Dogs Behaving Badly

I call my dogs the Hairy Hounds of Hell because, on the whole, they are a law unto themselves. Boy dog used to have basic training skills, but since we adopted Girl dog he seems to have lost his skills. Girl dog is impossible to train – I’ve tried every way I can think of, and she’s still as dumb as a daffodil.

Both will sit and hold their paw out to shake when offered a treat. Both will take the treat calmly and without nipping fingers. That’s really where it stops. Both are a nightmare on the lead – Boy dog barks and bounces around at anything and everything, flipping around so violently at the end of the lead that he slips out of his head halti, leaving you grappling with the lead attached to his collar only, which is dangerous as he could do himself an injury. This reaction is, according to our vet, a reaction of fright. When he was a pup we shared a house with another couple and their two dogs, one of which was a complete nightmare and would torment our Boy dog pup relentlessly. Now, even though Boy dog is six years old and a fairly large size dog, that fear is instilled, so when he sees another dog, or person, he reacts by shouting at them to tell them to go away even if they haven’t yet posed any threat. He sees this as protecting us, and he goes absolutely crackers. I can understand why people cross the street to avoid us, but it does leave them under the impression you’ve trained your dog to be an arse and have a go at everything and they give you some awful looks and make some scathing comments (One I had, when I was seven months pregnant and trying to get him to the vet, was “Get him neutered if you can’t cope with him, love” – My reaction was, “He is neutered!”) In addition to this, Boy dog is frightened of funny noises – at home, having him scared of the Hoover and the hairdryer isn’t much of an issue, but when you’re out walking him and he’s trying to run away from the lorries, buses, coaches (the air brakes freak him out) from motorbikes (loud and buzzy) and many cars (a certain deep pitch can freak him out too) it becomes a battle trying to walk him anywhere. When he was younger we used to be able to let him off the lead for a run about, as where we lived we could take him to the common where sometimes you wouldn’t see another sign of life for hours and his recall was very good – while we have access to a vast forest here we wouldn’t be able to trust him anymore to come back to us when we call, as his recall has gone since we got Girl dog and now he flounces off without a second thought. Girl dog, in contrast, despite being smaller, is a lot braver; But to the point of stupidity. She’ll run over to the lorries, buses and coaches to investigate the funny noise; she’d step out in front of the motorbike or car to see what it’s doing, if she was able to. So trying to walk these two badly behaved freaks is a mission and a half, and not possible for me to do alone, so I have to go out for walks with them with The Hubby, which means that they only get evening walks as he’s off out first thing, and if he’s not finishing til late they won’t get an evening walk as The Boy is already in bed and we can’t (obviously) leave him home alone. The Hubby is also unable to walk both the Hounds of Hell single handedly, which adds to the ongoing nightmare.

It would be unfair to walk Boy dog without Girl, and vice versa, but the breed that they are denotes that they need a hell of a lot more exercise than we are currently able to offer either of them. We try to get them out as much as possible, but sometimes it isn’t possible and for the most part they have to make do with running round our (generously sized) garden. We investigated the option of training classes, but were faced again with Boy dogs problem with other dogs – it would mean paying extra for special one-on-one classes for him, which isn’t an option. I found out that Dog Borstal was filmed fairly locally and I was all up for taking the pair of them, but it would have to be something The Hubby and I did together with them and The Hubby refuses resolutely to be involved in anything that involves a video camera and him appearing on TV.

