A place where I can share interesting ideas and maybe get a few things off my chest

Posts tagged ‘Sophie’

Silly Sophie (OctPoWriMo #12)

Since I first saw my silly Sophie
And my Sophie first saw me
We have shared long days together
She is now my best friend ever

We’ve gone for walks and we’ve gone camping
She really likes a bit of pampering
One time she tried to chase a rabbit
I’m not sure how she thought she’d grab it

She likes to sleep on the sofa arm
Where she is safe from any harm
She snores her little doggie snores
And I just love her more and more

Today’s OctPoWriMo offering is just a simple rhyme based on the word prompts: playful, childlike silly. And my Sophie.


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Hungry Dog

As we packed to leave for our monthly weekend camping trip, I worried, as I always do, about how Mother would fare while were gone. She’s got lunch fixings and TV dinners and ice cream bars, her walker, her pillow, and the western channel, and the emergency button necklace that is essentially a cell phone with one giant button that only dials the emergency service we pay for on a monthly basis. She is at home by herself on the weekdays she doesn’t go to the Senior Center, and does just fine, but I still worry, even though the PT who worked with her last year said she has clients less “with it” than Mom who still manage to live on their own.

This time, since we had an event planned with friends for early Saturday, we decided to leave on Friday evening, and also decided to leave the dogs so they wouldn’t be cooped up in their kennels while we were gone a good portion of the day on Saturday. They could also to keep Mother company, as her biggest complaint when we take our camping weekends is how much she misses us and how lonely it is without anyone at home with her. We did something similar in May, when we went to Disney, and it worked out well with one of our friends checking in on her and also making sure the dogs were being fed.

In May, Steve made up little bags with the dogs’ names on them for their breakfast and dinner, but Mom didn’t feed them breakfast. She doesn’t normally see them being fed breakfast, and I wasn’t sure she had been able to read the baggies Steve had fixed up. This time, I made sure he used labels, and then showed Mom the bags and explained how the dogs ate twice per day and how each dog had separate breakfast and dinner baggies for each day.

She didn’t call all weekend and since we were so busy, I didn’t think to call until after she would have gone to sleep. I told myself everything was fine, but I was still worried a little, and all kinds of outrageous scenarios played through my mind. We’d get home and find her fallen, with the dogs sitting beside her, keeping watch. Or we’d get home to find the dogs locked in the garage, having barked themselves hoarse because she couldn’t hear them. Or she would have become incapacitated and missed feeding the dogs and they would decide she would make a fine meal substitute.

Fortunately, none of those uglier things came to pass, but little Sophie, who really doesn’t need to miss a meal, didn’t get to eat all weekend. While I thought  I had been very clear on how to feed the dogs, and Mother made yes-I-understand noises, she really didn’t get it.

Dog food bags 2014-08-17 17.53.52

Gracie gets dog food from the supermarket, which comes in good-sized crunchy bites. Sophie, with her little, tiny mouth and delicate tiny dog teeth, gets food from the pet store that resembles cat food, because it is the only food she can chew. Instead of feeding each dog from the marked packets, Mom split Gracie’s food bag between the two dog’s bowls (the only reason one of Sophie’s bags above is empty is because I used it to feed her right after we got home – she was really hungry!). When we got home, she told us that The Little Dog (she has a hard time remembering Sophie’s name) hadn’t eaten hardly anything while we were gone. I tried to explain to her that Sophie couldn’t eat the big pieces of dog food and how we had specifically marked the bags. Mom kept nodding and agreeing with me as if we were saying the same thing and  just kept saying how she tried to feed The Little Dog but she wouldn’t eat anything.

How often do you think dog-sitters are hired to come in and feed dogs when someone is still at home?

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Grooming Sophie

Yorkies are known for their long, silky hair. And when Yorkies are groomed for show, they look like this:

Show Yorkie

It occurred to me that Yorkies are the grown-up equivalent of this:

Big Barbie Head

When I was a kid, I did not have the ability to sit still long enough to play with something like this. As an adult, the idea of holding down a squirming dog who didn’t want to be brushed and combed any more than I wanted to be doing it, would probably leave Sophie looking much like this poor puppy:

Cookie’s before picture

However, since I am not a cruel doggie mistress, I took Sophie to the groomer today. Our groomer has this poster on the wall so those of us unfamiliar with grooming terms can merely point and grunt at the style we desire.

Grooming poster

 

Last time at the groomer , we had her do something similar to 3rd row, 4th photo (not exactly, because they left her side fringe a little longer), only to find that the grass in our backyard has seeds that have some kind of sticky adhesive properties that allowed Sophie to collect them all along her legs and sides, and then deposit them on the couch and our laps. This time, I told them I wanted the Body Contour cut (3rd row, 1st photo) – to just make her look like a short-hair dog except for her little face ruff and eyebrows.

She is really quite adorable and as soon as I find the little cord that lets me transfer pictures from my camera to my computer (I know it’s around here somewhere on my desk, under some of this very important stuff I have yet to sort through and file), I will post a photo of her amazing cuteness.

