ants in my pants

dear diary,
so i helped mom put my toyfriends away and have been trying to be a good boy about not running around too much. most of the time it's okay cuz george is on and i'll just sleep, but you know with all that sleeping, well, sometimes it seems like i got ants in my pants and i just gotta shake em out, know what i mean? i mean, i'm only like almost three now and i'm not goin on any walks and i can't kill my toyfriends and i know there are squirrels out there that totally need chasing. but now that my kitty perches are put away, i can't watch them from my windows anymore and the only time i get to see them is when dad carries me outside to do my whiz biz. talk about rrrruffff! mom promised she would look into things we can do so i'm not just sleepin all day and getting all antsy-pantsy at night. diary, if u got any ideas of things i can do that are easy on my back, tell me. i got nuttin, other than me eatin rawhide all day and mom looked at me like that would never happen. if a fella can't play, a fella's at least got to eat, dang it.

hey speakin of playin, i am totally looking forward to the day i can meet up with this here oskar fella. mom wanted me to show you a peek at oskar's other harness, an ambery widewale corduroy number that she thought could use a little pizazz with a small touch of red. just enough to scare away the winter blahs, which i can totally relate to right now. mom likes to think that if oskar's other harness is what astro would wear if elroy took him to the jet screamer concert after party, then this amber one is what maybe the professor from gilligan's island would wear if he were back teaching classes and maryann dressed him. a class up north or at least during winter, because like the other harness, this one is lined in flannel, too.



so that is it for today. i hope u are having a super swell day. me, i mostly plan to sleep. if i do get more ants in my pants, well, maybe i can eat them.

toodles!
b.

snoozing and sewing

Tiny chumley is sleeping quietly today, lulled into a trance by George's gentle warm breeze. It's another one of those days where it seems like nothing is wrong with him at all. Yet I'm sure he still wonders what all the fuss is about, why his kitty perches are turned on end and his toyfriends are tucked away for safekeeping. Why dad went on walkies without him yesterday. Why we'll be going for walkies today while he sits in his crate. But despite these changes, he's been content for the most part to lie quietly on the floor, on his blankie and sheepskin, and for that I am grateful.

Baxter doesn't care much for being away from the action, even if the action is only the sound of a sewing machine whirring away or dad talking on the phone. He likes being close. He likes to know what his humans doing. I suspect if he gets antsy as a young dog might, we'll need to set up his crate, but for now and with our vet's blessing, we'll leave our snoozy boy to live life on the floor.

Two to three more weeks. I hope he doesn't miss out on all of autumn, but most of all I hope he'll just stay happy. All little doxies deserve at least that much, no matter how hard their bodies might try to work against to them.

I thought I'd also take a moment today to share some peeks at Oskar's new duds. Busy hands make for a less busy mind, so it's been good to do something other than wait and wonder. Today's peek is at Oskar's blue and winter white houndstooth woolen selection, all finished now and ready to wear. I'm glad I didn't have the indigo denim I thought I had for the binding, as I think hand dyed fabric always adds that much more depth visually. I can't wait to see how it looks on little Oskar.



Tomorrow, a Baxter update, and a peek at Oskar's gold and navy duds.

the lessons of time

An ear piercing cry came from our little kielbasa this morning as dad gently started unearthing Baxter from deep beneath our covers. I suppose we needed the reminder that our little boy has not yet healed after all, that time still taunts our patience like a chittering squirrel just out of reach.

So many questions now race through my mind, at speeds much faster than time will allow me to find answers for them. I sit here now and stew, ever so impatiently, unwilling to let the obvious and practical distract me from my futile quest for immediate resolution.

I can see why time had to teach me a lesson. Why time had to put me back in my place. Only three days since his tail was first tucked, I miss scoopable Baxter. I miss the cuddly boy I can pick up without thinking, without causing accidental pain. I want my bouncy boy back. I want my boy better. Now.

