Sandbag

Mia, our dog is now almost 3 years old and she is a "yard dog", constantly outside. Well, you would think she can't do much harm there. Wrong. She made herself the proud owner of our grill-cover and tore it apart. She apparently didn't like both our rubber doormats, for she shredded those. Several plastic pots stored under the building fell victim to her teeth and disappeared one by one in the garbage, chewed to pieces. My oh so carefully planted daylilies were dug up from out of the pot and made it, thanks to my quick intervention, to the front yard, out of her reach. A little toy, left behind by the neighbor's son...defragmented. Our plastic outdoor tables are constantly found scattered around the yard and the legs are already slightly mutilated. Our wooden benches bear teeth and scrape marks. Do you need me to go on??? Ok.....as you wish, even if you don't, hehe.

But... she really gets me aggravated. The yard-man came to mow the lawn and since we don't want her to get hurt and him to get annoyed, we put her up in the pen. We had another chiwawa (however it is spelled haha) in there, that couldn't run loose except under supervision, for she crawled under the fence and hit the road ...or the cars speeding by! She already found out she could crawl underneath the kennel door, so we put chicken-wire up, about a feet high. Mia refuses to go in by herself, so one of us has to carry her in. Yup...yesterday I had to do it, or at least try to. She is such a smart female dog! She drops on the spot and doesn't move. Now picture this: a two to three feet-tall dog, about 30-35 lbs, laying flat on the ground, acting like a bag of sand when you lift her up, letting all limbs hang as they hang and looking at me with eyes saying " I don't think so!!!" And she thought right. My strength is not that bad, but this "sandbag" was too much. I could lift her up, but not high enough to keep her paws from getting stuck in the chicken-wire. So I just had to let her go and hoped for the best. Nope, food won't work, and giving the example of stepping in and urging her to join, is useless. She would rather shut the door behind me, haha. I know the noise of the lawnmower scares her and I hoped she would take refuge under the building. And she did. So it went well after all. But at those times I get mad for being hindered by RA and having a "pretending-to-be-a-sandbag" dog haha.

Nah, seriously, I love the critter to death. Sometimes I want to, literally, haha. But those are only brief moments:-) She is something else, a real character. I just wished every now and then she would acknowledge that we have dominion over her!