About 4 months ago my family got a new puppy, Dixie. We were so excited to have another dog in the house and to have a playmate for our 2 year old poodle, Jazz. Jazz was the perfect puppy, well, not perfect, but as close to perfect as one who likes to chase squirrels can be. He even poses for pictures!
Little did we know that Dixie would be the complete opposite of Jazz.
Dixie, as my mom describes her is, “hell on wheels”. When she was smaller, she didn’t follow the normal puppy sleep schedule of play-nap-play-nap-play-nap, instead choosing to conserve her energy and take only one nap in the middle of the day. To anyone who has never had a puppy, this might not seem so bad. But, believe me when you’re on Dixie-duty, you live for naptime.
The hours that Dixie was awake, she required almost constant supervision. You couldn’t just watch her; you had to entertain her as well because a bored Dixie equals a Dixie getting into trouble. Your time is instead spent pulling tissues out of her mouth, wrestling shoes back, begging her to stop pulling on Jazz’s ears and telling her to stop jumping on the counter. Add to the mix having to take her out every 20 minutes or have to clean up a yellow puddle and you end up exhausted faster than she does. And this starts at 5:30 every morning and only ends when she (finally) goes to bed around 10:30, even on the weekends.
Oh, and you remember how I said we got her 4 months ago? Count back and you’ll realize that we got her in the winter. When it’s COLD. Who in their right mind gets a puppy in the middle of winter? My family, that’s who. Have you ever had to take a puppy out to go to the bathroom when it’s below freezing, the ground is covered in ice, and you have to wait through the most elaborate poo-dance known to dog-kind? Well, let me tell you that I wish I had bothered to put on a coat that night because it was really hard to tell Dixie to hurry up with my teeth chattering.
Luckily, as Dixie gets a little older and a wee bit more experienced with the way things work, things get better and I couldn’t imagine life without my little black ball of fur.