And so I relent to time's teaching this Sunday morning. Quietly wait, I must, just as Baxter already knew to do. Tiny chumley's tail hangs today like the question mark that resides in both our minds. Not quite pained, yet not quite relaxed, we both wait to see how this story will unfold. I think we can all use a steaming pile of laundry this fine autumn day.

an inconvenient truce

dear diary,
so i have no idea what the fuss is all about but lately mom n dad have been treatin me like royalty. i don't mind, except for the fact that they won't let me horse around as much as usual. that is really the pits cuz guess what - a package came yesterday and inside was a present from oskar - for ME! it was a bunny toyfriend!! how could i be any luckier? my day was definitely lookin up after having spent some of it in a box while mom ran some errands. i sure hope i can meet oskar one day so we can play together. he seems like such a good boy.









anyways, here is me, playin with my new friend bunnito bunnalini just moments before mom told me i had to sign an interim peace treaty with him on account of my neck thingy and how i should take it easy for a while.

crikey! i'm a wolf, not an ambassador.














but mom as right cuz i don't wanna be hurtin like that again. so with great reluctance, i stopped trying to kill him. and cuz neither of us know how to sign our names and what with the piggy flu n all, we just kinda bumped paws.









it's really not fair, diary. who ever heard of a truce with a bunny??? sigh. but i guess i can live with being nice to bunnito for a couple of weeks. i am glad i still have my dewclaws cuz i am counting down the days and need all my toes and my tail and both my ears just to do it. just 13 more days til you're toast, bunnito bunnalini.












pssst - i've been thinking about it and don't tell anybody but i've been havin fun with bunnito and i don't even have to de-stuff him to do it. maybe this truce ain't so bad after all. thanks again oskar and oskar's mom for my new toyfriend! yippee!!

toodles,
b.

pain in the neck

Tiny chumley awoke this morning and probably wondered what it was he had done wrong, the way his mom and dad were still looking at him and carrying him all over the place. With Baxter's condition stable but tail still kinda tucked, I am sure he heaved a sigh of relief when we finally turned George on to a constant low heat, and let him sleep most of the day while we waited for the vet to arrive for Baxter's already-had-been-scheduled weeks ago three o'clock appointment.

By two in the afternoon, our roasted pup left George in search of sun, and wandered about with his tail hanging freely. Holding it, at times, just upright enough in the air, so that I could tell where he was as he navigated past fabric piles on the floor.

Although I was glad to see Baxter's symptoms fading, I was also concerned that the root of the problem might elude us with only minutes to spare from Baxter's appointment. Was our wiener even capable of playing us?

With the help of some range of motion tests, our vet ferreted out Baxter's neck as the source tiny chumley's very real discomfort. All dogs should be able to turn their heads practically 180 degrees on either side to essentially lick at their ribs, yet Baxter let out a giant yelp when his head was turned about 75% to the right. Considering the second dumb thing Baxter did the day before was try to do an unsuccessful half turn jump to get on his kitty perch and ended up slamming the lower ottoman with his right neck and shoulder, things sorta made sense.

And so for the next two weeks, Baxter will get a tasty rimadyl half tablet with each meal. An anti-inflammatory, that should help whether his problems are muscular or disc related. I am relieved to see that chumley is acting like himself again. If his problems come back, we'll know his issue is disc related, but I am crossing my fingers that my little buddy will have many more tail wagging days ahead of him.

tucked tail

Baxter isn't much of a jumper, so I was surprised when I caught our boy doing this in the heat of a squirrel hunt yesterday afternoon. I didn't think much of it then, but now at midnight, I can think of nothing else. With his tail kept tucked for most of the evening and having mildly whimpered when we must have picked him up incorrectly, something is definitely up with the little shaver. Yet he didn't flinch a bit when I walked my fingers down his spine, still has feeling in his toes, still can walk as normally as he always does, with exception to that tail being tucked. Is he merely putting on a brave face or does he have injuries far more severe than he is letting on?

