Dobby Has No Master, But He Does Now Have a Family

So we've been out and about a lot lately. I'm not just talking about my trip to New York with N, to see my folks and celebrate my mom's mumbledieth birthday (best reaction to a surprise ever!), or even to the fact that, while we were there, Em and Baroy spent a 12-plus-hour day at Disneyland. I mean I'm working more hours than usual; Em, at 13, has the social life of...well...an exceptionally busy 13-year-old; N has his 73 different after-school activities; and Baroy's been working on more than the usual number of projects, including a documentary about a special-needs soccer team. (No, N's not on it. More on all that one of these days.)

What all this means is that Snug's been on his own more than we'd like him to be. For most of the five years he's lived with us, he's had near-24-7 human companionship. But no more. And so we've worried. We've fretted. We've felt guilt.

Enter Dobby, that sleepy-headed, only-been-here-five-day-but-can't-imagine-life-without-him-already moppet at the top of this page. How ever did we find him? Via Facebook, natch.

Officially, we're doing a favor for one of Baroy's friends, a woman involved with a rescue group; the foster mom taking care of this particular mutt (and I mean mutt, since I see about 45 different breeds in him--from Wheaten to wolfhound to scotty to possibly corgi) was going out of town for a month, and she put up some photos and a plea for someone else to step in and fill the gap.

Step in we did. But any filling of gaps was all Dobby. Especially if you're talking about the gap in our family...the one we didn't even know we had.

And so, in less than a week, we've named him and bought him toys and taken him for walks and introduced him to friends and given him a new collar, tossing the raggedy one he came to us with. And while Snug pretends to find him annoying, the two of them are already spending half the day running around the backyard playing tug-o-war with one or another toy, and the other half sleeping butt to butt on the couch. At night, Snug has continued his working-dog tradition of curling up at the bottom of N's bed, a boy-guard like no other; Dobby's lost no time in staking out a place to stretch out alongside Em on her bed. (And here I thought it wasn't possible for things to get any more gaggingly cute at our house.)

As long as Snug gets his food first, and there are no bones to jealously guard from the interloper, and we make sure to ignore Dobby in favor of Snug when we walk into the house after any absence...he's plenty happy to share his home with the new kid in town.

Which is good, since there's not a chance Dobby's going anywhere.

People let me tell ya 'bout my best friend...

Maybe It's Something In The Water?

Like N, my dog, Snug, is...quirky. Different. Edibly adorable, but just not your average bear. Or dog. Or whatever. You know what I mean.

His fear of thunder isn't anything especially unusual, I suppose. There are a lot of high-strung dogs out there. And while his fear of the dark might not be quite as common, I assume there are other dogs with similar concerns. But his fear of the back-left-corner of the couch and thus his refusal to walk around the back of the couch, forcing him to climb through our recyclables bin to get to the front door? His fear of the heater grate and thus his refusal to walk down the kids' hallway (which would mean walking IN FRONT OF THE SCARY GRATE) to get from one room to the other, forcing him to instead go through the kitchen, through the dining room, through the living room and THEN through the recycling bin to get from N's room to Em's? That's just weird.

He's also a creature of habit. And I mean that in the most most classic, OCD form of the word. And that was brought home to me last night in no uncertain terms.

Snug's evening tends to go something like this: He hangs out in the living room with whoever is watching TV there until I go to put N to bed, when he comes and lays down on the rug while N and I read. He then checks in on Em when it's her turn to go to sleep, returning afterward to the living room, where he lays on the couch with Baroy until Baroy comes up to bed, usually quite some time after I've retired for the night. At that point, Snug goes out the dog door to pee in the yard, does a full perimeter search of the property, comes back into the house, and goes directly to N's room to lay at the foot of his bed until morning, guarding him.

Snug takes his job VERY seriously. If anything seems amiss, he lets us know. If the door to N's room is closed, say, or the nightlight off in the bathroom? He lets us know. If one of the kids isn't where they're supposed to be? He lets us know, over and over and over, until we prove to him that we're aware of it, that it's OK.

