Tuesday, April 15, 2008

dogis blogis interuptis

I swear to you, I was sitting here tonight working on a post about the rest of the Boston trip. Really, I was. And then I began to notice that horrible "uh-oh, the house is too quiet" sound.

I used to only worry about that sound and what it meant to me as the parent of MyFavoriteKid. Now I have to worry about what it means to me as the parent of TheDog.

TheDog who eats my things even though he has his own things.


The very first week RileyTheDog was here, he took my beloved BunnyMan out into the backyard, and then hid one of his own toys underneath it. I was distressed (as I love BunnyMan beyond words), but he didn't hurt Bunnyman, just moved him. And to be honest, it was sort of comical. There was a photo taken of the pile of toys it was so funny, but I can't for the life of me find it.

Since then, Riley's habits have been progressing from moving to eating, I am sad to report.

While at TheMostImportantGuy's for a week, Riley ate a wooden sculpture of a frog that was special to TheMIG, then onto a heavy duty speaker cable for a PA system, and after that one very expensive set of headphones (of recording engineer caliber). Not. Good.

When I got home from the trip, I promptly went shopping to get Riley some more toys and things of delicious chewyness so he'd leave our things alone.

I wish it could say it has helped.

First up to dragged outside and/or spread around the house? Two skeins of yarn and a bag of roving.


The day after that Riley dragged my Nintendo DS and a pair of headphones out into the yard and tried to bury it.

Tonight when I got home from dinner out with my folks? More yarn.


BlackBunnyFibers, no less. Danged dog. At least this was leftovers from my Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawl, so at least I feel like I have used the yarn for its original purpose....but there is enough left here to make a large lacy scarf, and I had set it out on the table as inspiration. It is salvageable, but at the moment it's in a knotty dog spitty mess. It was dragged all over the house, over the couch, and around the coffee table a few times.

I scorned TheDog, then sat down to write a post. That is when the "house too quiet" sound happened (quiet really is a sound, ya' know).

No sign of Riley, but Riley had eaten Perkins.

Perkins is my Zombie. Riley had eaten his lips. Maybe we could pretend that Riley was just kissing Perkins and accidentally got a little over zealous.

After I found Perkins and sobbed, I went looking for Riley. I found Riley "kissing" Bunnyman. He hadn't ripped him up yet, but you could tell it was coming. BunnyMan is currently hiding scared under my pillows.



You know, on the day we adopted Riley, the very first thing he did when he walked into our house was to raise his leg to the wall and take a whizz. I told him no, stuck him outside for a few minutes, and it has not been an issue since. Done. Fixed. Trained. He got it.

Apparently teaching him to stop snacking on all things important is not going to be quite so simple.

3 comments:

Mouse said...

Eep! Good luck with the training...

Unknown said...

Oh no! Maybe you can take him to puppy class.

katrynka said...

Have you considered crate training? I used to think it was mean, but when I did more research, it is a great thing. It kept my german shepherd from eating my walls (literally). And it kept him from being in trouble all the time. When he was not directly supervised, he was in a safe place. We weaned him out of the crate (due to space issues!) at about 3 years old (research indicated that is a good age to do it for a shepherd. He has been fine, and he had chewed a LOT of things in unsupervised moments when younger.