Life with Puppy: Six Months

I can't believe my little baby puppy is going to be six months old on Saturday!!!  I tell Bryan all the time, JD is the best investment we have ever made!  He is so much fun to have around has so much personality!!  To date, he has only destroyed a down-alternative comforter which is fixable and a strap on a Camelback that Bryan bought me, which is also fixable.

JD is proving to be very much a people person, LOVES meeting new people and new puppies as well.  I weigh him in weekly and as of this week, he weighed in at 57 pounds!!!  (It's kind of fun because our Wii Fit has a "Pet Profile" section, so we entered both JD and Wrigley under there.)  He doesn't quite comprehend how big he is yet, he still thinks he is a tiny little puppy.  He's fun to when he plays with other dogs because he has learned to "box them out" (like in basketball).  He puts his little butt right in their faces and pushes them back until he gets to toy or whatever he is trying to achieve.

He's also hilarious to watch run - he runs with his butt down.  At first we always thought he was scared, but now he just does it all the time!  It's the weirdest thing.  Another weird habit is his need to suck, yes suck, on blankets.  A lady at our puppy class said it's because he never had a mama dog and so he does that as security, but he'll take his paw and "knead" the blanket like a puppy kneads a mama pup's belly to get milk. (Side note: Bryan's parents dog nips on blankets all the time and she too did not have a mama pup.)

While he is pretty much crate trained, he still prefers sleeping in our bed (a bad habit that I started when he weighed 20 pounds.) Every night he will jump into our bed and I'll let him lay there until about 10:30 and then he knows it's time to get in his kennel.  The minute he hears an alarm in the morning though, he rattles around in his kennel until we let him out and then he runs and jumps back into our bed where he'll go right back to sleep.

JD is also loving the snow.  I wish I had a better camera so I could capture it out side, (that is next on our wish list is a nice SLR camera.) Although temps have gotten down to negative 30 this winter, the cold doesn't phase him at all!  He'll still run and run in the back yard.  I can't wait for the summer when we can take him swimming and hiking.      

Christmas Tree Part Duex

Your eyes do not deceive you, yes, that is a different Christmas tree than we originally had.  Here's the story:

This is my first Christmas with a cat.  In all fairness, Bryan did try to warn me that Wrigley would think the tree is a giant toy.  But I have had dogs in the past who messed with the tree and even had one pull the tree on top of them, so I thought "Oh, it won't be THAT bad..."

I was wrong.

So very wrong.

We put the tree up on a Saturday afternoon and then left that evening to go to a movie. Upon our return, Bryan opened the door, closed it, looked at me and said. "You should probably just stay out here."  I pushed my way past him to find EVERY ordainment, candy cane, snow flake and even the star on the TOP of the tree was now scattered all over the living room floor.  You could even see where he had JUMPED to the top of the tree to get more ordainments.

 I hit the roof.

 Hard.

 I was threatening to take him back to the shelter, I was SO mad!  Bryan calmed me down (that's the short version of that portion of the drama) and the next day we put the tree back together and began putting Wrigley in the back room when we couldn't watch him. (With his litter, food and water of course... That didn't matter, he still meowed up a storm while he was in there.)

This strategy worked for a few days, but we left for a week-long trip to Phoenix that Wednesday and so he couldn't be locked in the back room while we were gone.  So the tree got locked in the back room.  As you can imagine, moving a tree to the back of the house caused the decorations to get just as messed up as when Wrigley attacked the tree.  

The whole reason behind putting an artificial tree up was so that it would last 5 weeks. (We put it up the weekend before Thanksgiving because we were in Phoenix until the 30th and I didn't want to deal with putting it up when we got home.)

 Well, deal with it I did.  Since I already had to re-decorate my tree, we went out and got a real one, something I never had as a kid but Bryan did have and loved.  I have to admit, I love how much taller it is.  It's not the fullest, but next year we'll spend more time picking it out.

 As for Wrigely and the new tree... Well, stay tuned, I have a good story about that too. :)

Life with Puppy: Week One

We survived our first week with our puppy!  Bryan said  to me today "I think you should get paternity leave when you get a puppy!"  That would be nice... Doubt that will ever happen though. 

I think the first week went pretty good though!  Potty training is going... OK.  I thought it was going well at the beginning.  At first, he would go to the back door and bark if he needed to go out, which I thought was just amazing!  However, he has since figured out that he really doesn't like cold and rain (which we've had a lot of lately) and therefore, finds it much easier to just pee wherever he might be standing, which is most often a carpeted area.  So, we've got to get him broke of that, I'll let you know how that goes.  We only had one major accident this week and that was because we tried leaving him in his kennel for 9 straight hours - not a good idea at all!  Our wonderful parents have offered to come over on their lunch hours though to let him out until he gets older so we don't have to deal with a smelly mess and batheing him every night - thanks Parentals!!!