Our previous experience with back injuries were obvious examples of knowing when to seek emergency care. Unsure of what to make of Baxter's mild symptoms, I called the emergency specialty hospital just now and they agreed that Baxter could wait til morning to be seen by our regular vet. I dearly hope our little boy's injuries turn out to be nothing, yet I know we will love him and care for him all the same no matter how this turns out.

anti-ode to baths

o shower stall where u make me clean,
why is it that you're so mean?
you steal my stink and make it worse
after the dog park, it's such a curse.

the pawgiene routine

Okay, I'll come out of the closet. I have a thing for nattily groomed dachshund paws. Our previous two boys struggled too much in their younger years and were too arthritic in their older years to maintain a rigorous nail trimming schedule. By the time they became immobile and we carried them practically everywhere, their paws were like gnarled white boots tipped with bear claws. They did not have nails to be proud of, but both humans and dogs agreed the bear claw look was better than the trauma of frequent nail cutting, and we loved them, claws and all, til the day it was time to say goodbye.

Baxter has been a much easier sell on the nail trimming front, which isn't the same as saying trimming Baxter's nails is easy. Keeping Baxter's nails nubby cute comes with diligence and patience. And an extra set of hands doesn't hurt either. In our earliest days with Baxter, I tried the same bypass clippers that I used on our pair of boys, sticking to the method that worked so well before, of cutting nails while the subject was sound asleep on our sofa. While then ten-month-old Baxter gently made suckling noises to the dreams inside his head, I cleaved each nail in small amounts as a chef would shave a truffle, in hopes of avoiding the painful surprise of cutting into the quick. But two weeks later the inevitable happened, and the jig was up. This dachshund was too young and smart to sleep through anything he didn't want to have happening to him.

I next turned to all sorts of files - ceramic, metal, and emery - for human, dog, and even wood - and finally settled on the alternate use of the coarse side of a human nail file and a diamond cut swedish style foot file. Filing each nail, one by one, all while Baxter laid on his back atop a supportive pillow. Not unlike a day at the spa for Baxter, but incredibly time consuming and exhausting for his human. Surely there was something better for both of us.

By the time I was ready to move on from files, the rotary pet nail tool ads started appearing on tv. I was intrigued and tempted, but leery of overpaying for what might be a scary, loud piece of single-purpose junk. So I drove all over town in search of the Dremel Stylus, a cordless wonder that I knew to be fairly quiet and powerful from having worked with one at a friend's house. A tool that I could use for crafty projects should this whole experiment backfire.

But backfire it thankfully did not. It probably helped that I introduced dremel slowly, and always ended Baxter's early encounters before he had time to consider it foe. For the next eight weeks or so, the dremel worked itself in to his pawgiene routine, a couple of nails at a time. I experimented with various speeds and found that a setting of 2 was too slow to effectively remove nail quickly, and a setting of 4 was too fast and could cause uncomfortable heat buildup if the dremel lingered too long in one spot. I determined that 3 was the Goldilocks of settings, juuust right for Baxter's nails if I kept the tool in constant motion like I should. By the time the dremel replaced all the manual file work, it was clear that one more change to the new process was in order. Baxter's nails would be much better shaped if the dremel-er was not also the person holding the dremel-ee. And thus was born our two person dremel process, with me dremelling away while dad holds Baxter in his lap.

Baxter endures his mostly biweekly pawgiene sessions with begrudging tolerance, though he sometimes likes to test the waters to see what he can do to shorten the experience. He is a dachshund, after all. A curious wet nose too close to the sanding drum, a tug of his stubby paw out from grasping hands. But all in all he's been a good sport with my desire to maintain the cuteness of his paws. I'm sure he wonders what the fuss is all about. They're just paws, he thinks. If a rabbit doesn't care what they look like, why should he?

a rose by any other name

It is amazing that Baxter comes to us at all when we call him, considering all the nicknames we have for him. Baby dog, sweetie, cutie, pumpkin, beex, beexstuh, henry, george, semi-Frodo, little boy, schlomo schneebly, home slice, homie, microdot, munchkin, tiny tim, wienuh, itta bena. All just to name a few.