To add to our woes, Girl dog isn’t well housetrained. She is up to the point where she won’t squat and go in front of you, and she won’t do it in her cage, but despite having her for almost four years and countless efforts, we’ve only just managed to get her trained thus far. We’ve stopped the pair of them going upstairs at all by keeping the kitchen and front room doors shut, so they’re limited to downstairs only – when we allowed them the freedom of the house she’d disappear upstairs to have a poo on the landing, not ideal in any circumstances but especially now we have The Boy to consider we can’t have that. To start off with, we allowed the Boy dog to have the roam of the house overnight, and locked Girl dog in her cage in the kitchen, as this was the only way she wouldn’t mess in the house overnight. After about a year of that we stopped both of them going upstairs at all, so they have the roam of downstairs overnight and she’s only done it once or twice since then. It used to be the same if we went out – Boy dog could be trusted, Girl dog could not. She’d mess in the house, have the bins turfed out and the contents shredded, she’s even been known to get up onto the kitchen worktops to get at oven trays and kitchen utensils which haven’t been washed up so she can chew them/lick them clean. It’s only been in the last few months we’ve been able to leave her roaming when we’re out and not come back to an awful mess.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for both of them to be rehomed. For them to go to a family who can offer them lots of regular walks, keep up with the training on a daily basis (realistically, between being a housewife, a mum and working from home I just don’t get the time) But then I think how awful that would be for us as a family. We’ve had Boy dog since he was an 8 week old pup – he’s six years old now, and we’re the only family he’s ever known. To uproot him now would not only break my heart, but surely his as well? He gets on so fabulously with The Boy, and I’m a big fan of children growing up around animals, I think it teaches them valuable lessons about life and love and caring and sharing, and the two of them are BFF’s already. And Girl dog was a rescue when we got her, after she was found running the streets around Christmas one year and taken to the local police station where the dog warden collected her. She had no collar and wasn’t chipped, so after seven days she was put up for adoption and that’s when she joined our family. She still has panic attacks over the strangest things, like if you pick up a skipping rope she freaks out and hides, or if you try to hold her to clip her claws she shakes and shivers and gets so upset she wets herself – it makes me wonder at the kind of abuse she might have suffered before we adopted her, and that makes us her safe home, and I don’t want to ruin her completely now by giving up on her and rehoming her elsewhere.

So I’m a bit stuck. I’ve got these two crazy furry hounds that I love dearly, but who are both clearly mentally unbalanced and need a lot more attention than I’m currently able to give them in order to try and work out some of their issues. The Hubby is a great one for starting a project and not finishing it – to begin with, dog training was his job, and he did very well with Boy dog as a pup, but it wasn’t kept up enough and Boy dog has lapsed into bad habits which are hard to break. Again it was The Hubby’s job to train Girl dog when she arrived with us, but he didn’t stick with it and she quickly became a handful. I’ve tried all different kinds of training methods, but what works with Boy dog doesn’t work for Girl dog and vice versa – Boy dog will do practically anything for a ball, he loves playing fetch and he’s always got a toy in his mouth to play with (One of the reasons him and The Boy get along so well is that The Boy is now at an age where he’ll play fetch with Boy dog). Girl dog, in contrast, couldn’t give two hoots about toys but if you offer her food of any description she’s up for it. Trouble is, with both of them, they get too distracted by the reward and after five minutes of attempting to train them they’re bored of what you’re trying to train and wander off with the reward.

So if you ever see a person in the street struggling with two mentalist dogs barking and being generally loony please don’t presume that person is lazy or hasn’t tried to keep their animals under control, for all you know they’re struggling on a daily basis to instil the basics and for whatever reason it isn’t working out well for them. I don’t know whether we’ll ever reach a point with our dogs where I can walk both of them nicely, when their recall is excellent and I can allow them free roam of the forest safe in the knowledge they’ll come back to me when I call for them, but I can dream. It would be lovely to be able to take a leisurely stroll with The Hubby, The Boy and both dogs, but it’s such a chaotic, mad event at the moment that it’s something I look upon with dread. With winter upon us it’s even more of a nightmare as its dark by the time we get them out after The Hubby returns from work, and dark makes them both worse because Boy dog also doesn’t like headlights and Girl dog seems to think that streetlights are something to be barked at when illuminated. Sigh.

A Quick Update!

It’s been a while, and I just haven’t had a lot of time recently to sit down and write much about anything, but I thought I’d post a quick update while I’ve got a moment and tell you what’s going on in the world of Summer Mama, The Hubby, The Boy & The Hairy Hounds of Hell!