 

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Gracie and Sophie Update

Gracie & Sophie share a bed 1.31.14

Although we still don’t trust them to behave when they’re alone in the house, Gracie and Sophie are on their way to becoming fast friends. Sophie has adapted quite well to the doggie door, using it for her own purposes, but she does not yet have any idea of what MY purposes for the doggie door are, and I continue to clean up small messes, even having bought a low-end Swiffer (just the stick, no attached spray bottle) to make the clean-ups a little easier. If she were a Great Dane, I’m sure we would be more motivated to watch the Potty Training video we got from Petsmart, but last night we watched Ender’s Game instead.

Sophie Loves The Mama 2.1.14

Sophie loves The Mama and doesn’t seem to mind her new short haircut, but she really didn’t like the t-shirt. It came off shortly after her modeling session.

Sophie's hernia 2.14.14

A couple of days ago, we noticed a small bulge on her lower abdomen. Yesterday morning, the vet confirmed that she has an inguinal hernia. It is not an emergency situation, but it is something that needs to be addressed before it develops into one. We have scheduled her surgery for Monday morning. It is a relatively minor surgery and her recovery time should be no more, and perhaps even a little less, than when she was spayed.

I guess it’s not just the free dogs that turn out to be the expensive ones.

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Gracie Has Lost Her Mind

Gracie's mess 1.23.14

Gracie’s mess

 

We’ve had Gracie since mid-June, when we drove to a Weekie-Wachee dog rescue in search of a border collie. It turned out that the only thing Gracie’s rat terrier self had in common with a border collie was her black and white coloring. But she was cute and energetic and charming and we brought her home. She’s been a very good dog, staying in the house during the day, not having any accidents, only chewing on the occasional should-not-have-been-in-her-reach plastic object and generally being a very good dog.

12.19.13 camera download 088

Gracie behaving at Thanksgiving

Then we got Sophie, and Gracie began acting out and tearing things up. First, she got into the bag I had taken to work with Sophie, chewing through and totally destroying a Rubbermaid bowl that had held some dog food, and just tearing up the other stuff in the bag in general. A few days later, she got into another bag that had plastic water bottles in various levels of emptiness and all kinds of papers and random stuff and tore it all up all over the living room, biting through the plastic bottles so they dripped out and got all the papers wet.

We thought most of her acting out was because she was being left home alone while Sophie was going with me, but yesterday morning, I left them both home while taking Mother to a doctor’s appointment. I placed the wire kennel across the end of the hallway so they’d have access to the doggie door to go outside, but be confined to the back of the house. This was an experiment that failed miserably. Not only did they both meet me at the front door when we got home, having gotten past the wire kennel with it still in place, but before getting out of the den, Gracie managed to tear up one of the new doggie beds, a multi-CD case, one of Steve’s crocs, plastic sleeves out of a 3-ring binder and some of the papers that had been in the sleeves, a box containing a silver-polishing cloth, and a cloth book bag, and also to  knock the door of the wire kennel off its hinges so it fell fully inside onto its floor. Oh, and one of the dog toys was outside, having been drug through the dirt several times, along with pieces of a large plastic cup from Cuban Breezes we had been using to fill their water bowls.

Unfortunately for Sophie, who is just getting used to living here and really getting the whole idea of the doggie door, Gracie has sentenced them both to several hours locked in their kennels on the days Mom goes to the Senior Center.

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Sophie!

Sophie 1.10.13

 

We recently added a new family member to our household. She is 5 years old, retiring from a breeder after having her requisite (for this breeder) three litters. She has never been anywhere but the breeder’s house and yard, so she’s taking a little while to get used to us, to her doggie-sibling, Gracie, and to the entire concept of harnesses and leashes.

Before we went to pick her up, I told Mother about her, and that her name was Fiona. Since Mother mostly reads lips, and she evidently has never heard this name before, she looked at me funny and said “Veeoga?” After I wrote it down, she said it correctly, but still looked quite puzzled. By the time we had had Fiona a couple of days, Mother had asked her name several times and mispronounced it in several unique ways. At one point, I looked down at the little dog, and the name “Sophie” popped in my head. Doggie telepathy, maybe? Anyway, it seemed closed enough to “Fiona” to not be too confusing for her, and perhaps a name Mother could better remember. When I told Mom the dog’s name was now going to be Sophie, she said, “Well, that’s better than Fie-ona.” And so it is. A couple of days later, Steve was scanning our bill of sale and noticed that the breeder spelled “Fiona” as “Phonia”. She said her daughters named the dogs after Disney princesses. I guess Mom wasn’t the only one to have never encountered that name in real life.

So, now, Sophie has been fixed (the breeder refunded us almost half her cost upon proof of spaying), had her teeth cleaned, got a few bad teeth pulled, got her jingle jewelry (county registration/rabies tag), and is almost fully recuperated. After being pushed in and out through the doggie door several times, she has managed to let herself into the house through it, but hasn’t felt a strong enough desire to use it to go out, so I’m still trying to monitor her closely enough to save myself from having to clean up tiny doggie messes.

Gracie has gotten over her severe jealousy and now is only playing the normal version of “don’t pet her, pet me”, rather than the spastic, shed-all-my-hair-and-drool-on-you version. She has also tried to get Sophie to play a few times, but Sophie is still very skittish with all of us. She follows me around, but won’t come to me. The best she’ll do is stop a few feet away, and then not immediately run away as I approach her. And that’s not consistent. The breeder said she was a cuddler, so I’m hoping it won’t take her too much longer to get used to us and actually try to get us to hold and pet her. I’m ready for my new lap dog to actually want to sit in my lap.

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