Family news

No, that's not Dionne.  It's Dudley -- one of Dionne's brothers! 

Bonnie Mueller passed the picture on to me.  She's raising Dionne's sister Demi up in Orange County. We've had a few e-mail exchanges, and apparently she's also recently heard from Mary Beth Morrow, who's raising Dudley in central Ohio. Mary Beth reports that "he's a big, leggy boy, and so sweet! ...Dudley has been a confident, but calm puppy. He is a quick and eager learner, loves everyone, and was best buddies with my previous CCI dog, Kieran, who turned in for advanced training in Feb. Our biggest challenge so far has been with crate training, since Dudley did not seem to mind urinating in his kennel for the first several weeks/months. He is doing really well now and has gone to the door when he has to pee since he was a little puppy - he just didn't hold it very well or long in his crate. He can be a little bit overly excitable with initial greetings, but calms down quickly and seems to be fairly low key otherwise. I think he shows good potential so far..." (As he's her 14th CCI puppy, she speaks with the voice of Experience!)

Steve and I are pretty astounded by how much Dudley resembles Dionne.  Also amusing is the fact that we all were told initially that everyone in her litter was a blonde (including Dionne). No one seems to know how that miscommunication occurred, as none of us have had any contact with the "breeder/caretaker" (in CCI parlance). In contrast, when Steve and I were raising Dionne's predecessor, Darby, we had the polar opposite experience. Her breeder/caretakers wrote us regular and effusive e-mails, sent dozens upon dozens of her baby pictures, and generally maintained a very close contact.

We probably won't ever meet Dudley but hope we eventually do meet Demi (most likely on that dark day -- when the girls turn in for Advance Training.)

Nothing like a pal

This is what two ecstatically happy puppies look like.  On the left is Ella, while the insane looking animal on the right is Dionne. 

The girls are almost exactly the same age (Ella's five days younger.) When I picked up Dionne from the CCI's Southwest regional headquarters on December 5, Kathy Alameda also arrived to pick up Ella. Like Steve and me, Kathy and her husband have previously raised four CCI puppies, but then they took a long (8- or 9-year) break from raising. Still, I'd met Kathy before, through mutual friends who are active in puppy-raising, and I was delighted to learn that we'd be raising dogs on the same track.

When Kathy put out the word that she needed a puppysitter for Ella March 14-17, Steve and I volunteered to host her. It will be more work, but it will also be fun, we're confident, for the little girls to have four days of playmate-time. In preparation for that experience, I also agreed to bring Dionne up to Kathy's home the other day so that our two charges could meet before becoming roommates. 

We were pretty confident they'd get along, but to say they did feels like an understatement. Kathy has a huge yard, and Ella and Dionne tore around it at about 50 miles an hour. They did that not quite nonstop, because part of the time they were rolling in the grass, play-biting each other's necks. For all the wild play, we heard almost no growls or barking out of them (that's a CCI no-no.) 

Ella also led Dionne onto the landing of her swimming pool, but neither is confident enough for actual swimming yet (which is fine with Kathy and with me!) After almost an hour, we made the two puppies lie quietly near each other. They did fine with that too. 

I took some video footage of the two pups playing, as follows. There should be plenty more next week. 

Five months old!

So she's five months old today, and she looks way dreamier in this photo than she ever does in real life!  For this photo, she had little interest in looking into Steve's camera but wanted to squirm to the ground.

For as many dogs as we've had, it astounds me to see how fast they change. In real life (if not in the photo above), Dionne still looks like a puppy. But she won't for long.

Dionne just three months ago. Hard to believe.

Bye-bye baby teeth

A beloved dog toy around our house is the empty plastic milk bottle. We drink a lot of milk, so we have an empty every few days, and when we rinse one out and toss it to Tucker and Dionne, they get a lot of pleasure out of batting it around and chasing each other for possession of it. We can't let them keep one for long, or they chew the plastic into shreds that cut their gums. But for a few minutes, it amuses them. 

Yesterday I thought I'd blown it when, just a minute after doling out a freshly empty bottle to Dionne, I noticed it was finely coated with blood. Then I realized what had caused that: Dionne has been shedding her baby teeth right and left. They look like this: 

And their loss is a bloody business.  At another point yesterday, I found patches of blood all over Tucker's head, from the same cause.

