How To Fall In Love...

…with Dogs. So cute and fluffy and loving and perfect – how could you not love them anyway?

I can tell you.  My lovely in-laws have two Goldendoodle (Golden Retriever/Poodle mix) puppies.  Seriously some of the most adorable examples of canines I have ever laid eyes on.  By the age of six months these little scragglemuffin furballs were huge – way bigger than my three year old and closing in on my five year old.  They’re not quite trained yet, either.

So what do you get when you mix two gigantic, excitable baby dogs and small children?  A whole lot of crying, that’s what. 

The dogs take a certain amount of delight in knocking down the three year old and biting her ponytails.  The baby (9 mo) they seem to see as one of their own; whenever he’s crawling around they lie on him, or lie next to him and give him a kind of hug with their bear-sized paws.  It’s a bit unnerving to watch two forty-pound dogs tackle your baby.  He’s a good sport about it, but once they have him properly pinned they nic his binky and run off to chew it to bits. 

The oldest can hold her own, sometimes a bit too well.  She likes to carry/force them up the stairs of the playhouse out back and then force them down the slide.  They do not like this.

As I hope you’ve surmised by now, we don’t get along very well with these dogs, nor them us.  This left us less than excited when the beloved in-laws needed us to housesit for them for a week.  Seven days of so much tackling and crying?  Good gracious.

I am so glad we did it.  The first day or two were a struggle; lots of jumping and tackling.  But then something wonderful happened: the little baby dogs were so worn out by being played with so much they started taking naps – lots of naps.  Or maybe they were fake-sleeping so my eldest would stop chucking them down the slide.  Either way, all that crazy little kid energy + all that crazy dog energy = a whole lot of bodies that want to sleep all afternoon.  Love. 

I grew up with a dog, and have always gotten on well with dogs in general, but watching my kids lying on the floor intertwined with a bunch of furry love fills my heart with happy feelings.  I can’t wait until we can live in a place where we can get a few scragglemuffin furballs of our own.

Magnus being "hugged" by Louie