Well for a start, I got some lovely new Flip It cups from Nuby UK for The Boy. They’re red with a race car design, which went down well as soon as he saw them, and they’re advertised from 12 months. They have a straw all the way down the length of the cup, a handy flip top to cover and protect the straw which means you can take it out and about with you, it’s specially insulated to keep the liquid inside cold (or warm) as required (though only for a limited time, it isn’t like a proper Thermos flask). The valve on the straw works by opening when the child uses the straw in the correct way, to encourage development for using straws rather than beakers or bottle teats, and so I filled one with water at lunchtime and gave it to The Boy.

As I’ve mentioned before, he is a creature of habit, and he wasn’t too impressed with the change in drinking method: He’s got the hang of tipping up a beaker or bottle to drink from, and he didn’t understand that with this style cup he just needed to suck the straw properly. For some time he was very amused with the way the straw pops up when you flip the top and spent quite a while giggling about that, but when he again tried to drink from it and couldn’t he became frustrated. I demonstrated for him how to work the cup and to be honest it is pretty precise the way you need to do it in order to get a mouthful of drink, but I guess that’s the point. After a few minutes of grumping, smacking his hands on the high chair tray and throwing the lovely red cup onto the floor several times, I handed him his familiar green Sport Sipper and he was content again.

Since then I start with the red cup, or have the red cup in the locality and give it to him when he wants a drink, but he still hasn’t really got the hang of it and prefers to use a normal beaker or his Sport Sipper still. It’s frustrating on one hand because the spout of the Sport Sipper needs replacing (I haven’t got round to ordering them, but I know they’re available on the Nuby UK site so I will do that!) but for now it means there’s no valve in the sipper so the water flows freely, which is annoying when your son likes to flood the tray of the highchair and smack his hands in the resulting puddle! I am sure we will get there eventually with the new cups, it’s just something new to learn, and there is so much else he is learning right now.

The Boy isn’t quite walking yet, but he’s doing well at furniture surfing and is standing up independently with the ability to lean down, pick something up and stand upright again. A couple of times he has done a couple of shuffle steps toward me, but only a couple and he either falls on his bottom when he realises what he’s just done, or else he quickly finds something to hold onto again. He has also discovered a passion for climbing, and will empty the big plastic boxes I use in his room as toy boxes, turn them onto their side and climb! As well as this when he is in the play pen he has discovered he has a Spiderman-like ability to climb up the mesh sides, holding onto the bar across the top and folding at the waist in an effort to escape. Lucky for me the play pen is actually a very solid Huack Baby Centre that I got an amazing deal on, and it is just as well I did as it has proved to be invaluable! (Highly recommended: Review to come soon!)

Although The Boy has been largely unimpressed with my efforts to get him to drink from a different type of cup, he has been very happy with my efforts to get him to eat. For a few weeks we have been struggling to feed a baby who doesn’t want you feeding him anymore, but who just likes to throw food on the floor if you allow him finger food to feed himself. It has been a bit of a nightmare as we’ve been going through so much wasted food as he decides he doesn’t want something after a single bite, so merrily throws the rest of it onto the floor. A while ago I stopped allowing the Hairy Hounds of Hell to roam free while The Boy was eating as dropping tit bits to them was too tempting and as a result our girl dog is now a fat girl dog! The Boy was, however, very impressed when I was sitting with him one lunchtime eating my lunch of scrambled egg on toast, and allowed him to sample some of the scrambled egg from my fork. He was thrilled by this development and as a result I managed to get him to eat two scrambled eggs and half a piece of toast, which was the largest meal I’d got down him in days (it was meant to be my lunch, but as other mums know when your child has shown interest in food after a while of not eating you’ll happily go hungry for them to have something!) Anyway I had overcooked as I was hoping that he’d want to share with me. The following day we went shopping and in Sainsburys I found a cute little cutlery set for a couple of pounds in blue with jungle animals on and brought it: Twenty minutes later in the Store 21 shop on the same retail park I found a plain blue fork and spoon set reduced to 99p, so I brought one of those, too, as I realised that an extra fork and spoon would be handy given The Boys history of throwing things onto the floor!

Back home, at dinnertime, we used the Sainsburys fork for the first time and The Boy ate more dinner than he had done in days. Since then he has not only been happier to eat with his new utensils, but he’s also become even more independent, and after you load the fork or the spoon up he’ll take it from you to feed himself (before clapping as if to congratulate himself for being so clever!) It’s a remarkable turn around and I’m so glad I thought of it. Rather than trying to take him back a step with his feeding and trying to feed him myself again, I should have been trying to encourage him forward as it is obviously what he was after!

