Quick Update

On Paul: He went to see an orthopedic about his broken clavicle, and found out he has to wear the figure eight sling another 3-5 weeks. He was also very sternly lectured about not using that arm at all. It's very hard for him not to be able to hold his children. Once the bone has healed, he'll have to rehabilitate the muscles in his left arm. Then he'll be able resume holding Maggie and Max with both arms, and I'll be able to walk Asia again.

On Max: Potty training has pretty much fallen to the wayside, as Max has lost interest. He still uses the toilet about once a day in efforts to procure M&Ms. The process has added a whole new array of amusing vocabulary combinations to Max's repertoire, like "a big poop coming," which of course he never tells me in time to get him to the potty. When Max is perfecting a new word he practices combining it with all the important people in his life. His latest, "Maxi's butt, Da-Da's butt, Maggie's butt, Oma's butt, Opa's butt, Asia's butt, Ma-Ma's BIG butt." Thanks kid.

On Maggie: She's eating, pooping, drooling, crying, cooing and smiling. She's also getting Ma-Ma's BIG butt back in to shape, by forcing her to dance her to sleep twenty times a day. Since we never invested in a rocking chair, this has been both of our children's preferred methods of going to sleep in infancy. I consider it my exercise routine, and I recently added squats to my impressive dance routine. It's a good thing we live on the top floor.

On Asia: Poor dog hasn't gotten much exercise lately, since I can't take her for hour long evening walks anymore. She's been a champ about it though, and is pretty much doing the same as Maggie, eating, pooping and drooling.

On Me: Read above, as my life revolves around these three people and our crazy pooch.

Raising Asia

When my husband and I first got married five years ago, there were two things I really wanted, a dog and children. My husband wasn’t convinced, about either. After one year of continuous hounding (no pun intended), I started to make some inroads towards getting a dog. I didn’t have him 100% committed, but we were getting somewhere. We did loads of research, and talked about the various breeds that would fit our lifestyles. But all this talk was going nowhere, and I was getting impatient.

A woman who I volunteered with had just adopted a mutt to be a companion for her aging Shelty. However, the dogs weren’t getting along, and the new dog had severe anxiety and jealousy issues. Being the sap that I am, I immediately fell for this poor dog’s sob story. She was on her fifth home in the first six months of her life, no wonder this dog had issues. Surely, I the compassionate and patient human was the right person to “rehabilitate” this dog, being that I had absolutely no dog training experience whatsoever. I went to visit the dog that evening after work, and when I got home, I told Paul that I had found a dog that I wanted him to meet. What I didn’t tell him was that this dog was coming home with us for a trial weekend. My heart was bigger than my common sense, and we kept her. That is how Asia became part of our family.

Asia was a case study in separation anxiety. She barked, jumped and eliminated in her crate, whenever we left the house. By the time we got home, she’d be covered in poop. I only worked two minutes from home, so I naively thought it would help if I returned home for lunch every day. So for several weeks, I’d come home for lunch, quickly bathe her and rush back to work, only to have to do the whole thing again when I got home that evening. This got old fast.

With time, patience and loads of research on training, Asia’s anxiety didn‘t disappear, but it got less. However, whenever one of us was sick, or on vacation or for some reason spent an abnormal amount of time at home with Asia, the anxiety would rear it’s ugly head, and we would have to re-train her again. Taking her to boarding kennels proved disastrous. The only place we could leave her was with a good friend who also had a dog. Having another dog to wrestle with seemed to dispel Asia’s anxiety. We could also leave her with my parents, but she would act depressed and morose, sleeping the whole time and not eating.

With our recent move back to Germany, Asia’s anxiety has again reared it’s ugly head, and besides driving us crazy, it’s severely irritating our neighbors. So once again, we’re re-training our dog. And, I keep wondering, when is she going to learn that we always come back?