It must be so easy being a dog. While my little toy poodle Simba has to struggle through life only knowing about 50 words in the English language and has to communicate his emotions through barking, he has a pretty charmed life. I walk him, I feed him, I pet him, he is allowed to sleep in our bed. And he takes advantage of all of these things.
Over the past couple of months he has decided that he doesn't like it when I try to sleep in. This is a problem because I am out of school right now and I enjoy sleeping in very much. However, I understand. The little guy hasn't been outside since the night before and has a full bladder. He decides at around 6:30 am that it is time for me to get up. I can usually convince him to sleep for another hour by covering my face up with the sheet and petting him until he lulls off into dream land. But after that hour the sheet has inevitably fallen off of my face and the dog has discovered that if he just licks my face I will wake up. At this point I try to get him to fall back asleep, but it's no use. He is awake and ready to go! We go downstairs and he is ready to go outside...or, much to my annoyance, to jump up on the living room couch and fall asleep again. Apparently it wasn't that he needed to go to the bathroom, he just wanted to change sleeping locations. It got worse a couple of nights ago. Apparently he woke the hubs up by licking his face at 1:30 am and 3:30 am. This is a big deal because the hubs doesn't get to sleep in like me - he had to wake up at 4:00 to go into the hospital for his ICU rotation. Of course, if I spent 20-21 hours/day sleeping I think I would want to wake up at 3:30 too.
Simba is also a little bit of a yipper (he's a toy poodle, so I guess that comes with the breed). The ultimate punishment in our home is the squirt gun. Right now I know he can't see anything from the sliding glass door except for leaves shaking in the trees, but he is ultimately finding that those are worth yipping at. We were thinking about buying a bark collar, but decided we didn't want to zap our dog into submission. Then we decided that a squirt gun might be a better option. It's really nice because when he is barking he won't respond to us yelling no. Before the squirt gun came along we had to go and pick him up in order for him to listen. We may be lazy "parents" but this got really old really fast. Now, with the squirt gun, I can squirt him from any window he is able to see out of from my couch. I don't know what is so horrible about water, but Simba avoids it like the plague (I set him on a pool float yesterday that had a little puddle of water in the middle - when his foot touched the water he jerked it back and panicked). When he starts barking I don't even have to squirt him. I just shake the gun with water in it and he stops barking.
When that little white fuzzball jumps up on my lap and rolls over onto his back to have his belly scratched at the end of a long day of sleeping and barking I forgive him for all of his annoyance and am so happy that I finally have a dog.
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