Monday, July 13, 2009

Animals in our house

So, the only animals we have now are fish! A stupid agressif Gourami that scares every other fish I will try to put with it into having a heart attack after eating off the end of their tale...and a gold fish (2 different aquariums).

We have had hermit crabs too. They are interesting. We had cats too! We got rid of them while I was very pregnant with #3 and I caught my 2 daughters (they were 3 and 2 years of age) emptying a very dirty cat litter with their hands and sticking it all inside my dryer! After I screamed, I grad them both (1 under each arm) ran up the stairs and washed them in the tub from head to toe (yes, I agree, quite an overreaction) and then phoned the health line to make sure they shouldn't get some kind of vaccin shot and they nurse tells me there is no danger for them only for me because I am pregnant. Being a nurse, I already knew that part but I was always very safe with the cat litter. The cats left the house on that day!

The husband being allergic couldn't believe how much better he could breathe after a week without cats in the house. So we have agreed to no longer have animals with fur!

But of course, we miss having cats or dogs of our own!

So the option we (well, I) came up with is to babysit animals. Here today and gone in a week! It is a fun compromise!

So far we looked after a 6 month cat (Mousseline) for a week and Margot the pug.

We had Margot in April for 5 days and now we just got her again last night for a week. Back in April, everything went pretty well except for the sleeping part. She is use to sleeping under the covers with her owner, so this was not an easy pattern to break. She would whine all night if we left her in her cage. We tried letting her loose in the house and she ended up on my sons bed which was a scary thing for him. We tried letting her sleep ON our bed but she would non-stop try to get under the covers and finally on her last night I put her bed in our room and she finally had a good night...

So I was looking forward to her coming back last night thinking this will be easy. She is a great dog and great with the kids and now the sleeping thing would be all worked out, so no worries! right?

Well, The second daughter and I took her for a walk to go and meet up with the eldest daughter and son at a friends house (they were doing a little skateboarding show thing) and the Margot found this very fascinated and wanted to get closer and closer and was really tugging at her leash and sure enough....GOT THROUGH THE COLLAR!!!!

Over an hour later and having about 15 people trying to circle around her and grab her and a very controlling man just drive me crazy (I actually told him twice to just go back in the house and I would look after it, we were on his lawn though, so he never left, and he is in the army, so he pointed out how we just were not following proper protocol very often!!) I finally decided to follow my 1st instinct being: Just walk home and Margot will follow...and sure enough. The husand and son were on bikes and she took off after them and went straight home and my son opened the house door and she ran right in!!

Oh man, can I tell you that this morning dogsitting has a totally different meaning to me! I don't know now that I want this extra responsability!

Did I mention that she slept not too badly after waking up the son a couple of times. His door does not have a handle right now...but that is a whole other story!

1 comment:

  1. I have a friend who's allergic to animal fur as well and their daughter is an animal lover, so they do the same thing as you - house sit a few dogs for friends.

    There are many days that I wish we were only housesitting our dog and someone was coming to take her back.....

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