This Should Work

but I didn’t pee myself.

Excited Pug Ruins Kodak Moment - Watch more free videos

LL’s pug Woody celebrated a birthday today, so birthday party was thrown in his honor at a local doggie day care called Dogtown. Myself, along with our pugs Yoda and Spike, went to celebrate Woody’s life along with eight other pugs and about 14 humans.

I’ve never been to this place before and was surprised to find that the dogs had a huge indoor room to run around (it’s literally the size of a basketball court). The dogs chased, sniffed, and peed all over the place and they all seem to enjoy every minute of it.

But the climax of the event was the the doggie birthday cake. After everyone sang Happy Birthday to Woody (including Yoda who howled his own rendition) each dog got a slice of cake from For the Love of Dog Bakery. Everyone took their dogs to a separate part of the room and let them enjoy the cake (which someone said tasted like gingerbread. She had to try it). Yoda and Spike licked their plates clean in a matter of moments.

Even though it was Woody’s birthday, his owners–Lorilyn and Tracy– made every other dog feel like a guest of honor. Thanks you two, and Happy Birthday Woody.

We’ve never dressed up our dogs in costumes. However, for Halloween, my wife and I are tempted to dress up our older dog Yoda in this:

When LL tagged me the other day to come up with 5 funny things about my two dogs, Yoda and Spike. This was really hard because we’ve lived with them for so long that some of the things outsiders think are funny or quirky, we consider normal behavior.

However, working with my wife we came up with Five funny or quirky things about Spike and Yoda:

1. Spike barks at the sound of crickets in TV shows, but does not bark at the sound of real crickets in our backyard.
2. Yoda loves to lick our feet, especially my wife’s feet at during breakfast.
3. If the downstair’s bathroom door is left open, Yoda will unroll the toilet paper from the bathroom into the hallway
4. If we’re sitting on the couch with Spike, then get up with a sense of purpose, Spike will jump off the couch barking and running toward the front door.
5. And Spike will bark at objects, like my wife’s purse or my gym bag, if he feels it’s out of place. He’ll continue to do it until we move to it’s “right” place.

The sad thing is that my wife and I were able to easily come up with three things about our foster pug, Otis, who we had for only three months. Here they are:

1. Otis would do handstands on his front paws whenever he peed
2. He would bob his head to classical music (I tried playing Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, but he wasn’t down)
3. He would get so excited at dinner time that he would hurdle over our other dogs to get to his food

(from left to right: Spike, Yoda, and Otis)

Yesterday my wife and I drove to Louisville to hand Otis over to his adoptive family. This is the hard part of agreeing to foster; Otis had been with us for two and half months and really started to feel like part of our family, but now it’s time for him to go to his permanent family.

My wife once said “Yoda may be the sweet one, and Spike may be the cute one, but Otis is the funny one.” And it’s true, he could always make you laugh either with his big smile and wall-eyed stare or doing something acrobatic like hurdling our other dogs on his way to his food.

Otis also wanted to be in the middle of everything. If it sounded like something was going on in the other room, one could hear Otis sprinting to find out what was happening. Here’s an example: Before we sent our other foster dog Charlie to another foster home, my wife wanted a picture of just her and Charlie on the couch. Just as I was about to take the picture, Otis came flying into the room and the picture ended up looking like this:

Yep, that Otis taking up a third of the frame with his mug. He jumped up at just the right time.

We did get a chance to meet the family who have three kids ages 4 to 13 and all of them seemed to smittened by him right away. The middle child wants Otis to sleep in his bed at night-which he’ll love- and their youngest daughter was hugging him so much that the mother kept telling her “gentle, gentle.”

The family’s in-laws also have a pug, so Otis will have a playmate to run around with; and the mother has a home business so Otis will be with her most of the day (not extensive hours in a crate).

It’s clear that Otis will get lots of love from this family, but our concern is also his health. He’s got some sort of allergy as well as a minor ear infection and pneumonia in the past. So we hope that they will follow up with the medications and research the allergy thing, but we no longer have control over that.

