What happens when I try to sleep in on a Saturday

Today has not been a good day in puppy-land. Nick and I have a sound machine sitting next to the bed that plays "soothing" noises which are supposed to help us sleep (it has almost 30 different sounds; I think we've only ever used five of them, max). This morning I woke up not to "White Noise" but to the sound of a little doggy peeing on the carpet. So I jumped out of bed and started yelling "NO" and "BAD DAG" in a deep, scary, trying-to-imitate-a-pissed-off-Nick voice. Forest actually made eye contact with me but continued to do his business on the carpet! And it wasn't like a little squirt, he had a jet stream of doggy pee coming out of him, and the whole time I was yelling at him, all I could think was "Damn, that's a lot of pee." I can only assume that I slept in too late and Forest REALLY had to go, so even though the puppy knew he wasn't supposed to potty inside, he had no choice. That thought made me feel sort of bad for yelling at him, but not bad enough to stop me from locking him in his crate while I cleaned up the mess.

I'm not a morning person to begin with, so toss waking up early to clean puppy pee on that and I'm really not pleasant to be around. But as I let Forest outside to finish up (I doubted he had anything left after the mini reservoir he created in our bedroom but he proved me wrong by pooping on the lawn) and then dragged my ass around to make coffee and breakfast, I tried to keep reminding myself that Forest's a good dog and the accident this morning was kind of my fault.

About an hour later I had forgiven the puppy and decided to take him for a walk. We got about a block away from the house when he pooped on a neighbors' lawn. No problem, I used a plastic bag to clean up his mess, walked back to the house to drop off the goody-bag, and we started off again. We got almost two blocks away when Forest took another dump, although this time it was a little, um, liquidy. All right, fine, it was a tad more difficult to clean up but I wasn't going to leave puppy diarrhea on our neighbors' lawn. We walked back to the house again, and then started our walk for the third time. We got about halfway around the neighborhood when Forest stopped to go #2 for the third time in 15 minutes and the fourth time that day. And this last poop, dear God, it was terrible.

Flashback to Thursday night. Forest was playing with his rope toy when he suddenly started making gagging noises. I pried own his open his jaws, felt around his mouth with my finger, and pulled out a piece of string that had come off his toy. A few minutes later, I found him chewing on another piece. He was eating his rope toy! This was very bad.  As silly as it sounds, string is dangerous for dogs. I guess it can get wrapped around their intestine or something, making the dogs sick or even killing them. So I plucked all the loose strings from his toy and kept a close eye on him for the rest of the night. When I took Forest to doggy day-care the next day, I was relieved to know that someone would be around to watch him in case he got sick. I wondered how long it would take a piece of string to hurt a puppy or pass thru his system.

Well today I got an answer to my second query: it takes less than 48 hours for rope string to go from puppy mouth to puppy butt, and the end product is extremely disturbing. When Forest finished taking his fourth dump this morning, I saw a clump of poop just dangling from his butt. After a lot of cussing, I got closer to try to clean it up. That's when I discovered that the poop wasn't stuck to his fur, it was actually stuck to a piece of string that had not been fully dispelled from the puppy anus. After a lot more cussing, I found a stick and was able to scrape the rest of the poop and string out of his butt.

That fun activity officially killed my walking spirit and we quickly went home. Before I let him inside the house, I tried to clean Forest's backside with some paper towels and found another piece of string protruding from his a-hole! Somehow I got the brilliant idea that if I pulled the string out right away, poop wouldn't have a chance to get caught on it and we wouldn't have a dangling poop incident again. So I bent down close, making sure that I breathed thru my mouth, grabbed a hold of the string and pulled. Out popped the rope string with a mid-size turd clinging to the end of it like a grotesque lollipop. I'll admit it, I almost threw up.

So I've spent the majority of this beautiful Saturday letting Forest out every hour or so to fertilize our grass. It's starting to taper off now, so I can only hope that he'll be able to get thru the night without messing up his crate (and himself in the process) and that perhaps tomorrow, I'll wake up to my alarm clock instead of any other surprises.

What happens when I try to sleep in on a Saturday