It's a dog's life

I've been sitting here watching my cairn terrier puppy play with a rubber chew toy this morning, and in spite of the fact that she has destroyed more things around the house than I care to admit, she is so innocent it makes me smile. The way she bounces around the room, tossing her toy in the air, her tail wagging at breakneck speed as she pounces on it is absolutely adorable. Rosabel isn't even a year old yet, and while I know that makes her a snotty little second grader in dog years, she's still just a baby to me. I can't imagine anything bad happening to her without getting all teary eyed. Other than destroy two pair of shoes, a few power cables, and my carpet, she really hasn't done anything wrong in her life. Oh, well there is that pouncing on our heads thing to wake us up...

She only looks innocent



We have two other dogs, too, both about twelve years old. Shiva (a bit pull mix) still bounds around the house like a puppy and is more likely to stand over her food and guard it than eat it, but you never met a dog that wanted love more than she does. Bandit is half pug, half Labrador retriever, and unfortunately he inherited a lot of bad pug characteristics. For one, he has breathing problems. For another, he whines incessantly about nothing, which can get annoying.

They're plotting something.

Whenever Bandit has a breathing episode I can't help but compare it to my low blood sugar reactions as a kid. He just looks at me so helplessly. He's had these issues for his whole life, and yet every time he starts to wheeze he gets scared. All he has to do is swallow a couple times and he's fine, but even as an adult dog he doesn't do it without some encouragement from me or my husband.  In so many ways he's a just a kid who wants his mommy to make the bad stuff go away.

I know having dogs isn't the same thing as having children, but since I don't have human children my dogs fill in, and all I want is for them to be happy, healthy, and to feel loved and safe. And when Bandit starts to wheeze he doesn't feel any of those things, except maybe loved because I always come running to be with him. In a lot of ways it's exactly like my parents running to my rescue when my blood sugar would crash when I was a kid, or my husband running to the rescue to take care of me now. It may not seem like much when paramedics are being called and everyone is scared and things seem chaotic (that's a worst-case scenario though; usually it's just "Go drink some juice") but having that love is so incredibly helpful. I've had lows that were so low they didn't even read on my monitor, and  so long as I had family that loved me there to help me through it, they weren't half as scary as 55's that I had to deal with on my own (and "on my own" includes being at work surrounded by people.)

I think Bandit agrees with me, though pant pant whine woof whine could just mean he wants me to get up off the couch and feed him.