This post was begun in June, and finished over a month later. Oh well, better late than never... (This explains the incongruous timeline references.)School is out for summer. Yay for that! Around our house things are far different than they ever have been. We have completed our suburban stereotype with the addition to our family of a four-legged member of the canine variety. Yes, folks, we got a dog.
Her name is Daisy. She's currently three and a half months old, and last week she weighed in at three and a half pounds. She is a full-bred shih tzu, although her parents were both on the tiny side at less than five pounds each. She's not going to get very big, which has a lot to do with why we chose her. I grew up with Hotdog, a six pound runt toy fox terrier. Hubby grew up with Beau, a lhasa apso who was on the huge side of the breed standard at 20+ pounds. Beau was too big for me, and Hotdog was too yippy for Hubby, so agreeing on a dog was a big deal.
Daisy is very social. I have not seen her react negatively to any person. Ever. Each new human she encounters is an immediate best friend. And she doesn't bark at people. Not unless she is left alone.
She will fetch a tennis ball. It's a hilarious sight to see this tiny dog carrying a ball the size of her head by clutching the fuzz with her teeth. It's too big to fit in her mouth, of course. She also fetches her other toys. The tennis ball is the most fun for us, as it requires more of a chase, and watching her scamper through the house is quite entertaining.
The first few nights we had her, she cried all night long. Not liking to be left alone, she let us know what a horrible thing it was to be abandoned in a crate downstairs while we went upstairs to our bedrooms. One night we put the crate in the laundry room, and after that, I just wore earplugs to bed like hubby does all the time. Daisy has learned that it's not so bad, and now she doesn't even bark at us as we ascend the stairs. Sometimes, when she's feeling particularly cooperative, she'll go in the crate on her own accord.
House training was a challenge at first. Now that it's been about two and a half months that we've had her, and she's five months old, she knows what to do outside, and not to go inside. It took a whole bottle of Urine Off to get to that point, however. It pains me to say that it was easier to teach this dog what to do than it was my second born child... Long time readers of this blog know what I'm talking about. That was April of 2009 after we started working on it in August or September of 2008. The dog has the concept mastered in about a month...
Daisy has some towels that we've given her, old towels we'd use to wash the car. She's fond of dragging them to wherever she wants to park for a little while. They're hers and she doesn't get into trouble for chewing the corners. They're not in good shape anyway, that's why they're hers. She sleeps with one on her bed in her crate. As I'm typing, she's got one right now.
Shih tzu have bad rep for intelligence. If as a breed they are generally dumb, as some websites suggest, then I fully believe she is an exception. Any failings in her training are not her fault. They are ours. We have trained her to wait for her dinner. She will stay seated about five feet away as we pour her food in the bowl, and not come to eat it until we say it's OK. She's getting to be good about coming in that way too. When the door is open, I want her to be invited before she comes. There was one day when she got her front leg caught in the door for trying to come in when she wasn't welcome. She hadn't yet done her "business" outside, and it was in the days before she was fully house trained.
One thing she hasn't learned yet is how to go down the stairs. She can climb up, but she doesn't know how to go down. I guess that's all right with me because I don't really want her to have full reign of the house anyway. I would like her to stay down. She used to go upstairs and then be stuck, but lately she doesn't try to go up, and that's good.
Hubby and I will look around and then at each other every now and then and remark, "We have a dog." It's kind of like the feeling we had after we had our first baby. The reality of it is still so new. Unlike having a baby, this is something we never thought we'd do. This is a change from the paradigm we had worked under for so long.
So there it is. We have a dog.
