The Crazy Dog!

Every single day, I say to Oscar “Why did we get the crazy one?” It doesn’t seem to hurt his feelings. I say it in a funny little squeaky voice and he thinks I’m playing with him. Really . . I just want to know why we got the crazy dog! 🙂

With each day, we get closer to his second birthday (December 14). Some days I feel like he’s maturing; some days I feel like he’s gone from the destructive puppy stage to the difficult 13 year old boy stage. I’ll never forget the day Chad got off the bus on his 13th birthday and it was like a child I had never seen before. So began about 7 years of . . well, I know it could have been worse and looking back, I can laugh about it . . or some of it.

Don’t let the innocent look fool you. He’s a handful. If you watch his eyes, he’s constantly looking for something he can get into or something one of us have left within his reach.

See the slip cover in the background? He is determined he is going to pull it off and use it as a blanket. That’s a learned behavior because he does have a blanket on the love seat and when he wants it on the floor, he can pull it off. Yet the love seat has a slip cover and he’s never tried to pull it off.

I have some kind of rods that go in the crack between the back of the cushions and the back of the sofa. The rods have worked for us for years . . but they don’t work with Oscar. I have storage bins full of linen stacked up on the sofa to keep him off since he’s already gone over the back of it once and landed on the tile floor. I’m afraid he’s going to pull and pull til one of those bins falls off on him. Every morning, while he’s still in the crate, I lift the five bins off the sofa, tuck it all in the crack tightly so it isn’t hanging down on the floor, put the bins back on and by noon, it looks like it looks in the picture.

When I had my first dachshund, cell phones weren’t around and bell bottoms were in style. I had a phone on the wall in the kitchen and from my sewing room to the kitchen was a bit of hike so when the phone would ring, the dog would grab onto the bottom of my jeans because he knew I was going to run to get the phone and he would get a free ride. My ankles were always black and blue from that dog grabbing my pants and catching my ankles. I think the nature of a dachshund must be to want to see me run. No matter where Oscar is downstairs, when the printer starts to print, he hears it and he comes running. He’s just barely tall enough that he can jump and grab the paper as it comes out of the printer. If it’s something I’m printing, the minute I hit “print”, I walk over to the printer and can get the paper as it comes out, even though it sometimes means Oscar grabs a corner so there’s part of it missing. If Vince prints something from upstairs, I don’t know it’s coming and if I’m not right in the room with the printer, Oscar gets to it before I do and he can shred a piece of paper faster than you would think possible. I asked Vince if we could put something under the printer to raise it up. He said “We can only raise it up about 3″ before it gets in the way of the TV.” Good, let’s get rid of the TV!

For the better news . . we haven’t been going to his little play yard because it’s just been too hot. Yesterday I got the ball out and was tossing it to him in the living room. When we were going outside every day, I taught him to bring the ball to me, drop it and to sit and stay. He would then get a treat, which was simply a piece of dog food because he would do it 100 times or til I got tired. The reason I taught him that is that he would come running as fast as he could and jump up on my lap (I was sitting in a lawn chair). If I had on shorts, his nails were painful! So he would drop the ball at my feet, then sit.

Yesterday in the living room, the first time I threw the ball, he brought it to me, dropped it and sat. I was surprised he remembered that because it’s been over a month since we were outside playing. We had been going to the park and walking until this week when it was super hot. The walking wears him out too .. that’s the goal . . make Oscar tired!