Thursday, April 2, 2009
Some mornings, after I have gotten out of bed to get my shower, Benny slinks part of the way out from under the covers and makes himself comfortable on my pillow. To see him snoring away in my spot always makes me laugh.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Cupid the cat has the honor of eating on the counter of the little bar section of the kitchen. She gets this distinction because she is the only four legged creature in the house that does not devour her meal in less than 5 minutes. Instead, she likes to savor her meal and come back and nibble on it throughout the day. I think her main reason for doing this is that it drives Benjamin crazy! Benny will be walking by the bar stools and he will suddenly catch a whiff of the tasty cat morsels and he immediately does an about face. He will stand there gazing upward and whine at the cat’s food all the while trying to will it to come to him.
Sometimes, I will catch the cat sitting off in the distance watching and listening to Benny throw his tantrum. I think it is a highlight of her day. She wakes up early, prowls around the pool deck in the screen enclosure, toys with some geckos, eats a little bit of her breakfast and then waits for the pug with the red harness to throw a tantrum over her food. I think it is a bit of kitty prank. It’s sorta like every day is April Fools day for her.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
This photo made me laugh when I saw it flash by as I was pulling photos from the camera. I don’t like to bias the captions by adding my own two cents when posting a Caption This photo, but I can’t help myself with this one. My first thought when I saw this picture was, “‘Cuz this is Thriller, Thriller nights…”
Looking forward to your captions in the comments.
Monday, March 30, 2009
The pugs always wake up at an obscene hour for breakfast. And by pugs I mean Benjamin. Benny usually starts sometime between 5am and 6am jumping around wanting to eat. I usually hold him off until it is time to get up for work, but on the weekends this doesn’t really work too well. So I get up at his normal feeding time, take them out in the yard to go potty, give them their breakfast and then sneak back to bed for a few more hours of sleep.
Yesterday morning, I woke up to tags jingling, glanced at the clock and saw that it said 5:12am. My immediate thought was 5am on a Sunday, Benny, you got to be kidding me! So I grumbled something to him to let him know that he is crazy and that he needed to go back to bed. But my grumbling was not heeded and I heard a pug dancing around not taking no for an answer. I pried my eyes open to see what was going on and I saw little Luna staring back at me. While Luna is always quick to join in on Benny’s breakfast crusade, she is never the one to start it.
Thinking that Luna might just need to go potty, I got up and took her to the yard. Benny and Henry joined us and I scooped up Sol so that I only needed to make one trip to the yard in my stupor. Luna wasn’t in much of a hurry to go potty, so I wasn’t sure why she was dancing around the bed so early. As we were coming back into the house, all the pugs made a mad dash for the kitchen and while it went against my principles to feed them so early in the morning I did it anyway because I certainly didn’t want to get up to do it about an hour later. After the pugs ate, we all crawled back into bed and as soon as my head hit the pillow, I heard a clap a thunder and then the sound of rain beating on the roof. It was pouring. At that point, I remembered they were calling for pretty bad thunder storms to move through the area in the early morning hours. I laid in bed listening to the rain and the thunder. Luna snuggled up beside me and was quite pleased with herself. By getting up when she did she saved her paws from getting wet!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Benjamin sporting his Birthday Boy Bandana. Why the serious look? He heard someone in the kitchen. Could they be making him a special birthday treat?
Saturday, March 28, 2009
This week’s flashback: Not Guilty
Just one of Baby Benny’s infamous antics.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Today, Baby Benny turns 7 years old! I can hardly believe it. It seems like only yesterday I was bringing that little guy home. Technically, Benjamin is my first pug. We picked him up on a Friday afternoon and he was the only pug in the house until Saturday afternoon when we brought home Henry. The 24 hours that Benny was the sole pug of the house gave him the distinction of being the first pug to steal my heart.
Before we took Benny home, we made a stop at Aunt Laurie’s office so the two could meet. Benjamin was charming as always, but he also had a potty accident while he was there. And that little incident was foreshadowing for what was to come with Benjamin. I don’t think I will ever meet a dog that will ever have as many potty accidents as Benny had in the first year of his life. He was forever going to the bathroom in the house and there was a point, about 6 months after Henry was potty trained, that I thought he would just never learn. We had ruled everything out. There were no medical reasons hindering him or any other special circumstances. It was just him. Around the time I was contemplating pitching a tent in front of the house because one of us was always taking Benny out to go potty, the stars aligned and something clicked with Benny and he was suddenly potty trained. He went from having accidents every day to having no accidents ever. There was no occasional slip up, he just got it and he became a pro at going potty outside. It has been years since he has had an accident in the house.
Benjamin’s learning style is similar to flipping a switch from off to on. Benny can be completely inept at doing something one day and the next day he will have confidently mastered that very same skill. When the boys were about 6 months old, we enrolled them in a basic obedience class. They were known by the instructor as the wiggle butts and we had the honor of sitting next to two lab puppies who were the smartest and quickest learners in the class. I would always sit with Benny closest to the labs hoping that Benjamin would pickup some of their savvy via osmosis because in the early weeks of the class Benjamin was in danger of flunking.
One of our first assignments was the “sit” command. We learned the techniques on how to teach the command in class and then we were told to practice, practice, practice at home. Henry had the sit command mastered a day or two after class and that was good because that gave us plenty of time to focus on Benny because it took him at least a few more weeks before he knew how to sit on command. We would do about 4, 5 minute training sessions a day and each time no progress was made.
I will never forget the day we were visiting G-Ma & G-Pa and we were all sitting around outside. I had a bag full of liver treats that had been broken into tiny pieces and I was going to show G-Ma how well Henry knew the sit command and how Benny just wasn’t getting it. The pugs didn’t disappoint at first. Henry sat on command each and every time he was asked and Benny, well, he just stood there wiggling his butt. G-Ma & G-Pa thought that was just the funniest thing. Then, I told Benny another time to sit and to everyone’s surprise he did! I pretty much gave him all the treats that were left and everyone was giving him “good boys” and lots of love. From that point forward, he never missed a sit. It was like a switch went off in his head. And for Benny it has been like that with everything.
Reflecting back over the last 7 years I can’t help but smile as all of the Baby Benny memories fill my head. He may have caused us a lot of grief with all the potty accidents as a puppy, but he has more than made up for it over the years will all the times he has brought a smile to our face or turned around a crappy day by doing something silly.
Happy Birthday, Baby Benny!
A few of my favorite Baby Benny moments shared on the blog:
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