Dear Diary - Good morning?

 

Dear Diary,

Yesterday I had lunch with a good friend.  Like us, she and her husband have two dogs.  She was telling me about how much her dogs like routine, and how theirs worked.

She gets up in the morning at 6am, walks the dogs for 15 minutes, feeds them, then gets ready for work and is out of the house to go to work by 7:15.  She said that the walk in the morning gets her blood going and wakes her up, which sounded like a really good idea to me.

Well, Puppy Girl wakes us at 6am anyway, so I decided to give it a try.  I got up at 6am, let the dogs out for potty, brushed my teeth, got dressed, caught Puppy Girl so I could get her harness on her (she hates it), tried to get Puppy Dog to calm down and stop bouncing when he saw his leash, and finally got out of the front door.

Puppy Dog is on an extendable leash, and Puppy Girl on a thin nylon normal one.  He doesn't like her first thing in the morning - who would like a baby jumping all over them nipping their ears before they'd had breakfast? - so I have to keep them apart.  She can't differentiate his play growls from his I-am-going-to-bite-you-if-you-don't-stop-it-NOW growls.

So she spent the entire walk pulling at the harness, whimpering, trying to get to her brother.

We walked for about five minutes before I realized I had made a mistake not putting my gloves on.  I wrestled one from my pocket, held both leashes in one hand, and wrangled a glove on.  Puppy Dog immediately decided to squat and have his morning ablutions, so there I was, two dogs straining at the leads, taking the glove off again, shining the little torch on my keyring on an neighbor's bush, trying to find the poop and scoop it.

On we went.  Puppy Girl strained against the leash all the way around the three blocks, and I became concerned that she was learning the wrong thing about going for a walk - pulling.  No better time to deconstruct bad behavior and replace it with good behavior than right now with a puppy, so I put Puppy Dog back in the house and took Puppy Girl out for another walk, with treats in my pocket, trying to get her to walk at my side.

Giving her treats with gloves on was a mistake.  She thought it was a new biting game.  We got halfway up the block with her jumping up at my side, trying to nip my gloves.  Then she saw another dog coming down the street and started barking her head off.  I turned back and went home.

I put Puppy Girl in her crate - after I managed to catch her - when we got home, and fed Puppy Dog, then put her breakfast in her crate.  She wasn't interested, and kept barking and whining.

I figured maybe she needed potty - she had only peed on our walk - so I took her outside.  But all she wanted to do was play. 

I got her back inside, herded her back into the crate, suffered the crying (you have to ignore it) till she ate.

Thank God.

Potty time again.  She ran straight to her potty place (yay!), and peed.  I knew she must need to poop by now, so tried to get her to do it.  Nope.  She barked and barked.  I was confused. 

And then I saw it.  She had obviously pooped first thing this morning - outside the enclosure - and I had stepped in it.

I scooped it, then got the hose to clean off the bottom of my shoes.  Of course the water got into my socks.  I squelched my way inside, seriously contemplating a cup of tea laced with whiskey.

It was 7am and yes, dear Diary, my blood was pumping.  But I didn't feel awake.

I felt exhausted.