Boof’s struggles are real.
I’ve mentioned before that Boof hates it when we leave the house without her now. Like bad. She seems to think that we totally uprooted our lives and moved here, just so we could abandon her in this strange house. Poor girl. When we leave, she cries and barks from inside the house – made worse by the 1-2 times that we have to run back inside for something. When she get home she carries on and scream-barks at us. (scream-barks are a real thing)
She was really sad for the first few days at the house. I think Jenson knew it because he kept taking her toys to her (or would give them to me and say “here ya go boof”). If she was currently chewing on one of her toys, he was afraid to give it to her, so he’d have me do it instead.
She still has love/not love feelings for Jenson. She loves when he is eating, but she doesn’t love when he’s getting our attention. She’s still very patient and gentle with him…but she probably blames him for all of the change. She sits by the front door sometimes and is like “okay, its my turn…I’m going for a walk”. He’s become more interested in some stuffed animals that he had…and so has Boof. I put the one bear on the bookshelf where she can’t reach it, and she’ll start howling for it, like its hers. She knows it’s not.
She loves going for walks in the ravine, even though it’s totally annoying to walk her down there because she’s trying to go in a million directions to smell every single animal that has even been down there. And eat random poop if she can find it. I don’t know how many times I’ve said “don’t eat that poop” or “spit out that poop”. I’m glad I’m saying it to Boof and not Jenson though.
She’s skittish about all of the different animals and skittering noises we hear down the hill from the backyard. That’s fair, I’m a little bit too at times – we’ll all get used to it. I let her out the other night (Lo wasn’t home and Jenson was in bed), and I took the maglite out and was shining it all around the backyard to make sure there weren’t any animals in the fence. About 15 feet outside the fence on the far side, I could make out a pair of animal eyes – just staring. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was Boof’s size or larger and it just sat there and stared the whole time, blinking occasionally. It was a little creepy that it didn’t move even though I was shining the light on it for a few minutes. I wanted to get a little closer, but I’d just put Jenson down and didn’t have the monitor yet and didn’t want to go too far out into the yard. Luckily Boof was oblivious to this animal.
So she’s not sure she wants to be a country dog yet. She can’t sit in the front window and bark at all of the people and dogs walking….she doesn’t get to go for walks every night on the nice neighborhood sidewalks where all of the dogs pee. She perches on the back of the couch instead and stares out into the yard.
I keep telling her that all she needs is love and I’m happy to shower plenty of that on her, but she’s not convinced. She got uppity while living in Dublin I guess, and she doesn’t realize that toothwise, she may fit in better in the country.
She’s also not allowed in the basement at this point, after having gone to the bathroom a couple of times down there. There must have been a dog down there before and she’s trying to mark her spot. We’ll let her try it out again sometime – once she realizes that this is her house and there aren’t any other dogs in her territory.
She’s also not thrilled because Lo has been bringing boxes from the storage unit and when she sees them, she thinks we are packing up again and gets all weird and nervous. I keep telling her that we are staying here forever…and then saying – well, at least 3 years…because we thought we’d be in the Dublin house long-term. No really, I think we will be here for awhile. It’s really what we want and is going to be an amazing place to live and raise kids.
I think she’ll adjust and be happy eventually. We hope to extend the fenced yard for her and get her a doggie door again. I think we should do inground electric fence, but Lo doesn’t think it’ll work for her. He thinks that she’ll just take off if she sees something. She’d be fine if she went in the ravine, but we’d worry about her heading to the road. Despite living in an actual school zone, people fly past our house. Also, it’s popular to not have mufflers in this area. We really need to plant some pine trees…
Meanwhile, she’ll just continue to give me shitty looks for obviously ruining her life.