A little obsessive, I'll admit. But I didn't realize just how deep it went.

Last night, Baroy--having had a rough time staying asleep the night before--came up to bed early. Several hours early. I was up reading (a heartwrenching and beautiful book by my friend Vicki Forman), so the light stayed on for a while, and we chatted back and forth. As Baroy was drifting off, I heard Snug crying softly, then louder and louder, by the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs leading up to our loft-ish bedroom. (The stairs are gated because there's no door on our bedroom, which is the only room upstairs, and we've made it the cats' dog-free sanctuary, since they never got used to having Snug in the house. So Snug can't come upstairs, which is fine by him. Except when things are somehow WRONG.)

"Is the door to N's room closed?" I asked Baroy. "Did you accidentally turn off the night light?"

"I don't think so," he mumbled. But when Snug didn't stop crying, I went downstairs to check. All was as it should be: Doors open that should be open, doors locked that should be locked. I showed Snug that it was OK Em wasn't in her room, just in case that was the the problem (though she's been in NY for two weeks, so he's pretty much over it), gave him some more water, and went back upstairs.

Second later, the crying resumed, louder, more insistent, somehow sadder, even.

"What could it BE?" I said to Baroy, trying to decide whether to be annoyed or concerned. "I can't figure out what is bugging him."

Baroy opened one tired eye. "I have no idea," he said. "He never does this when I'm downstairs, though."

And then it hit me. "It's only 10:00," I said. "You don't ever come up before midnight. Do you think he could just be upset that you went to bed early?"

"I can't imagine he's THAT cra..." Baroy stopped. "Yeah. Probably."

And so I took my book downstairs, turned on the lights in the living room again, and settled down on the couch. My tush had barely hit the cushions when Snug turned around once and lay down on the floor at my feet. He didn't open his eyes again until, after midnight, I finished the book and put it down, stared into space for a few minutes (because it's the kind of book that requires quiet digestion at the end...and time for the tears to dry), and went through the light-turning-off, door-lock-checking rituals another time.

As I headed up the stairs, I heard Snug head out the dog door for his appointed rounds, and as I got into bed I heard him return, his nails scratching the tile kitchen floor as he headed directly to N's room, satisfied that everyone was now in their designated place AT THE DESIGNATED TIME, thank you very much.

Frickin' nutty dog.

God, I love him.

Reproduction

Last weekend, Em was watching the rabbits that belong to the family across the street, one of whom is a girl close to her age, and a friend of hers.

Let's just say that these rabbits? Aren't all one gender. And aren't separated into cages by gender. And aren't neutered. I have 'feelings' about that, but I'll just let that go for now. (SPAY AND NEUTER YOUR ANIMALS, PEOPLE! GET A CLUE! OK. Now I'll let that go.)

So it shouldn't have been a huge surprise when, on Sunday morning, Em and her friend Bec came running back across the street after going to feed the bunnies, yelling that there were babies in the cage, come quick, there's something wrong with them.

And, indeed, when Baroy and I went into the backyard with the girls, there were three babies, two of which had clearly been dead for some time, since rigor mortis had set in, and one of which was juuuuust hanging on.

There was panic. There was a quick run down the street to our friend K, who is a vet, but who doesn't deal with bunnies and such and didn't have much more of a clue than I did. There was Googling of "newborn bunnies." There was a heating pad to see if we could get this tiny little thing--which looked more like an alien's fetus than anything MEANT to be brought into this world--to perk up a bit.

There was a limited amount of success, too. The baby rallied a bit, started moving around more, making attempts to move around the box we had him in. (Yes, it's OK to handle a newborn bunny...we checked. It's even OK to separate said bunny briefly from his mom, since rabbits only nurse their babies once a day, and then usually in the middle of the night.)

