New dog gushes

Here is an update on how our new dog is doing.  I admit I'm not a huge fan of "oh, see how cute my pet is!" kind of stories, so I'm going to try to corral these all into one post.  But I will have this one post, because our pet is so darned cute!

We got our dog from the local SPCA; she came to this shelter from the southern and eminently spell-able state of Mississippi.



Prewash has been with us for two weeks now.  She trends toward being extremely mellow; the photo at the right might give you a sense of that.  Her first night, after we'd been in bed a half hour, my husband asked me if I'd put the dog in her crate and I said, "No; she's been lying on the floor next to me this whole time!"  She's definitely a much calmer dog than our last attempt, and even calmer than our earlier beloved Miser Dog (whom she looks a lot alike!).

At the same time, she gets along fairly well with other dogs (unlike all other dogs that I've own, which have been selfish and nasty little brutes around other four-legged creatures).  It's a lot of fun to take her to the dog park and let her run wild, because she can tear back and forth with the best of them.  And when we get back home, she goes from 60 to 0 in about ten seconds, curling up quietly again.  Magic.

She already follows me around everywhere. So that's good.  And she's super gentle with the kids and with my granddaughter, even when Baby-A gets in her face and "tickles" her or takes her toys.  

The cliff of death.
Ain't gonna venture over the edge.

She's also supremely trainable, from what I can see. The day we brought her home, she had apparently never heard of this strange custom called "sit" and thought it was some kind of torture/intimidation. On a walk the first night, she was essentially a paddle ball bouncing back and forth between me and the end of the leash, in every direction she could manage.  Woo!  That was a whole body workout!  But now, just two weeks later, she's pretty much got "sit" and "heel", and we're starting to work on "stay".

Perhaps more story-worthy:  we discovered the night we brought her home that she was terrified of stairs.   If she was downstairs and I went upstairs, she might as well have been watching me ascending like Jesus to heaven on a cloud, as far as she could dare follow me.  If  I carried her up to my sewing room, and then went down a two-step set of stairs to J-son's room, she looked at the two stairs down to the landing like it was a cliff at the edge of a bottomless pit.

Nope, better to hunker down here
than to risk catastrophe.

So we have done a bunch of leash work, walking her around a park near my college, up and down progressively more stairs (the four stairs at the playground, the six stairs in front of an office building, etc), and now she barrels up and down the stairs in the house like a pro.  We've even managed work our way up to the gold standard: navigating her way in and out of her dog run.  To do this, she has to go 

• down the basement stairs,
• into the utility room,
• up a set of wooden stairs I built 8 years ago,
• through a dog door built into a boarded-over window of a window well,
• and up out of the window well to the ground of her dog run.  

Of course, to come back into the house she needs to do all of that in reverse.  And now she can.  She hasn't yet decided on her own initiative to make the trek to the dog run (we've had about three accidents in the house so far), but I'm optimistic for the future. 

She doesn't bark at strangers, which is both a blessing and a disadvantage.  It'd be nice to have a burglar alarm.

Did I mention she follows me around?  She really likes to be with me, which means when I'm home I know exactly where she is, which is great.  She doesn't much like to be alone, but she seems to take to the crate reasonably well when I have to leave the house.  

As for living up to her name, she is awesome at Prewashing the dishes.  She's ecumenical in her tastes, and she licks all the dishes clean, and then double clean just to be sure.   (After which, we put them in the dishwasher -- not back in the cupboards.   I promise!)

And, perhaps most importantly, here in the Miser Mom household, she's universally adored.  It's not just me doting on her: the kids want to be around her.  They love snuggling up to her, taking her for walks, giving and getting a bit of physical affection.   She's good with the family, and she's good for the family.

And that's the end of my "isn't she adorable?" post.