Puppy Damage

Sadie is a great little puppy ... but she's still a puppy! She's chewed some cords like I said before, but now she's done a little more damage than that. First of all, she has anxiety attacks when we leave her alone. I'm not kidding! If you don't think that animals can have anxiety attacks just come over to my house! We usually come home to a kennel that is completely turned backwards and sometimes with screws knocked out. When we come home she's calm and doesn't even bark, so we always wondered what she does while we're gone. Finally we found out. One day Sadie must have thought that Preston left already, but he was still at the door, so he proceeded to watch her do BACK FLIPS in her kennel!! I've seen it now too and she really does. She puts her paws on the sides of the kennel and pushes herself around so that she'll hit the edge and land on her feet. It's pretty amazing and one of these days I'm going to video it to share :) Anyway, so that's the first thing to remember ... she has anxiety problems!

At first we thought that maybe if we left her in a bigger area she would be okay and wouldn't whine when we left. So, the first Sunday that we had her here, we barricaded her into the kitchen. Somehow she got out! When we came home, she greeted us at the door with a look that said "I know I'm not where I'm supposed to be, but I'm so happy to see you anyway!" We let her outside to take care of business while we assessed the damage, and guess what we found? NOTHING!! She hadn't made any messes or chewed anything up! We were amazed! So, we've tried leaving her out a couple of times now, but her anxiety usually gets the best of her. Maybe finding a way out of the barricade took long enough that her anxiety had worn off or something, because now we come home to things like this:

She chewed my ceramic snowmen salt/pepper shakers that I JUST bought! They were empty luckily, but it was still sad :( ... next time we'll keep the table chairs pushed in!

This one was bad news because it is NOT my book! Oops :) It was one that my supervisor at DCFS lent me to read. Good thing he's a nice guy. I told him about it and he said he might be able to find another one anyway. If not, I'm buying him one for sure!

This is a better look at all the teeth marks in the book.

There are several other things she's done. We had some little hershey's chocolates in a closed box that was sitting on a side table by our couch. She had never gotten into it before, but this time there was non trace of the chocolate (not even wrappers) except for 3 pieces of dark chocolate that appeared untouched. Who would have thought ... our dog doesn't like dark chocolate? Well, the other things she's done have been more minor, but still we just don't know what to do with her. We have some neighbors, the Wongs, who have been nice enough to come over and take her out to play sometimes, but she still freaks out when we leave. Oh well ... maybe it's a phase?

Random pictures we haven't blogged about yet

The Coribantics - Preston's ultimate frisbee team - after their championship game. Unfortunately, they ended up taking 2nd place, but they were in the highest division, so that's still way awesome!

Another picture of the bantics, but goofy style.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

My family at our cabin on new year's eve. Preston and I are trying to spell 2009 with our hands ... I don't know how good it turned out. What do you think?