In thinking about this list I realized there is one affectionate nickname we haven't called Baxter lately, Chub Chub. He was at his heaviest when I first met him, only recently deposited in his new foster home. I mentioned in an earlier post that Chubby Baxter weighed in at 22 pounds, or four pounds over his ideal weight. When he came to his foster mom's door to greet me, it was as though his barks arrived first and his jiggly wiggly body caught up from behind in sinusoidal fashion, wave after wave of chub piling up upon each other as he carefully ran/skipped so as to not be thrown off balance by the opposing forces created by his jiggling. Back then, watching him run what we now affectionately call his fat dog run was like watching a bridge during an earthquake.

We were still fresh from grieving at the loss of our prior two boys, Kep and Padua, when we came across the opportunity to adopt Baxter. We weren't sure if the timing was right. We weren't sure if we were betraying the memory of our boys for whom we had loved and taken care of for sixteen years. But there Baxter was, barking at my feet, jiggling all the while and following his host dog's lead to treat me with suspicion.

After giving out a handful of treats, we made our way to the sofa. More treats gave way to a truce, and finally, I was able to pick up this prospective pup, this big bowl of warm jelly, and put him in my lap. Though his body spilled out and over my lap, his settled silence made it clear this lap was fine and he quietly waited for more treats with his now characteristic bright eyed stare. A polite and gentle boy, Baxter was a innocent soul willing to put his trust in me if I would only accept it. Our little Chub Chub came home with us for good two weeks after that visit, in mid-November.

Weight loss for Baxter came fairly simply, really. It should be so simple for humans. We fed him the kibble amount corresponding to his target weight, and as an added bonus walked him twice daily. Treats like rawhide were worked into the plan, but we tried to be mindful of how this affected his overall calorie intake and adjusted his meals accordingly. By spring, he was well on his way to ideal weight. By early summer, thanks to an unfortunate bout with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, he briefly dipped below it.

Sometimes when I whistle for him now, Baxter will still run up with his fat dog gait, only now there are no seismic bodily disturbances to interrupt his travels, no worries about his caboose having to catch up with the rest of him. Looking back I now realize his early nickname of Chub Chub encapsulated more than just his physical presence, it memorialized who he still is today. A gentle soul, an innocent and trusting friend. Baxter may now be a lot skinnier, but he will always be Chub Chub.

thursday's forecast: solar flares

Since coming to our house over a year and a half ago, Baxter has become the sun around which his humans orbit. His rays of boundless joy and innocence warm our heart and enrich our souls. He is the light at the end of an awful work day.

Our orbits around this little red dwarf are sometimes literal, as we carefully walk around him when he's chosen to sleep in a sliver of sun that's smack dab in the middle of a busy pathway. Sometimes, after he's made his way into our bed at night, we are awakened by this little sun, his paws pushing on us in an attempt to make more space for himself in the center of our bed. Even suns, it seems, need their beauty sleep.

Today as I write this entry with Baxter nearby, it seems our little sun is experiencing another type of solar effect. Tiny toots provide chorus to the music playing gently in the background. Pfft. Pffffooooo. Squeak. Pfeep. Bup-bup-bup. Pfweeeeeee. Solar flares of a different kind. Our tiny red dwarf, a gaseous giant in disguise.

a year ago...

