That Awesome Feeling Of Being Missed By Your Dogs

I was gone for 4 days last week and while I had a complete blast at BlogPaws I missed home.

I’ve always been a homebody.

Home is where my family is.

Home is where my bed is.

Home is where my dogs are.

I love home and home loves me and I love home even more when I know that it and all of its occupants missed me when I was gone.

I know Gracie missed me because she sent me a text every morning and every night telling me so.

I know Bobby missed me when I saw him for the first time after 4 days and he had the biggest smile on his face that I’ve seen in quite awhile and he actually hugged me out in public.

I know my husband missed me, just buy the relieved look on his face and the enormous pile of laundry that was sitting there waiting for me to fold it, and the mail unopened but separated out into piles all over the kitchen table, and he gave me a big kiss.

I know that Sherman missed when he just melted when I waked in the door and rolled over on his belly for a belly rub.

It’s been 4 days since anyone has rubbed my belly and wiped my slobber!

And Leroy.

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Stringy Things Stuck On My Dogs This Spring

Every Spring we get these stringy things in our yard.

I’m pretty sure that they come from our oak tree and I think they are called catkins, but don’t quote me on that.

What I do know is that they are a BIG mess and they get stuck everywhere on Sherman and Leroy and they clog my drain on the patio.

If they are stuck on them then they track them through the house on my carpet, in my vents, in my bed and just about anywhere they go.

They kind of gross me out because they remind me of worms.

I’ve been doing my best to try and get them picked up every time I got outside but we had a pretty windy weekend and they were just literally flying off the tree and the dogs were doing just a fine job sweeping them up with their fur.

It was like their fur was velcro for these stringy things.

My house is messy enough. I don’t really need stringy things stuck on my dogs that look like worms, to make it even worse.

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Dog Therapy. Best Therapy Ever.

courtesy of Life+Dog

I saw this sign on Facebook yesterday and it got me thinking and it really hit home because I think a lot of us feel this way, I know I do for sure.

It’s been a bad year and if I have any hopes of making it through to 2014 I need to just realize that life is as good as I make it and while some things may be out of my control, the way I deal with them is totally up to me.

Dealing with some of those things in a positive manner can sometimes be totally exhausting and stressful but over the past few months I’ve learned that, while I’m not to the point of needing professional therapy, I do need some sort of therapy to help me cope.

Lucky for me I have two very good pieces of therapy right in my home.

They’re a bit furry and drooly but they are just what I need to keep on truckin along.

Meet my therapy:

You might know them as Sherman and Leroy. I now to refer to them as Therapy One and Therapy Two and here’s the kind of therapy they provide:

1.Fur Therapy. I brush them. After a long day at work and when the kids are in bed, I sit down next to one of the dogs and brush. It’s extremely therapeutic for me and for them, and sometimes I even find myself thinking out-loud to them. (that’s an entirely different blog post for another day)

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That Awkward Moment At Costco When….

Last week I had to to make a trip to Costco for a few things.

Coconut oil and pickles.

Well I was really just going there for the coconut oil but I figured while I was there I would get a big jar of pickles for myself too, and no one can go to Costco for just one thing, at least not me.

Which is why my husband is a member and not me.

I’m not allowed to be a member because I can’t be trusted alone in Costco.

Believe me.

I’ve tried to go by myself before and I got busted when they asked for my membership card and I handed over my husbands card with his name on it and they told me I didn’t look like a “Bob.”

Anyway, last week I had to to be escorted to Costco by the husband for coconut oil and pickles.

Of course when we entered into Costco I immediately got distracted by all their summer fun patio furniture that they had out and I began to wander through the aisles when I came across the most perfect thing ever for Leroy:

Cedar-Cottage-Playhouse-Costco-1200x680 (1)

Image courtesy of Costco

A dog house for the back patio!

It’s really a playhouse for kids but in my imagination it’s a dog house for Leroy.

I immediately began to check it out.

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Vaccine Reactions. Some Dogs Have Them And Some Dogs Don’t.

Just like people, dogs can suffer from allergic reactions from vaccines.

Allergic reactions from a vaccine can be a scary thing for any pet owner when they aren’t aware of what one is.

I see vaccines given several times a day every week and rarely do I see a pet have a reaction but we always make sure that clients know what to look for if their pet is getting a vaccine for the first time.

So what exactly is a vaccine?

“In many cases, a vaccine is simply a strain of the virus modified to allow the dog’s immune system to fight and destroy it. The immune system builds antibodies which will fight off any future invasion of this virus, thus rendering the dog “immune” to the virus. However, the dog can sometimes display side effects of the disease or virus itself, and some dogs appear to “get sick” for a day or two after being inoculated.”

Some of the most common, less severe reactions I have seen are:

Pain or soreness where the vaccine was given
Lethargy
Mild fever
Small lump where the vaccine was given.

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A List Of Things My Dogs Do That Annoy Me.

The other day Dogster published an article titled Do Your Dogs Ever Annoy You?

Go figure that last week I wrote a post about annoying things that my dogs do.

