- Never leave anything on the kitchen counters, and if you do, make sure the gate is up so she can't get in. (She could step over it she were smart enough, but she's not).
- I left a fresh baked blueberry lemon bread cooling on the counter. I walked in the laundry room to switch laundry loads, walked out. My homemade bread was just little crumbs.
- Don't leave chicken boiling around her. She will eat the chicken out of the boiling water, WHILE IT'S BOILING!
- Don't leave dishes in the sink OR a dish soaking, she will drink or eat whatever is in there.
- Refer back to always having a gate up.
(Forgot to put the gate up.)
- Never leave toilet seats up, she will drink the ENTIRE bowl of water and then leave slobber and a trail to where she goes to find trouble next.
- She's a wateraholic.
- The backyard. It's a mud pit thanks to her need to dig. You fill in a hole, 30 minutes later, it's a hole again. I swear she has a power...the power to not let grass grow.
(Said mud pit, right as you walk out the back door!)
- She runs laps around the backyard throwing tufts of grass EVERYWHERE. Basically, it's like a horse running and throwing up dirt, except she's not in a pasture or riding ring...she's in OUR BACKYARD.
- It has been raining A LOT. Mud pit for a backyard=a pissed mommy. I have given up cleaning the floors, other than sweeping.
- NEVER walk barefoot in our house, a mud pit means there will ALWAYS BE dirt on the floor, no matter how many times a day I sweep.
- Thank you, Mabel. You are such a gem.
(I didn't do anything.)
- Did you know Mabel has Mange. Yes, mange. Demodectic Mange to be exact. She got it from her Mom, the breeders didn't know the mom had it until Mabel was 7 months old. It was hereditary. At first we thought she just had bad allergies and her skin was getting irritated. Nope, She had Mange. It is not contagious and Stella and all other dogs she comes into contact with are perfectly safe. It's an adolescent type of mange, and she is growing out of it and looking MUCH better.
- Just to admit and say the word mange is HARD. It makes it seem like we are bad parents to her! But after dealing with it for 6 months, I know that we have treated it and it's almost gone. Plus, there was no way to prevent it, her Mom passed the stupid mite onto her.
(Here you can see some on her spots. It's not all over, just sporadic.)
- Like I said...NOT CONTAGIOUS.
- Ever wake up to a Great Dane standing on the side of the bed and wagging their tale. Wagging is an understatement. You should...it's such a great wake up call. From a dead sleep you shoot straight up in bed to "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom" as she wags her tail back and forth, on one side, hitting the bed, the other, the wall.
- Mabel can't sleep past 6:30. She doesn't have it in her. Hence the boom, boom, boom. If she's awake, we better be, too.
- Never put her in the bathtub to bathe. She doesn't do well. So when it's winter...have fun finding the warmest part of the day and then giving her a good scrub down with the water hose. There's a lot of shivering involved. Poor thing. But that mange has to be taken care of.
- Watch your water cups, or any cups for that matter, she will drink from them. Remember, wateraholic.
- She ate two holes in the wall. Not like "hey mom, I'm going to chew on the corner." It was more, "hey Mom, watch me do magic. I can eat a hole in the middle of the wall, no corner needed!"
There are MANY, MANY more Mabel "happenings" but I'm tired of reliving all this! Basically, it's like owning a horse, with bull tendencies.
On to her birthday night. She decided that when I put her outside for the last time before bed, it was a perfect time to run laps around the backyard. Fine, get it out...then come inside. And that she did, ran inside like a bull did a few circles around the house before flying down the hall and into the bedroom. All this WHILE flinging poo all over the house. That little sh*t had poo covering every paw and probably inches deep. How this happened, I'm still clueless considering I had JUST picked up all poo before taking the trash to the road! So, 7:30 at night, I am chasing her around the house trying to get her to the laundry room. She thought she was in a boatload of trouble so she was panicked..and panicked Mabel means MORE running like a bull around the house because she doesn't want to go in the laundry room. It was now 8pm and I was scrubbing carpets, cleaning and steaming the wood and washing rugs and dog beds. Happy Birthday, Mabel...you get to spend your birthday night sleeping in the laundry room...WITHOUT a bed. Now who gets the last laugh. Yeah, I still don't think I won that one. Dangit.
Yes, I just talked a lot of smack about my PUPPY. She is still a PUPPY! All 120 pounds. So these are all puppy stories. Everyone has them. I just think Mabel likes to remind me what it's like over and over and over and over. And she usually picks all the the "fun" ones for when Jason is gone. I swear, she has it in for me. But I love her anyway. She makes me laugh more than the girls do...that's probably because the girls are at school and I'm around Mabel 24/7. I just really would like to know...what is going on in that little mind of hers!