Steve, the resident tooth-brusher, thinks Dionne only has one or two of the little guys left.  This should come as a huge relief to Tucker. She still loves to chew on him, but the bigger, rounder adult teeth hurt less.

Happily, teeth were the only thing she deposited around the house today. Yesterday morning, despite all our restrictions and confining her to an easily digestible diet, Dionne vomited yet again.  

The tummy wars

Our tummy trouble continues. After throwing up at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, Dionne seemed fine.  To forestall any more indiscriminate eating, we had her under almost constant scrutiny -- either on a leash or in her kennel or within our direct gaze. Still, yesterday in the middle of the morning, she vomited up her entire breakfast (she was in her kennel in Steve's office.)

As gross as it's been to find mystery objects (the larva, the bed stuffing) in Dionne's vomit, we were more bothered NOT to find anything in yesterday's offering. What's wrong?! But we remembered what vets have told us in the past when one pup or other has developed tummy trouble. The standard advice has been to keep the dogs off all solid food for 24 hours, then to gradually introduced bland stuff like rice and cottage cheese and canned pumpkin. We didn't do that earlier this week because we felt so bad about depriving a chowhound like Dionne of her chow.

She threw up a bit more (mostly liquid) in Tuesday afternoon, but she's acted fine since then. We've given her only water. Our plan is to feed her the rice etc. starting this afternoon and take everything super easy tonight and through tomorrow.

Still... it's so easy to screw up. This morning she was laying on the carpet next to me, up in my office.  I ran down into the kitchen to talk to Steve about something.

"Where's Dionne?" he suddenly asked me.

"Up in my office. But she was just lying there quietly. She's become a good girl, you know. She doesn't do bad things any more."

"Oh, right," he retorted, sarcastic.

A minute later, we heard her coming down the stairs to join us. But I could tell she had something in her mouth. I grabbed her; opened the jaws. Out tumbled the little glass bottle that just minutes earlier had been sitting on my desk, full of perfume.

It was empty. I raced upstairs and quickly spotted the little cork and label from the bottle. I could find no sign of the contents -- no damp, intensely fragrant spots anywhere in the room.

On the other hand, Dionne's breath was a curious mixture of open sewer and perfume. 

We have no idea what havoc this will wreck on her delicate stomach. We can only hope it functions like a tonic, though that seems unlikely.

Getting off

All the ground we've been covering with Dionne in the past few days has been gratifying. But it also has made us aware of a little problem area: she's still afraid to jump out of the kennel (in the back of our van.)

Ordinary treats just aren't cutting it.

The following video illustrates what we're up against. You'll see some success at the end of it, but that occurred Monday night when we took her to puppy class. The presence of the other pups lured her out.  But normally she finds it too creepy. 

Highs and lows

I thought I was going to have such a nice little post for today. At last night's puppy class, Dionne behaved well, despite the presence of two new little fluff balls that she obviously longed to romp with. It's hard to believe she looked like them just a few weeks ago. Now, halfway through puppy kindergarten, she's learned so much.









From the class, we drove to the yacht club to grab a couple of burgers, and once again, Dionne's behavior was exemplary, considering that it was her first time out to a restaurant, and that she's still less than five months old.

But things went downhill fast around 3:30 a.m., when she loudly threw up in her kennel. (This is our fourth vomiting adventure in the past 6 weeks. But who's counting?)


This morning, when I tried to use my newly developing diagnostic skills on the vomit, I found it looked like dogfood -- except that it was congealed into an almost solid mass. Poking at it with the turkey needles revealed that it was filled with tough, stringy, and obviously indigestible fibers.

I recognized those fibers -- the stuffing from the little dog bed she's been chewing on since we first introduced her to it.

I can be soft-hearted, but I try not to be soft-headed for too long. The bed is now in the trash.

Here's the bed, in the dumpster.

And Dionne seems as energetic as ever. We withheld breakfast, but fed her her normal lunch, which she wolfed down. She's on VERY tight restrictions, however, as we had a load of mulch delivered Sunday. We can only imagine what it would do to her delicate tummy, were she to start snacking on it. We don't intend to find out.