In the meantime, the girls had returned to the cage to do the feeding they'd been too distracted to do earlier. And then came running back into the house again, yelling about MORE babies in the cage.

Another visit across the street, and I realized what had happened. There had been eight babies in this litter. Mom rabbit had made a little nest for them out of the blanket in her cage, which is why Em and Bec hadn't seen them the first time; they were covered up. But when they'd gone back, they'd noticed the crumpled blanket, straightened it out, and found a little mound of impossibly tiny babies, all squirmy and warm and huddled together.

I explained to the girls that, apparently, the mom had quickly realized that three of her babies weren't doing well, and so had separated them from the other five, leaving them out to die. We'd found one still alive, and while we were going to give it the best shot possible at surviving, his mom probably knew better, and thus it would be a reallllll long shot. Em did a bit of crying; Bec, a future zoologist, was fatalistic. But still, you could tell she was rooting for the little alien baby.

(And yes, thank you, no-neuter family, for making me have THAT particular circle-of-life conversation on a Sunday morning before breakfast or coffee.)

Anyway, we decided to put the now-warmed-up baby back in with his siblings. So I marked him with a red Sharpie--so we could tell him apart from the others--and plopped him into the middle of the pile of newborn bunnies.

We spent a lot of time, that morning, staring at bunny babies. Which of course led to a discussion of how, exactly, this particular circumstance had come to pass. After all, just a few months ago, there had only been the two bunnies...the male and the female. And then when the female had a litter earlier in the spring, the family separated out the male so that it was just the mom with her mixed-gender litter of four.

"So, I don't understand..." Bec began.

(Thank you AGAIN, no-neuter family. Still no coffee, and now I'm supposed to explain INCEST? Greeeeeat...)

Still, things seemed to be going well. The other bunnies seemed to be accepting the new one in their midst. Until, that is, one of the older, full-grown rabbits began nibbling on 'our' bunny's toes. No. I mean NIBBLING. Like, um, there were fewer of them after she'd begun than there had been before.

Ew.

(The blood you see on that one bunny in the picture above is from its rubbing against our bunny's toes; our bunny is the one at the upper left of the picture, the one on his side; you can't see his missing digits.)

So we took that bunny out of the cage for a while again, put him back on the heating pad and applied pressure to his bleeding foot (did I mention, EW?) and eventually put him back into the cage. Because, as I explained to Em, he had a better chance in there, even with his cannibalistic aunt/mother/whatever she was, than out here with us clueless, rabbit-milk-less humans.

Em's friend came home later that day, and our bunny was still alive, and we considered it a victory.

It didn't last long. That bunny--who Em insisted would have been named "Hero" had he survived being both rejected and snacked on--apparently died overnight. One of his siblings died last night. So now there are four.

In any case, it was an experience. A sad experience. An at-times-joyous experience. A learning experience.

The main lesson, though? Spay and neuter your animals, people. PLEASE.

And if you don't, please don't ask us to babysit.

Damn animals

One of our cats, Buttons, has an upper respiratory infection, and needs daily antibiotics. Which is why, of course, she hasn't yet come home tonight. Any other night, and she's in and sleeping on our bed like clockwork.

Our dog, Snug, has a lump on his leg that went from bug-bite sized to golf-ball sized in an afternoon. Our vet/friend tried to aspirate it, but found it wasn't really solid, and said it looked "weird" under a microscope. So it has to come off. To the tune of about a grand. Baroy was trying to figure out how to convince the surgeon who will do N's surgery (when we schedule it) that N just got kinda furry recently...and that his testicle has wandered down to his rear paw...I mean leg. After all, THAT surgery would probably cost us well under a hundred bucks.

Our friend, Ambre, got thrown from her horse yesterday...thrown over a fence and onto the hard-packed earth outside the ring. She broke her clavicle and scapula, and suffered a compression fracture in one of her vertebrae. If you were able to read that without shuddering, you're made of stone.

Why did we decide it was a good idea to domesticate animals again?