The Hubby is taking advantage of having a couple of weeks off work to do some serious DIY. We have been building a collection of items over the last year or so for when we get round to decorating various rooms of the house and we never seem to have the time to do it, so he has been busy already this week shuffling around the kitchen set up and changing the crappy sinks in the utility room and the kitchen for decent ones, with nice new taps too! He’s planning on doing some tiling and some painting as well as having a thorough clear out and clean up of the entire space before he’s considering it finished, and he’s done very well already so far. One thing about The Hubby, he does tend to take his time to start on a project but once he starts he flies through getting it done and he doesn’t like leaving things half finished so I’ll have a new look kitchen by next week which is exciting. We’re not replacing the cupboards, or the worktop, but giving it a facelift which is a cheaper way of making it look better. A while ago The Hubby laid dark laminate floor in the kitchen and his plan is to continue that into the utility room as well, so it all flows nicely and looks good. I don’t know when he’s thinking of doing the hall/stairs and landing, or the spare bedroom, or our bedroom, but we’ll get round to them eventually I’m sure!

Ah well for now I’d better sign off … I’ve got a list of things as long as my arm that I really should be doing instead of sitting here drinking coffee and rambling on! Ho hum!



Product Review: Steadyco Weaning Spoons

What? Steadyco Weaning Spoons (set of three)

RRP? I paid £3.50 for the set at my local Tesco store, but they’re not listed on the Steadyco website so I’m not sure what the RRP is.

Where from? I can’t find them in any store locally and internet searches are showing up other Steadyco products but not this particular one, which is a shame. I will e-mail Steadyco and ask their advice!

The Boy is now a year old, and since the success of the Nuby Toss Or Wash Beakers getting him to drink by himself, I wanted to try the next stage and see whether I could get him to attempt feeding himself. He doesn’t seem to enjoy mealtimes much anymore, and gets very annoyed and frustrated when you’re feeding him, so a friend of mine recommended I just let him get on with it and see what happens; Which I have done, and what happens is a big mess and I’m not entirely sure how much food The Boy actually eats and how much the Hairy Hounds of Hell end up consuming, but it seems to make The Boy happier.

In the pack of Steadyco Weaning Spoons you get a standard plain spoon for you to feed the child: A spoon with a flat top and holes in it so you can mush up pieces of food into something easier for LO to deal with, and a spoon which is angled to encourage LO to feed themselves (it’s easier for them to deal with a specially angled spoon than it is a straight handled one).

I prepared The Boy’s lunch as usual, put him in a long sleeved plastic bib to protect his clothes and wore my own kitchen apron to protect my clothes! Then I handed him the angled spoon to hold and started feeding him with the normal one. As usual, the first couple of mouthfuls went without issue, but then he got bored and annoyed and started pushing my hand away from him whenever I approached his mouth with another spoonful. So I tapped the spoon in his hand and said, “You do it, then.” And leaned back.

It was quite funny, very sweet and hugely messy but sure enough The Boy dunked the spoon into his lunch and tried to feed himself. (He also tried to feed me!) He ended up with lunch in his eyebrows, all over his cheeks and up his nose, in his hair and even on his ears! The Hairy Hounds of Hell thoroughly enjoyed the fruity chicken casserole raining from the heaves too! On the whole, though, I think The Boy managed to get a fair bit of his lunch in him! He experimented holding the spoon in both hands to work out which way worked better, he tried using the spoon handle to dunk in the lunch and then suck the lunch off it, and he tried holding the spoon in one hand and smacking his other hand in his lunch just to see what worked best for him!

It took us a long time to eat lunch that day – around an hour or so – but he was much happier doing it ‘his’ way than he has been for ages when I’ve been trying to feed him, which I think is a success in itself. I don’t want a battle over eating – To me that just kicks off a food issue, and I definitely don’t want that. He’ll eat when he’s hungry, drink when he’s dry, and if the Hairy Hounds of Hell end up sampling his lunch and my hair gets coated with baby rice pudding then never mind, we just have to live with that!