At home things are quieter; only two pairs of dog paws trot across the hardwood floors, there’s a little less barking a the squirrels and birds outside the window, and running and jumping on and off furniture has almost gone. And while we both enjoy the calm silence, we also miss our Mr. Otis.

Yesterday our oldest dog, Yoda got a little older. He’s seven and is starting to slow down; the puppy energy is gone, but the enthusiam is still there. He always gets overly excited for his breakfast and dinner; I asked my wife if she thought he would ever not be excited for food and she thinks that he’ll always be excited, but his body may not allow him to show that excitement. I think that’s starting to happen now.

We’ve had him for six and half of his seven years and when my wife brought him home to our apartment in North Carolina he looked like this:

Small, sweet, ready to spring into action; his motor never stopped. These days, he’s happy doing this as well:

Just lounging on the couch pillows, half-asleep.

So what did we do for his birthday? Well nothing special really. My wife and I were pretty busy yesteray, but at 10pm I decided to make the birthday dog a treat: Peanut Butter Cupcakes. I baked them this morning and gave him his “birthday cake” a day late, but as you can see from this video he enjoyed it.

Yesterday my wife took one of our other foster dogs to a new home in Louisville. We thought Charlie would be with us for a while, but after an incident in which he bit one of our friend’s hand the Pug Rescue group wanted Charlie to stay with a board member to observe his aggression issues.

Charlie’s probably still a puppy (I’m guessing he’s a little over 1) who’s full of energy and could almost jump into your arms from a standing position. He loved nothing more than to curl up next to my wife and just hang out or sometimes chew a bone.

But he’s with another loving family and we’re down to one foster dog, Otis. But he may soon be leaving us for a permanent home at Fort Knox; the Pug Rescue folks want to make sure he’s fully recovered from any health problems before he goes to his new family, so we’ll be watching him until then.

It looks like we may soon return to the way things were: just two dogs.

Well, we finally moved one of our foster dogs last weekend. Lexy was causing too much havoc in our house in order to keep her, so the Kentuckiana Pug Rescue found another foster home for her a couple of hours away east of Lexington.

She kept sparring with one of our dogs, Spike, and sometimes it would get bloody. During one fight, my wife tried to break it up by picking up Spike, but she ended up picking up both dogs because Lexy was biting Spike’s ear. There were many times when neither Jene nor I could sit on the couch because Spike and Lexy would fight over who would sit in our laps.

She is a very sweet dog who loved nothing more than to sit in my lap, or lick my face. While she was with us I tried go teach her to catch a ball out of mid-air and it probably would have happenned if she were with us longer.

But she is now with another loving family who will take care of her and treat her like family; this is all we could ask for. The youngest son of the family really like Lexy a lot; once we showed him that she likes to play fetch his eyes lit up and he was throwing the ball for her.

And while part of me knows moving Lexy was the right choice, it’s still hard to not feel like we failed in some way. We always said our dogs would come first, and that’s the way it should be, but I’ll still miss her.

Two of the foster pugs, Lexy and Otis, were only supposed to be at our house for two days before going to a more permanent foster home. We told ourselves “we can do anything for two days.”

Well two days has turned into a week and a half. Three foster homes that agreed to take these guys fell through and no takers are in sight. The Pug Rescue coordinator has said if we can’t handle them any more to send them to the local kennel until they can find a permanent home.

The thought of sending these guys to the kennel is really hard for us. On the one hand, it’s tiring having five pugs in the house-they’re whining during the nights, barking during the days, it takes two of us to care for them, etc. On the other hand, they are now comfortable here, they’ve bonded with us, and we are starting to see their personalities come out. Yesterday, we found out the Otis likes to nod his head to classical music; last night we found out the Lexy likes to play fetch.

One of the reasons we agreed to help Pug Rescue was to give a good home to needy dogs, and Lexy and Otis qualify (especially Otis who’s a skinny and not feeling well), but it’s really disturbed our daily routines.

We’re leaning toward keeping them for a little longer and just trying to get them to adjust to our schedule instead of reverse. Besides, they’re really sweet dogs.