Mother’s Day is here and we thought it would be great to focus on all the different types of moms out there. Here is my story.
I am the mother of my four year old mixed-mutt Kaycee and you bet I expect at least a card from her for Mother’s Day… with the help of my husband of course :)
When we first got Kaycee she was only 8 weeks old. She was being sold by a man on the side of the road and was covered in her own urine and feces. I had never been a huge dog person but seeing the sad look on her adorable face made it almost impossible to say no – that and my husband had been wanting a dog for years (he has had dogs all of his life).
To say the least, she was a little terror. I could have sworn every time she chewed a pillow, looked the other way when I called her name, or peed on the floor- she was doing it to spite me. It was definitely a love hate relationship – it even got to the point where I considered re-homing her. A week in, my husband told me, “if we have to give her up, we need to do it now. I am already getting attached to her”. The way he loved her and the way she obviously loved him made me committed to trying to make it work.
We got her a trainer (well mostly got me a trainer) and I bought “Puppies for Dummies”. After our first training session – I was shocked! My little monster was a genius! She sat after being asked once, laid down, and stayed after just a few tries. Obviously she was a smart girl… so she WAS just disobeying me! After a week of training and un-“dummifying” myself about puppies – I learned that puppies are JUST like human babies (a fact that is so obvious now, but to someone who wasn’t a dog person, this was shocking). With a little love and patience my bratty, monster puppy would grow into a respectful and loving adult!
I realized she wasn’t peeing on the carpet to spite me, she just really had to go and I didn’t take her outside. I understood that she wasn’t chewing the furniture to make me angry – her teeth were coming in and it helped soothe her gums.
It was like a light bulb turned on in my head – she wasn’t doing things that she knew upset me, rather she was just exploring the new, unfamiliar, scary, big world that she had just entered… and with my help I could teach her that the vacuum wasn’t as scary as it sounded and that the carpet was for laying on, not chewing.
I may not have any children yet… but I do have a “doghter”. I worry about her when I leave to work, I try to find her the best babysitter when we go on vacation (when we can’t take her) and I do my best to make sure she knows how to share and play nicely.
I never thought it would be possible to love a dog so much. If you ask me I am a mother.
To all you dog moms out there – Happy Mother’s Day.
– Phuong and Kaycee