I washed the spoon up once he’d had enough lunch and he used it again to eat his pudding with. This was much quicker, far more effective and you could see the concentration in his face as he dunked the spoon into a pretty small pot in his efforts to get at his favourite strawberry flavour fromage frais! He grew bored by the time he was onto the second pot and I ended up feeding him that one – I think simply the fact that he couldn’t get it out of the pot and into his mouth quickly enough was his main problem there!

I absolutely love this little angled spoon, it makes it far easier for The Boy to handle his own food, and I would really love to get some more of these; but sadly I can’t find them anywhere! I am going to write to Steadyco to see whether they can offer any advice as this product no longer features on their website.

For his dinner that evening, The Boy had fish fingers, alphabites and spaghetti shapes, and I used the mushing spoon to break it all down into pieces he was comfortable eating. As well as being able to mush the food well, this spoon has a straighter bowl so it’s flat instead of rounded like a normal spoon, and the edge of it can be used to chop very large chunks into smaller ones before mushing. Dinner was less of a success as he got completely sidetracked by peeling the coating off the fish fingers and eating that separately to the pieces of fish, and then he plunged both hands into the spaghetti shapes and proceeded to fling his arms around the room, coating me (minus my pinny!) and the floor, the Hairy Hounds of Hell and most of everything else in the room with spaghetti shapes and tomato sauce. The Hubby nearly had heart failure but the PC came up clean again afterwards! The Boy did try to feed himself again but I think the problem was that as it was a ‘proper’ dinner and not baby food from a jar it wouldn’t stay on the spoon as well so it was more difficult and required more concentration and he lost interest. I eventually managed to coax him into eating some apple crumble and custard baby pudding using the spoon, but about a third of the way through he decided he’d had enough and the whole lot ended up on the floor, spoon and bowl and all! (Hairy Hounds of Hell thought their Christmases had come at once until The Hubby stepped over and told them to go away and he cleaned up without their assistance!)

Ever since, I’ve handed The Boy the angled spoon to have a go himself and sometimes he will, sometimes he won’t, but he loves having it in his hand even if he doesn’t want to use it, and that to me is good because it means its comfortable, he associates it with mealtimes and he is becoming more used to the idea of holding cutlery when eating rather than just throwing it on the floor.

Just the mushing spoon and the angled spoon makes this pack a worthwhile purchase to me, the standard weaning spoon is nothing special but it’s another weaning spoon to have which is always handy and it’s got a fairly long handle compared to a lot of them which makes it easier to get food out of the bottom of the large size baby food jars.

A lovely four out of five for this set, very handy to have and as they’re dishwasher safe, microwave safe, steriliser safe, freezer safe and BPA free too.

Weaning: When Your Child Keeps Giving Food To The Dogs!

In a couple of short weeks, we will be celebrating The Boy’s 1^st birthday. I’m looking forward to it in some ways – the marker of his first year, the first of many birthday celebrations to come; But in other ways I’m not looking forward to it, as it is the marker of him no longer being a ‘baby’ and it means that a whole 12 months has gone by since I gave birth to him yet still I am two dress sizes bigger than I was pre-pregnancy and I still don’t feel like I have the faintest, foggiest clue what I’m meant to be doing in this job as ‘mummy’.

As we all know, part of them growing up is all the fun of weaning. The Boy started on baby rice at four months old but wasn’t interested in the least – he wanted to move onto more interesting things from the moment we tried anything other than milk. The Boy has been exclusively formula fed since he was six weeks old – he rejected breastfeeding from the start, so for the first six weeks I was expressing and combination feeding, but after The Hubby returned to work it was just too much to try and look after The Boy, express for a good four hours a day, as well as clean bottles, make up formula and everything else that needs to be done all day. So anyway, he was five and a half months when we tried Rusks mashed in formula milk, and baby cereals for breakfast with fruit pots in the afternoon, and he’s done really well. On the whole he loves his food (though there are moments!) and he is generally good about eating.

