Puppy Patience

Cam Marston's new puppy has expensive taste — and this week, while the rest of his family's out of town, Cam's discovered his actual job has become full-time appraiser of whatever's currently in her mouth. 

-----

Our new puppy got the TV remote control this morning. I noticed it around lunch when I went to see if there were any World Cup games on. I tried the chewed-up remote anyway and found it turned the TV on but not off. And I'm ashamed to say it, but I lost my mind, because that remote was brand new — less than 24 hours old. It replaced the remote she ate last week, which I'd finally gotten around to replacing to the tune of a couple hundred dollars.

The remote controls in my house need to live somewhere up high where she can't reach them while she's still in puppy stage, which is to say another couple of years, give or take. So do the shoes, pillows, and anything else of value. She'll eat anything and everything, and she does. There's a small piece of firewood she occasionally chews on, and that's fine — I'm happy with that arrangement. But she very clearly prefers the taste of things that cost money and take effort to replace. It's like she has radar for anything expensive. She knows to leave the cheap and unimportant stuff alone. Old, stinky tennis shoe? Leave it be. New pair? Find it and destroy it.

This, of course, brings me to the old line about dogs being man's best friend. Maybe grown dogs are. Puppies sure aren't.

My son and I are alone in the house for about twelve days while the other three kids are scattered everywhere and my wife is in Raleigh. When all six of us were here, someone was always nearby, half an eye on the dog. Now I try to work during the day but keep having to stop and check on her, only to find she's figured a way around every defense I've set up and destroyed something new in the time it took me to send one email.

I've gone from "don't let her destroy anything" to "evaluate the worth and value of whatever is currently in her mouth." That's become my actual job this week. I hear her trot into a room and I don't even look up — I just calculate. If it's one of her countless chew toys, fine, gnaw away. If it's a wallet or a shaving razor, we have a problem.

Yesterday I caught her mid-stride with something dark and rectangular in her mouth, and for half a second my brain ran through every expensive dark rectangle in the house — phone, wallet, glasses, the new remote. Turned out to be an old flip-flop — I've needed a new pair anyway.

When my son's home he's chief distraction officer, mostly because an entertained puppy isn't going to chew his guitar or XBox. Twenty minutes of fetch buys me twenty minutes of work. My calendar this week is mostly puppy windows with meetings squeezed in between.

Dogs may be man's best friend. Puppies are more like very small, very determined auditors, sent in to find everything you care about and nearly destroy it. To my family scattered everywhere – please come home. I need relief.

I'm Cam Marston and I'm just trying to Keep it Real.