I have decided to accept the fact that Pippin may not really like my brother. My brother, Brother Mary Isaiah of the Dominican Order, aka Uncle Mark, just left after 2 days with us. We always enjoy spending time with him and I was looking forward to introducing the newest member of our family.
When Mark first arrived, I expected some resistance from the pup. After all, this is his territory and a new person was "invading". I took the family (minus my husband who was at work - luckily for him, haha) to the park. There, they seemed to get along and I was optimistic. The drive home was uneventful.
Back inside the house, however, the barking started. I tried everything the trainer said to do: ignore him (how the heck do you do this without going deaf), having my brother act like a bear (he does this very well), tying him to me (he was supposed to be bored to death just watching me clean house...yeah right). I finally had to resort to attaching his leash to a pole in the back. When he didn't bark for a while, I brought him back in. He behaved for a while and finally went to bed without any more barking episodes.
Unfortunately, this did not last throughout Mark's whole stay. It got to the point where I would hear Pippin growl and I would cringe. We were all lucky that the weather allowed us to go out; I think I would have had to keep Pippin tied up outside the whole time my brother was here.
Today, I wanted to go to 2 shops on the Yarn Shop Hop Contest. According to Mapquest, it should have only taken me less then an hour to travel to them both. I expected us to be home within 3 hours. Because of the curvy road and that I didn't have a blasted map of my own city, we were out for 5 hours. Poor Pippin was in his crate for 5 whole hours. I could have cried.
I had to drive Mark to the train station with the kids in tow. I felt so bad about Pippin being alone almost the whole day that I took him with us. I put him on my lap as I drove. My brother was next to me and I was amazed that Pippin didn't protest. Not even a little possessive growl.
I mentioned this out loud, and my daughter piped, "Maybe Pippin is glad that Uncle Mark is leaving." Ahhh the blatant honesty of kids.
No comments:
Post a Comment