So far he hasn't chewed anything of extreme importance.  I learned VERY fast to pick up my shoes as well as my purse - anything is fair game to him!  He loves his squeaky toys as well as any type of bone.  We started putting peanut butter in his Kong, however, I don't think that is agreeing with him tummy, so that has stopped for the time being.  He and the cat are developing a love hate relationship - JD loves to chase Wrigley and therefore, Wrigley hates JD.  However, we did see Wrigley try to play with JD once this week, but that was before JD caught him in his mouth... Poor kitty.

He is not quite sleeping through the night yet which is making for two very tired masters.  We're keeping our fingers crossed that it is coming soon though!  He loves sleeping in our bed with us and we've made the mistake of letting him in the moring between his 5 a.m. potty break and when we get up.  Now he thinks if he barks long enough, we'll let him up.  So that too has stopped. 

Even thought we're tired and a little frustrated with the potty training, Bryan and I LOVE having him around.  He is so funny to watch and has such a little doggie personality!  We start puppy classes on November 3rd, hopefully he'll be the smartest kid in the class. :)  I'll give you guys another update when there is something more to report on that his bathroom habits.

Introducing Jack Daniel aka "JD"

So, I finally won the battle of getting a puppy!!! :)  After months of BEGGING and quite frankly annoying the living hell out of Bryan, we picked up our 12 week old puppy on Friday afternoon: JD, which is short for Jack Daniel - Bryan's favorite thing in the world (next to me of course.)
 
We had a great first weekend at home with him, he is doing great with potty training, 85% of the time he will go to a door and bark when he needs to go out. Hallelujah! He is also doing very well with crate training, he didn't like being in there the first night, but by Sunday, he was going back to his kennel just to take a nap with the door open! It just warms a mother's heart! :)  

JD also met mom and dad's dog Sadie this weekend.  Sadie does not like other dogs and proceeded to show her teeth everytime JD got too close.  But Sadie is such a froo-froo dog that it was more funny than anything.  He also met Bryan's parent's dog Maggie.  Maggie is a pit-bull/terrier/beagle/boxer mix and VERY territorial.  She decided to claim all of JD's toys as her own and not let JD near them.  She snarled at him a few times which caused me to freak out and Bryan to laugh.  They'll be good friends though once the whole territorial thing has been established.  Which is good, cause we're going to need puppy-sitters! 

JD also met our cat Wrigley this weekend.  Wrigley has never encountered a dog that was not afriad of him, so he's not really sure what to make of this dog who is not intimidated by him at all... JD thinks Wrigley is there solely for him to chase... Which is pretty entertaining to Bryan and I for now, but we should probably break him of this.  

I'll post some more pictures of JD as he gets bigger, at 12 weeks he weighed in at 18 pounds!!! He is going to be a moose, his paws and ears are gi-normous!

Introducing Wrigley Fransico

I told you to be on the look out for a blog about the impact Tristan's cats had on me...

As many of you know, I am a huge dog person, I just love them! I want a puppy more than anything in the world, however, it would not be fair to subject a puppy to my lifestyle at the moment, living in an apartment and always being on the go. Bryan's mom is a huge cat person and as I have spent more time at his house, I have grown to love the little critters. (Even though Fuzzy has a tendancy to attack on occasion.)

So, I began toying with the idea of getting a cat. I was on the fence about it until I visited Tristan and Brody in Des Moines. Both of them have cats and while we were there I just absolutly loved playing with them! I decided that weekend to get my own. This past weekend I went to the Cedar Rapids Humane Society and found the little guy pictured above. He was the first one I saw when I walked in the room and it was love at first site! I started the adoption process and found out on Tuesday that I had been approved. I get to bring the little guy home next Friday.

While thinking about names, Bryan was adament that I name him Fransico. (He likes the way it sounds when he yells it.) I wasn't too crazy about it, but I definately liked the name Wrigley after my favorite teambaseball team, the Cubbies! However, Bryan informed me that he was going to call him Fransico regardless of what I named him and since I am relying on him for major support and guidance through this process (since I have no idea what I am doing with a cat!) I combine the two names and it actually sounds pretty cool!

After I get the little guy home next week, I will be sure to post more pictures and I am sure I will have many, many storied about him since I am clueless going in to this. He is going to pick up on this right away and take total advantage of it, I just know it. :) I am excited to have a pet to take care of though and have something other than myself to talk to when I am at my apartment.