Our life with dogs

Since nothing very exciting has been going on around the Whetstone household lately I thought I would share a few stories about our dogs.

We will start with the oldest, Roxy, our Chocolate Lab. She had a chewing feddish that we can't seem to get rid of. It all came to a head (literally) at the beginning of December when she decided the Joseph figurine in my brand new (not even 12 hours old) nativity scene Jacob bought me as an early Christmas gift needed a little reconstructing. I found Joseph laying face down on the front room floor with teeth scrape marks on his forehead and a chunk taken out of the top of his head. A few days later she tried eating a blanket. I took her in to the vet when we realized she wasn't keeping anything down. They did x-rays and told me there is a blockage inside her somewhere and in order to find it they will have to do surgery and the entire vet bill would be around $1,000.00.

While I was in the room saying goodbye to Roxy before they took her back to prep her, she put her head on the bench next to me and then quickly ran across the room. It took me a second to realize that she had just grabbed a Klenex I had and was trying to eat it. I don't know what she won't eat.

In talking to the doctor after the surgery he told me they found pieces of plastic in her intestines which caused them to stop working. Lucky for us (and Roxy) he was able to get them out without cutting in any further and it saved us a few hundred bucks. Needless to say, we put a little of that money towards an early Christmas gift for Roxy....a muzzle.

When I came home without Roxy, Tater was giving me her sad puppy dog eyes and wandering the house trying to figure out where I hid Roxy. She would walk through the rooms and look out the window and just couldn't figure it out. When we brought Roxy home Tater wanted to get in the kennel with her. They are such good buddies.

While Roxy is our goat, Tater, our black Lab, is our little sweetheart. She loves her dad and tries to help him any way she can. She always knows when he's about to put his shoes and socks on and is right there to help in any way she can. It usually includes a lot of flailing of the tongue directed towards Jacob's face while she sits or stands as close to his feet as possible.

Since our dogs have the floppy ears they get infected if we don't clean them often. We have found that we only need to clean Tater's ears and then she takes care of cleaning Roxy's. They will start out playing tug-of-war and end up with Roxy laying on her back with her ears flipped up and Tater licking them. Now that's love!!

I have found that our dogs are very modest and self-conscious. Within the last month or two we have started taking their collars off at night because they sleep on the floor in our room and when they get up and shake during the night their tags would rattle and wake us up. They love having their collars taken off and running around "naked". In the morning Jacob will let them out while it's still dark outside and they do just fine, but when I try getting them to go out a few hours later Tater will inch her way towards the door with a "please don't make me go out there" look on her face while Roxy sits in the front room and protests even going close to the door. When I realize they don't have their collars on I will ask them if they want to get dressed and they immediately jump up and run around. Once I put their collars on they usually beat me to the back door and are more than excited to be going outside.

Since our 4 legged kids are all we have right now, that's what you're going to read about. Just give it another 3 1/2 months or so and we will tell you all about our 2 legged kid.