Great minds think alike I would like to say to this, however really great minds, like the fine folks over at Dogster, write their post and then hit publish, where as my brilliant mind lets my post sit in draft waiting for me to get back around to tweek it and add pictures.

***BIG SIGH***

Always a disappointment I am.

Anyway, I figured since the topic’s out now and people are talking about it I might as well finally publish my post rather than let it sit in drafts collecting dust along with my other brilliant posts that are awaiting for me to revisit them.

I love my dogs but my dogs are not perfect.

No matter how I portray them here in posts they have their flaws.

Some of them have more flaws than others but we won’t point fingers.

Regardless of that, and regardless of how much I love my dogs, I would be living a life of lies if I didn’t come clean and say that they don’t do things on a daily basis that annoy me.

I really don’y have a list of things, that was a little white lie. There’s just one really, really annoying thing that they do lately that annoys the heck out of me:

They lick each other and it grosses me out, totally.

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Leroy’s Ruptured Tympanic Membrane

When I decided that I wanted to introduce more pet health related posts to the blog this year I think Sherman and Leroy misunderstood me.

I didn’t want to talk about their pet health related issues, I just wanted to talk about pet health related issues in general.

Obviously our communication barriers were down there because these two will not give me a break!

Here’s the latest My Brown Newfies drama:

Leroy has a ruptured ear drum in his right ear.

He’s been suffering from an ear infection for I don’t even know how long now, several months at least. We’ve been monitoring it and treating it forever it seems. Sometimes it’s just a yeast infection, sometimes it’s bacteria and sometimes its both.

We’ve sent out ear cultures and we’ve adjusted ear medication and ear cleaners as needed.

It gets better and then it comes back.

This last infection got pretty bad and despite a new treatment it didn’t show any signs of improving. His ear had a thick dark discharge, ulcers and smelled like sour milk. He was mildly painful. Painful only when you touched the base of the ear and because of the all the discharge in his ear the vet was unable to visualize his whole canal. We tried cleaning the ear several times only to have it fill back up with discharge the next day.

Our next option was to flush his ear under sedation. Sedation was needed so that the vet could really get in there and flush out the ear, not an easy task with a 150 pound dog who does not want his ear being filled with saline and then sucked out.

In the picture below Leroy was sedated with an injectable medications but then had to be given gas because he was resisting the sedation and we needed him to be very still.

The flushing went really well and the vet was able to get a lot of debris out of the canal to the point where she could actually visualize the whole canal. What she didn’t see was the tympanic membrane, also known as the eardrum.

The tympanic membrane is a thin membrane that separates the external ear from the middle ear. The tympanic membrane receives vibrating sound waves and transmits them to the bone in the ear, hence the ear drum. The most common cause of a tear or hole in the tympanic membrane is an ear infection. Other causes can be an injury to the ear or side of the the head and changes in pressure.

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Getting Ready For The Big Game This Weekend. #SuperDogSunday!

This Sunday’s The BIG Game!

But did you know that it’s also the third annual Super Dog Sunday?

This event, hosted by Event Barkers, takes place on the day of “the big game” and benefits Petfinder Foundation to help them do more of their awesome work assisting shelters and rescues to find loving homes for homeless pets.

There’s over $1,500 in prizes being given away by the 2013 Super Dog Sunday Sponsors:

Just making sure there’s enough air in the ball!

So how can you join in the fun of Super Dog Sunday?

You can enter photos of ANY kind of pets–including adoptable pets on Petfinder– but here’s the game rules: your photo has to have a football theme. It doesn’t have to be a particular team…any kind of football theme. You can dress your dog up, play a game of football, touch only please, no tackle:) or you can edit in a football theme. You can enter one photo per pet.

Then email your digital photo to EventBarkers@gmail.com. (full size photos only.)

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Why Do Dogs Yawn?

Does your dog ever yawn?

I have 3 dogs and 2 of them yawn

Sherman, as far as I can recall does not yawn, or if he does, he does it secretly because I have never seen him do it.

Plunger yawns, but usually only after he wakes up from a 10 hour nap.

Leroy yawns all the time, but not when he is tired or waking up from a nap. He yawns at weird times, like when we are outside playing, or when we’re at an event, and sometimes he yawns when we are out walking, and this got me thinking, why does this dog yawn at odd times? Am I that boring?

Well a study conducted last year says that dogs may catch their yawns from humans, you know, like the contagious yawn. You see someone yawn and you yawn. It happens to me all the time. This new evidence suggests that dogs may have the capacity for empathy.

(Of course dogs have empathy, silly.)

A very interesting theory and I’m sure it may be true, but when Leroy and I are out playing I know there has been times when I didn’t yawn, but he did.

So there has to be more to this dog yawning thing.

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Can You Describe Your Dog In One Word?

The other day day I was trying to think of one word that would describe Sherman and Leroy.

One word.

Now that’s hard.

For Leroy I came up with a whole mess of words because he’s complex and it was tough to narrow him down to just to one word, but majestic stuck out because every time I look at him I am in awe of his dogness beauty.

Sherman was easy because he wears his heart on his sleeve.