Next week marks the one year anniversary of Baxter's first (and hopefully only) visit to the emergency vet. It all started with couple days of soft runny poop which we tried to manage with added fiber in the form of canned unsweetened pumpkin, but his symptoms progressed to vomiting of undigested food and worsened through the evening. Once blood started to show up in both his vomit and stool, we knew we had more than a mild case of upset tummy and set off for the emergency vet in the middle of the night. The diagnosis: hemorrhagic gastroenteritis (HGE). It's hard to say what Baxter might have gotten into that would cause HGE, but we're pretty sure the tiny bit of dead baby bird remains that we caught him eating the day before didn't help. After a night in the animal hospital, Baxter came home to us with the antibiotic metronidazole and his new found favorite food in the world, canned Purina EN Chicken and Rice. May this never ever happen again!

update 6/21/09: hmm, I have no idea how to respond to a comment since it seems blogger just ate my response so I am posting here. HGE isn't typically associated with an overeating incident. In fact, Baxter probably had very little to eat because he was already in the throes of being witheld food for a possible upset tummy. There is no specific known cause of HGE but most theories support the notion that it is a bodily reaction to bacterial/viral toxins and/or parasites, and that stress may also be involved. In Baxter's case, we know he got into that dead baby bird (he didn't kill it, it was already dead for who knows how long and he only ate a SMALL amount before we got to him) and he also got into a nugget or two of rabbit poop (a delicacy, apparently) before his HGE incident. Baxter's gastrointestinal system may have already been compromised by the time he ate this junk. Since he was already serving up the soft serve style poop, he was on a reduced/no food timetable to help settle his tummy. The problem with this, in retrospect, is that Baxter's the kind of small dog that tends to overproduce stomach acid on an empty stomach, as evidenced by the occasional morning yack of bile. So could eating that junk on an EMPTY stomach have been the cause? Was he stressed because he wasn't getting any food? Was it something else?? Oy. Other than keeping our fingers crossed, we try our best now to keep Baxter's poop nice and firm with the addition of Konsyl, metamucil's sugar free cousin, and we supervise his hunts as best we can in a yard that we check for obvious dead stuff (which isn't that often considering we live on less than a third of an acre in the suburbs). Happy Hunting!!

riddle me this

Take one teaspoon Metamucil, one tablespoon of canned dog food, and three tablespoons of water and what do you get?


One happy doggie begging for more!

don't squeeze the charmin

I get the impression Baxter didn't quite appreciate how wonderfully his slow rainy day was going until it was rudely interrupted by a visit from his vet late this afternoon. He played. He ate. He kept his tail at half mast, indicating his slight displeasure from being ousted from our bed the night before and wishing that we would pay more attention to his pleas for rawhide. He should have known that something like this would happen the moment the stinkies came back, but he didn't, and the tail said it all.

His tail spoke more loudly and even drowned out his barking when he saw the vet's white van pull into our driveway. He held it high with tiny hackle ridge raised, making it quiver as he barked, telling the van to come again some other day. His resolve to scare away the van melted into an immediate desire to protect what he realized would be the focus of this visit, and as we approached the van, his tail took an immediate downswing. With his tail tucked tightly between his legs, and all four legs stubbornly planted so that it looked like we were dragging Baxter like a sled across our concrete driveway, Baxter made sure we knew that he was on to us. Nobody would be messing with his rear today.

But when you're seventeen pounds and cute no matter how high your hackles are, it's a battle you know you're going to lose. Just as quickly as Baxter came to appreciate the boring first half of his day, he was equally quick in accepting his new fate once he was brought inside the van. One expresssion, one diet additive recommendation to beef up his poop, and one prescription later, Baxter emerged from the van as happy as ever, though thankfully much emptier. Here's hoping his bottom and his new diet will cooperate!

malodorous malady

Baxter is our fourth dachshund, but our first to give us reason to research the topic of overactive canine anal glands. Sure we had the occasional "what IS that smell?" with our last pair of boys, but they seemingly outgrew their mysterious malodorous moments. We never really had to figure out what that smell was until we were gifted with the same odor for several days in a row from Baxter's beefy behind. Two anal gland expressions, one course of antibiotics, and one steroid shot later, we are again faced with figuring out what's up with this pup's very overactive anal glands. Other than making with the stinky, he is the same happy go lucky barky pup that he's always been. Firm poops, no scratching, no scooting. So what's the deal? We'll see what the vet has to say tomorrow.