is the clean up crew. Quite the team, those two.

Many mornings, as I'm on step 6 or 8 of my 14-million-step-getting-ready process, Lula will stand in the doorway of the bathroom shaking. It's as if, without a single word, she's able to communicate to me the following:

"See how much I don't want you to leave. I can't tell you why, but I can't bear you leaving. And, after all this shaking, you still to decide to leave, know this: I WILL TEAR THIS MOTHER F**KING SHACK DOWN SPLINTER BY SPLINTER."

Every morning when I leave for the day, with Walker in his upholstered bucket on my left arm, I just close the door behind me and feel depressed. Depressed that a part of my day I used to love (coming home and seeing Walker and Jon on the couch, Jon holding him in the crook of his arm, and Walker wrapping his hands around the top of his bottle ... and petting the dogs, saying Hi to them, putting my stuff down, happy to be home) is now a time when I put all my stuff down, don't look at the mail, don't say Hi to the dogs, don't look at Walker's sheet from daycare, I just walk through the house to inspect the damage with Jon directing me "Oh, that's not all. Look down the hall".

After spending many nights slouched down on our respective couches, talking through what to do we finally figured enough was enough. They're going to dog daycare. They're bored. Their lives are small. We owe it to them to expand their doggie horizons. And we definitely owe it to the wooden components of our home.

Jon asked our vet a couple weekends ago what we could do in the meantime (since wouldn't you know it that we'd figured out the solution just prior to school vacation when dog daycare was full to the brim for weeks). She suggested giving them both a homeopathic for stress relief. Or, as Jon likes to think of it, "witchcraft and voodoo". So in addition to my 14-million-step-getting-ready process, I now have to drop little drops of Rescue Remedy on the dogs. I have to hold Lula's snout and drip it on there and then she licks it off. I'm supposed to do the same thing with Sammy but she literally opens her mouth and licks it up. I could be dropping arsenic into that dog's mouth for all she knows. She is devoid of a survival instinct. If we dropped her into the wilderness with a milkbone and a compass she'd be dead by sunset. Even knowing all this, I looked at her the first time I dripped the drops into her big waiting alligator mouth and said "Sammy, you know, sometimes you're a great dog."

Our vet told Jon that this is the first step. If this doesn't work then there's an intermediate step. And if that intermediate step doesn't work then there's Prozac. PROZAC! When Jon told me this over the phone I said "Jesus Christ, Prozac! We're not giving the dogs Prozac! This can't be my life. This is not a life. This is a bad pilot for a failed sitcom. Who lives like this?"

We do.