The thing is, now he’s nearly a year old, I kind of expected him to be a little more independent about eating by now. I don’t know whether that’s accurate, whether I was expecting too much too soon, but I presumed by this point he’d be trying to spoon feed himself, certainly holding his own cup of water when he had a drink. He doesn’t; He’ll sit like a baby bird with his mouth open waiting for you to pop in the next spoonful or attach him to the water beaker. Finger food is a different matter: He loves getting his hands into that and playing with the different textures (and flinging a lot of it on the floor). And herein lies my current issue.

Our two hairy hounds of hell, one male and one female, are generally pretty good about not begging for food. The female is a bit weaker about it and she will sometimes forget herself and sit looking pleading at your feet while you’re eating, but she was a rescue dog and we don’t know her history, but she was very underweight when we first adopted her so I think it’s safe to say that, combined with the fact that she’s a complete bitch (I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean it quite literally!) means that she is constantly on the lookout for food. She’s a random cross breed and is a fairly small size dog (think about the size of a spaniel) so when she puts on weight it really shows. Our male dog is pedigree, and burns off his excess calories easily by all the running around he does, so a treat or two doesn’t hurt his figure; but she has quickly become a porky little rain barrel!

The trouble is, while neither of them will beg for food from The Boy as such, they are never far away when he is in the high chair at mealtimes. The Boy, such is his nature, wants to share everything right now, so whatever finger food he has; biscuit, banana, toast, whatever – he’ll have a couple of mouthfuls then offer it to the dogs. Now while they get interested, they won’t take it from him, as either myself or The Hubby (or whoever is feeding The Boy) is sitting there watching them closely to make sure they don’t – but if they don’t take it from him, The Boy will casually fling it on the floor. The female dog will break her neck on the laminate floor racing to get to whatever tit-bit it may be – she’s been known to eat orange and red peppers, carrot sticks and cucumber – but the male is a little more reserved and he’ll only eat it if it drops right in front of him and it’s something of interest – a biscuit or a piece of toast for instance.

I’ve tried locking them outside (very noisy – they bark and shriek like crazy to be let back indoors, and the noise puts The Boy off eating altogether as he is very easily distracted). We can’t shut them out of the room we have the highchair in as our kitchen, dining area and front room have no doors separating them, just open doorways, and the dogs aren’t allowed past the kitchen doorway into the rest of the house as the female cannot be trusted not to mess (again we think it stems back to her being a rescue dog, she’s fine when contained downstairs, but allow her the run of upstairs and she’ll ruin the carpet within a week). The female has a large cage in the kitchen that we put her in overnight or when we’re out (again because of the messing problem which she’ll do downstairs if left out overnight or while we’re out) so I have sometimes put her in the cage while feeding The Boy, which leaves the male dog free but he tends to go and lie in the front room when she’s out of the way. However it seems pointless as The Boy will still drop food on the floor in anticipation of when they come back into the room.

As I said, the male dog it isn’t so much of a worry, but the female is now seriously porky (her head looks out of proportion to her body!) she’s lost her waist entirely and she waddles about with her fat little bottom wiggling from side to side like a real hoochie! To top the problem off, I can’t take both of them out for a walk on my own, nevermind with The Boy in his pushchair as well, as the male is frightened of everything and goes scatty at the traffic and the noises it makes and the female has no road sense and just wants to bomb out into the middle of the road every two minutes. It takes both me and The Hubby to walk them, so we can have one each, and even then it can be a nightmare if you see another dog, or a cyclist, or someone on a skateboard or rollerskates, as the male dog will go scatty and flip around at the end of his lead barking (the vet says it’s a fear response) while the female dog will go scatty trying to get to them to say hello and potentially have her tummy tickled. Since The Hubby works funny shifts, nine times out of ten he isn’t home until The Boy is in bed, which means one of us has to stay at home, which means we can’t walk the dogs, which means the dogs don’t get a walk as often as they should. This doesn’t help the porky female wear off those extra calories!

I’m at a loss – If I stop giving The Boy finger food he’ll never learn to feed himself properly, but as long as I continue he is dropping it on the floor for the dogs and the female is hoovering it up like a mad thing and gaining weight by the day! Any suggestions gratefully received!!